Coherentism

Overview

Coherentism is the epistemological theory that takes a stand against foundationalism. Where the foundationalist sees knowledge as a building resting on solid ground, the coherentist sees it as a web — a network of mutually supporting beliefs with no privileged foundation. A belief is justified, on this view, not because it traces back to some bedrock truth, but because it fits coherently into the overall system of beliefs a person holds.

The image that captures this best is Otto Neurath's famous metaphor: we are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dry-dock it and start from the keel up. We can replace any individual plank, but only by relying on the surrounding planks to keep the ship afloat. No belief is immune to revision, and none serves as an ultimate foundation.

This holistic picture has attracted many philosophers, particularly in the analytic tradition. It avoids the regress problem that haunts foundationalism, and it fits well with the Quinean idea that our beliefs face the tribunal of experience as a corporate body, not one by one. But coherentism faces its own challenges — especially the worry that a perfectly coherent system of beliefs could nevertheless be entirely disconnected from reality.

Core Principles

Coherentism is built on a set of interconnected claims about how justification works.

Rejection of Basic Beliefs

The defining move of coherentism is to deny that there are any basic or foundational beliefs. Every belief, no matter how simple or self-evident it seems, can in principle be revised or given up. Justification is always a matter of one belief being supported by other beliefs, and there is no belief that enjoys a special status as self-justifying.

Mutual Support and Circular Justification

If no belief is basic, how does justification avoid infinite regress? The coherentist's answer is that justification is circular — but not in the vicious way that foundationalists fear. The idea is that beliefs support each other mutually, like the strands of a rope. A belief is justified not because it follows from some single foundation, but because it belongs to a system of beliefs that cohere with one another. This mutual support is not a defect but the very nature of justification.

Coherence as a Property of Systems

What exactly is coherence? This is one of the most difficult questions for the coherentist. Coherence is typically characterized in terms of logical consistency, explanatory integration, and mutual inferential support. A system of beliefs coheres when its members are consistent with one another, when they explain and are explained by other members, and when they stand in positive inferential relations. The more tightly woven the web, the greater the coherence.

Holism About Confirmation

Coherentism naturally leads to a holistic view of confirmation. On this view, experience does not confirm or disconfirm individual beliefs in isolation. Rather, experience impacts the entire system of beliefs, and the rational response is to adjust the system as a whole to maintain maximum coherence. This is what W. V. O. Quine meant when he said that our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but as a corporate body.

Key Thinkers

W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000)

Quine is perhaps the most influential figure associated with coherentism, though his exact position is debated. In his landmark essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951), Quine attacked the analytic-synthetic distinction and the idea that individual empirical statements can be confirmed or disconfirmed in isolation. He proposed instead a "web of belief" in which the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science. While Quine did not embrace pure coherentism — he acknowledged that experience impinges on the periphery of the web — his holism provided the framework that many coherentists adopted.

Donald Davidson (1917–2003)

Davidson developed a sophisticated version of coherentism in his work on knowledge of the external world. He argued that a belief can only be justified by another belief — sensory experiences, being non-propositional, cannot serve as reasons. This seems to lead to coherentism, since the only available justifiers are other beliefs. However, Davidson attempted to avoid the charge of disconnect from reality by arguing that coherence itself guarantees a connection to the world: a creature with a mostly false belief system could not have beliefs at all.

Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989)

Sellars's attack on the "Myth of the Given" in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956) provided a major impetus for coherentism. Sellars argued that the foundationalist's basic beliefs — the "given" — are a philosophical illusion. All awareness is a linguistic affair, and even observational knowledge requires the framework of other beliefs. This undermined the foundationalist's first tier and pushed many philosophers toward a more coherentist picture.

Historical Development

Coherentism has roots in the work of 19th-century idealists, particularly F. H. Bradley, who argued that reality is a coherent system and that truth consists in coherence. However, the modern analytic version of coherentism emerged in the mid-20th century as a response to the perceived failures of foundationalism.

The key turning point was the collapse of logical positivism. The positivists had attempted to build knowledge on a foundation of protocol sentences — reports of immediate experience. But difficulties with this program, including the problem of the "given" and the failure to draw a sharp analytic-synthetic distinction, led philosophers to seek alternatives.

Quine's "Two Dogmas" was a watershed. By showing that even our most basic logical and mathematical beliefs could in principle be revised, Quine undermined the foundationalist idea of a sharp distinction between foundational and derived beliefs. His web metaphor became the dominant image for coherentist thinking.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, philosophers like Davidson, Sellars, and Gilbert Harman developed increasingly sophisticated versions of coherentism. They addressed the standard objections — particularly the "isolation objection" that coherentism allows a system of beliefs to be justified regardless of its connection to reality — with varying degrees of success.

In recent decades, pure coherentism has become less popular. Many philosophers have moved toward hybrid positions or externalist theories. But the coherentist critique of foundationalism has permanently reshaped the landscape of epistemology, and the web-of-belief metaphor remains central to how philosophers think about justification.

Contemporary Relevance

Coherentism continues to influence several areas of philosophy and beyond.

In epistemology, the coherentism vs. foundationalism debate remains a live issue, though many philosophers now occupy middle ground. The recognition that even "basic" beliefs can be defeasible and revisable has led to more modest forms of foundationalism that incorporate coherentist insights.

In philosophy of science, coherentist themes appear in discussions of theory choice and scientific revolutions. Thomas Kuhn's idea that paradigm shifts involve a holistic reorganization of the web of belief echoes coherentist thinking. The Duhem-Quine thesis — that hypotheses cannot be tested in isolation because auxiliary assumptions are always involved — is a direct consequence of coherentist holism.

In cognitive science and artificial intelligence, the idea of belief revision in networks of interconnected propositions draws on coherentist ideas. Systems that update beliefs based on global coherence rather than local foundations have practical applications in expert systems and machine learning.

In legal theory, coherence theories of law and legal reasoning have been developed by scholars like Ronald Dworkin, who argues that legal principles should be evaluated by how well they fit and justify the existing legal system as a coherent whole.

Sources

• Quine, W. V. O. "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." Philosophical Review 60 (1951): 20–43. Reprinted in From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.
• Davidson, Donald. "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge." In Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Ernest LePore. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
• Sellars, Wilfrid. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Originally published 1956.
• BonJour, Laurence. The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
• Haack, Susan. Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
• "Coherentism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-coherence/
• "Coherence Theory of Truth." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/cog-truth/