Event Detail

Coherence considerations guide our reasoning in science and in daily life. But what is coherence anyway? And why is it a useful concept? While mainstream epistemology struggled to answer these questions, formal epistemologists made some progress beginning in the mid-1990s. For various reasons, this debate more or less came to a halt after about ten years. In this talk, I survey earlier attempts and propose a fresh look at the issue. In doing so, I have three goals: (1) To provide an explication of the concept of coherence. (2) To derive and defend a new measure of coherence. (3) To explore the question under what conditions, if any, coherence is truth-conducive. For this purpose, the Bayesian framework proves to be particularly useful. I conclude with a new assessment of the role of coherence considerations in scientific and ordinary reasoning, and a defense of a position I call Bayesian Coherentism. The talk is based on joint work with Borut Trpin (MCMP).