Coherentism, truth, and witness agreement

Acta Analytica 25 (2):243-257 (2010)
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Abstract

Coherentists on epistemic justification claim that all justification is inferential, and that beliefs, when justified, get their justification together (not in isolation) as members of a coherent belief system. Some recent work in formal epistemology shows that “individual credibility” is needed for “witness agreement” to increase the probability of truth and generate a high probability of truth. It can seem that, from this result in formal epistemology, it follows that coherentist justification is not truth-conducive, that it is not the case that, under the requisite conditions, coherentist justification increases the probability of truth and generates a high probability of truth. I argue that this does not follow.

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William Roche
Texas Christian University

References found in this work

The structure of empirical knowledge.Laurence BonJour - 1985 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Evidentialism: essays in epistemology.Earl Brink Conee - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Richard Feldman.
An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation.Clarence Irving Lewis - 1946 - La Salle, IL, USA: Open Court.
Evidentialism.Richard Feldman & Earl Conee - 1985 - Philosophical Studies 48 (1):15 - 34.

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