Relation to truth· Belief and knowledge
Coherentism
Axis: Justification of belief — What makes a belief justified?
No belief is justified on its own: it is justified by its place in a coherent whole, where each supports the others. An idea holds if it fits without contradiction into the entire web of our experience, with no ultimate foundation.
Philosophers 1
Show inferred positions (1)
Charles Sanders Peirceinferable
Peirce attacks head-on 's : one cannot doubt at will nor feign a doubt one does not have, real doubt is born of a surprise, a jolt of experience, never of a decision. He likewise rejects intuition, that supposed first cognition deriving from no other: all thought is inference from prior thoughts, sign referring to other signs. As a result, justification rests on no indubitable basic belief, but on the holding of the whole: knowledge is a cable whose strength comes from the multitude of intertwined fibres, not a chain as weak as its frailest link. This coherentist bent is doubled by a reliabilist strand, since what validates a belief is also the tested reliability of the method that produced it.
Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man (1868) · Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (1868)
- Descriptive SituationShould you believe it?
Faced with a claim we cannot check for ourselves, what would make believing it justified: being able to trace it to first-hand evidence, its coherence with all we already know, or the reliability of the source it comes from?
a claim received - DescriptiveThe chain of reasons
Every belief rests on a reason, which rests on another: either the chain stops at beliefs that justify themselves, or it closes into a circle where each supports the others, or it runs off to infinity. These three exits are exactly the three ways of answering "what justifies a belief?".
the chain of reasons - DescriptiveCoherent, yet false?
A set of beliefs can be perfectly coherent and yet wholly cut off from reality: a well-built tale, a systematic delusion, a conspiracy theory that explains everything and absorbs every objection. If coherence is not enough to touch the world, must beliefs not also answer to something outside, to the experience that contradicts them?
a coherent system