The present paper investigates the first step of rational belief acquisition. It, thus, focuses on justificatory relations between perceptual experiences and perceptual beliefs, and between their contents, respectively. In particular, the paper aims at outlining how it is possible to reason from the content of perceptual experiences to the content of perceptual beliefs. The paper thereby approaches this aim by combining a formal epistemology perspective with an eye towards recent advances in philosophy of cognition. Furthermore the paper restricts its focus, (...) it concentrates on the case of color perception and perceptual beliefs about color. (shrink)

I develop a probabilistic account of coherence, and argue that at least in certain respects it is preferable to (at least some of) the main extant probabilistic accounts of coherence: (i) Igor Douven and Wouter Meijs’s account, (ii) Branden Fitelson’s account, (iii) Erik Olsson’s account, and (iv) Tomoji Shogenji’s account. Further, I relate the account to an important, but little discussed, problem for standard varieties of coherentism, viz., the “Problem of Justified Inconsistent Beliefs.”.

Elizabeth Fricker has recently proposed a principle aimed at stating the necessary and sufficient conditions for testimonial justification. Her proposal entails that a hearer is justified in believing a speaker’s testimony only if she recognizes the speaker to be trustworthy, which, given Fricker’s internalist commitments, requires the hearer to have within her epistemic purview grounds which justify belief in the speaker’s trustworthiness. We argue that, as it stands, Fricker’s principle is too demanding, and we propose some amendments to it. We (...) further discuss the viability of her internalist approach to testimony.Keywords: Testimony; Justification; Internalism; Social epistemology; Elizabeth Fricker. (shrink)

The concepts of coherence and confirmation are closely intertwined: according to a prominent proposal coherence is nothing but mutual confirmation. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that both are confronted with similar problems. As regards Bayesian confirmation measures these are illustrated by the problem of tacking by conjunction. On the other hand, Bayesian coherence measures face the problem of belief individuation. In this paper we want to outline the benefit of an approach to coherence and confirmation based on content (...) elements. It will be shown that the resulting concepts, called genuine coherence and genuine confirmation, can be used in order to solve the two mentioned problems. In a final section we present some results on degrees of genuine coherence and genuine confirmation. (shrink)

Is logical consistency required for a set of beliefs or propositions to be categorically coherent? An affirmative answer is often assumed by mainstream epistemologists, and yet it is unclear why. Cases like the lottery and the preface call into question the assumption that beliefs must be consistent in order to be epistemically rational. And thus it is natural to wonder why all inconsistent sets of propositions are incoherent. On the other hand, Easwaran and Fitelson have shown that particular kinds of (...) inconsistency entail the epistemically ‘irrationality’ of holding certain sets of beliefs. In cases of the latter kind of inconsistency, it seems more reasonable to insist that such sets of beliefs or propositions are categorically incoherent. What the precise relationship is between coherence and consistency depends on the nature of the coherence relation. We shall examine recent attempts to explicate the coherence relation in terms of probabilistic measures of confirmation or agreement to see what they can teach us about the relationship between coherence and consistency. We shall show that some probabilistic measures of coherence allow for inconsistent sets to be categorically coherent, while satisfying plausible epistemic rationality constraints. Other probabilistic measures of coherence impose very strong logical consistency requirements, and some measures are tolerant of most forms of inconsistency. As we try to understand what distinguishes coherence measures in this respect, we will also draw some important lessons about Bayesian confirmation measures and differences in the way that they treat contradictory propositions. (shrink)

Bovens and Hartmann propose to analyze coherence as a confidence-boosting property. On the basis of this idea, they construct a new probabilistic theory of coherence. In this paper, I will attempt to show that the resulting measure of coherence clashes with some of the intuitions that motivate it. Also, I will try to show that this clash is not due to the view on coherence as a confidence-boosting property or to the general features of the model that Bovens and Hartmann (...) use to analyze coherence. It will turn out that there is at least one other measure that is similarly based on the concept of a confidence-boosting property, but does not have the same counterintuitive results. (shrink)

Over the past years, a number of probabilistic measures of coherence have been proposed. As shown in the paper, however, many of them do not conform to the intuitition that equivalent testimonies are highly coherent, regardless of their prior probability.

In this paper I consider whether there is a measure of coherence that could be rightly claimed to generalize the notion of logical equivalence. I show that Fitelson’s (2003) proposal to that effect encounters some serious difficulties. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that no mutual-support measure could ever be suitable for the formalization of coherence as generalized logical equivalence. Instead, it appears that the only plausible candidate for such a measure is one of relative overlap. The measure I propose (...) in this paper is quite similar to Olsson’s (2002) proposal but differs from it by not being susceptible to the type of counterexample that Bovens and Hartmann (2003) have devised against it. (shrink)

Over the years several non-equivalent probabilistic measures of coherence have been discussed in the philosophical literature. In this paper we examine these measures with respect to their empirical adequacy. Using test cases from the coherence literature as vignettes for psychological experiments we investigate whether the measures can predict the subjective coherence assessments of the participants. It turns out that the participants’ coherence assessments are best described by Roche’s coherence measure based on Douven and Meijs’ average mutual support approach and the (...) conditional probability. (shrink)

In robustness analysis, hypotheses are supported to the extent that a result proves robust, and a result is robust to the extent that we detect it in diverse ways. But what precise sense of diversity is at work here? In this paper, I show that the formal explications of evidential diversity most often appealed to in work on robustness – which all draw in one way or another on probabilistic independence – fail to shed light on the notion of diversity (...) relevant to robustness analysis. I close by briefly outlining a promising alternative approach inspired by Horwich’s (1982) eliminative account of evidential diversity. (shrink)

This paper evaluates four different qualitative (probabilistic) accounts to coherence with a focus on structural properties (symmetries, asymmetries, and transitivity). It is shown that while coherence is not transitive on any of these accounts, there are screening-off conditions that render coherence transitive. In a second step, an array of quantitative (probabilistic) accounts to coherence is considered. The upshot is that extant measures differ considerably with respect to a number of symmetry constraints.

Bayesian epistemology provides a formal framework within which concepts in traditional epistemology, in particular concepts relating to the justification of our beliefs, can be given precise definitions in terms of probability. The Bayesian approach has contributed clarity and precision to a number of traditional issues. A salient example is the recent embedding of the so-called coherentist theory of epistemic justification in a Bayesian framework shedding light on the relation between coherence and truth as well as on the concept of coherence (...) itself. Starting with the early work of Condorcet, the calculus of probability has proved to be a useful tool in the study of social aspects of knowledge as it is pursued in social epistemology. (shrink)

Two recently popular metaphilosophical movements, formal philosophy and experimental philosophy, promote what seem to be conflicting methodologies. Nonetheless, I argue that the two can be mutually supportive. I propose an experimentally-informed variation on explication, a powerful formal philosophical tool introduced by Carnap. The resulting method, which I call “experimental explication,” provides the formalist with a means of responding to explication's gravest criticism. Moreover, this method introduces a philosophically salient, positive role for survey-style experiments while steering clear of several objections that (...) critics of “positive experimental philosophy” raise. Thus, it provides the experimentalist with a more defensible example of how empirical work can have positive philosophical import. For these reasons, experimental explication should appeal to experimental philosophers and formal philosophers alike. (shrink)

One of the integral parts of Bayesian coherentism is the view that the relation of ‘being no less coherent than’ is fully determined by the probabilistic features of the sets of propositions to be ordered. In the last one and a half decades, a variety of probabilistic measures of coherence have been put forward. However, there is large disagreement as to which of these measures best captures the pre-theoretic notion of coherence. This paper contributes to the debate on coherence measures (...) by considering three classes of adequacy constraints. Various independence and dependence relations between the members of each class will be taken into account in order to reveal the ‘grammar’ of probabilistic coherence measures. Afterwards, existing proposals are examined with respect to this list of desiderata. Given that for purely mathematical reasons there can be no measure that satisfies all constraints, the grammar allows the coherentist to articulate an informed pluralist stance as regards probabilistic measures of coherence. (shrink)

Many have the intuition that the right response to the Lottery Paradox is to deny that one can justifiably believe of even a single lottery ticket that it will lose. The paper shows that from any theory of justification that solves the paradox in accordance with this intuition, a theory not of that kind can be derived that also solves the paradox but is more conducive to our epistemic goal than the former. It is argued that currently there is no (...) valid reason not to give preference to the derived accounts over the accounts from which they come. (shrink)

Recently there have been several attempts in formal epistemology to develop an adequate probabilistic measure of coherence. There is much to recommend probabilistic measures of coherence. They are quantitative and render formally precise a notion—coherence—notorious for its elusiveness. Further, some of them do very well, intuitively, on a variety of test cases. Siebel, however, argues that there can be no adequate probabilistic measure of coherence. Take some set of propositions A, some probabilistic measure of coherence, and a probability distribution such (...) that all the probabilities on which A’s degree of coherence depends (according to the measure in question) are defined. Then, the argument goes, the degree to which A is coherent depends solely on the details of the distribution in question and not at all on the explanatory relations, if any, standing between the propositions in A. This is problematic, the argument continues, because, first, explanation matters for coherence, and, second, explanation cannot be adequately captured solely in terms of probability. We argue that Siebel’s argument falls short. (shrink)

In this paper we show that the coherence measures of Olsson (J Philos 94:246–272, 2002), Shogenji (Log Anal 59:338–345, 1999), and Fitelson (Log Anal 63:194–199, 2003) satisfy the two most important adequacy requirements for the purpose of assessing theories. Following Hempel (Synthese 12:439–469, 1960), Levi (Gambling with truth, New York, A. A. Knopf, 1967), and recently Huber (Synthese 161:89–118, 2008) we require, as minimal or necessary conditions, that adequate assessment functions favor true theories over false theories and true and informative (...) theories over true but uninformative theories. We then demonstrate that the coherence measures of Olsson, Shogenji, and Fitelson satisfy these minimal conditions if we confront the hypotheses with a separating sequence of observational statements. In the concluding remarks we set out the philosophical relevance, and limitations, of the formal results. Inter alia, we discuss the problematic implications of our precondition that competing hypotheses must be confronted with a separating sequence of observational statements, which also leads us to discuss theory assessment in the context of scientific antirealism. (shrink)

Let us by ‘first-order beliefs’ mean beliefs about the world, such as the belief that it will rain tomorrow, and by ‘second-order beliefs’ let us mean beliefs about the reliability of first-order, belief-forming processes. In formal epistemology, coherence has been studied, with much ingenuity and precision, for sets of first-order beliefs. However, to the best of our knowledge, sets including second-order beliefs have not yet received serious attention in that literature. In informal epistemology, by contrast, sets of the latter kind (...) play an important role in some respectable coherence theories of knowledge and justification. In this paper, we extend the formal treatment of coherence to second-order beliefs. Our main conclusion is that while extending the framework to second-order beliefs sheds doubt on the generality of the notorious impossibility results for coherentism, another problem crops up that might be no less damaging to the coherentist project: facts of coherence turn out to be epistemically accessible only to agents who have a good deal of insight into matters external to their own belief states. (shrink)

Coherentism maintains that coherent beliefs are more likely to be true than incoherent beliefs, and that coherent evidence provides more confirmation of a hypothesis when the evidence is made coherent by the explanation provided by that hypothesis. Although probabilistic models of credence ought to be well-suited to justifying such claims, negative results from Bayesian epistemology have suggested otherwise. In this essay we argue that the connection between coherence and confirmation should be understood as a relation mediated by the causal relationships (...) among the evidence and a hypothesis, and we offer a framework for doing so by fitting together probabilistic models of coherence, confirmation, and causation. We show that the causal structure among the evidence and hypothesis is sometimes enough to determine whether the coherence of the evidence boosts confirmation of the hypothesis, makes no difference to it, or even reduces it. We also show that, ceteris paribus, it is not the coherence of the evidence that boosts confirmation, but rather the ratio of the coherence of the evidence to the coherence of the evidence conditional on a hypothesis. (shrink)

Some philosophers, most notably Hempel and Salmon, have tried to reduce explanation to probability by proposing analyses of explanation in probabilistic terms. Hempel claims, roughly, that a hypothesis H explains a datum D if and only if the conditional probability P is close to 1. It is well known that such an account fails in cases where H is irrelevant for D. Even though it is highly likely that Tom will not become pregnant, given that he regularly takes his wife’s (...) birth control pills, the latter does not explain the former. Neither does an idea work which is in the proximity of Salmon’s, namely, that H explains D if and only if P > P. Suppose Susan swallows a pound of arsenic in order to commit suicide. Shortly after, however, she dies because she is run over by a bus. The probability of dying, given that one ingests a pound of arsenic, is usually higher than the prior probability of dying. Nonetheless, it is not the arsenic but the collision with the bus which explains Susan’s death. The aforementioned objections are directed against …. (shrink)

A measure of coherence is said to be reliability conducive if and only if a higher degree of coherence (as measured) among testimonies implies a higher probability that the witnesses are reliable. Recently, it has been proved that several coherence measures proposed in the literature are reliability conducive in scenarios of equivalent testimonies (Olsson and Schubert 2007; Schubert, to appear). My aim is to investigate which coherence measures turn out to be reliability conducive in the more general scenario where the (...) testimonies do not have to be equivalent. It is shown that four measures are reliability conducive in the present scenario, all of which are ordinally equivalent to the Shogenji measure. I take that to be an argument for the Shogenji measure being a fruitful explication of coherence. (shrink)

I show that the two most devastating objections to Shogenji's formal account of coherence necessarily involve information sets of cardinality . Given this, I surmise that the problem with Shogenji's measure has more to do with his means of generalizing the measure than with the measure itself. I defend this claim by offering an alternative generalization of Shogenji's measure. This alternative retains the intuitive merits of the original measure while avoiding both of the relevant problems that befall it. In the (...) light of all of this, I suggest that there is new hope for Shogenji's analysis: Shogenji's early and influential attempt at measuring coherence, when generalized in a subset-sensitive way, is able to clear its most troubling objections. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This essay addresses the methodology of philosophy of science and illustrates how formal and empirical methods can be fruitfully combined. Special emphasis is given to the application of experimental methods to confirmation theory and to recent work on the conjunction fallacy, a key topic in the rationality debate arising from research in cognitive psychology. Several other issue can be studied in this way. In the concluding section, a brief outline is provided of three further examples.

Today it is generally assumed that epistemic justification comes in degrees. The consequences, however, have not been adequately appreciated. In this paper we show that the assumption invalidates some venerable attacks on infinitism: once we accept that epistemic justification is gradual, an infinitist stance makes perfect sense. It is only without the assumption that infinitism runs into difficulties.

Can some evidence confirm a conjunction of two hypotheses more than it confirms either of the hypotheses separately? We show that it can, moreover under conditions that are the same for nine different measures of confirmation. Further we demonstrate that it is even possible for the conjunction of two disconfirmed hypotheses to be confirmed by the same evidence.

This paper is concerned with formal solutions to the lottery paradox on which high probability defeasibly warrants acceptance. It considers some recently proposed solutions of this type and presents an argument showing that these solutions are trivial in that they boil down to the claim that perfect probability is sufficient for rational acceptability. The argument is then generalized, showing that a broad class of similar solutions faces the same problem. An argument against some formal solutions to the lottery paradox The (...) argument generalized Some variations Adding modalities Anticipated objections. (shrink)

If coherence is to have justificatory status, as some analytical philosophers think it has, it must be truth-conducive, if perhaps only under certain specific conditions. This paper is a critical discussion of some recent arguments that seek to show that under no reasonable conditions can coherence be truth-conducive. More specifically, it considers Bovens and Hartmann’s and Olsson’s “impossibility results,” which attempt to show that coherence cannot possibly be a truth-conducive property. We point to various ways in which the advocates of (...) a coherence theory of justification may attempt to divert the threat of these results. (shrink)

Bayesian epistemology addresses epistemological problems with the help of the mathematical theory of probability. It turns out that the probability calculus is especially suited to represent degrees of belief (credences) and to deal with questions of belief change, confirmation, evidence, justification, and coherence. Compared to the informal discussions in traditional epistemology, Bayesian epis- temology allows for a more precise and fine-grained analysis which takes the gradual aspects of these central epistemological notions into account. Bayesian epistemology therefore complements traditional epistemology; it (...) does not re- place it or aim at replacing it. (shrink)

The "myside bias'' in evaluating arguments is an empirically well-confirmed phenomenon that consists of overweighting arguments that endorse one's beliefs or attack alternative beliefs while underweighting arguments that attack one's beliefs or defend alternative beliefs. This paper makes two contributions: First, it proposes a probabilistic model that adequately captures three salient features of myside bias in argument evaluation. Second, it provides a Bayesian justification of this model, thus showing that myside bias has a rational Bayesian explanation under certain conditions.

The my-side bias is a well-documented cognitive bias in the evaluation of arguments, in which reasoners in a discussion tend to overvalue arguments that confirm their prior beliefs, while undervaluing arguments that attack their prior beliefs. The first part of this paper develops and justifies a Bayesian model of myside bias at the level of individual reasoning. In the second part, this Bayesian model is implemented in an agent-based model of group discussion among myside-biased agents. The agent-based model is then (...) used to perform a number of experiments with the objective to study whether the myside bias hinders or enhances the ability of groups to collectively track the truth, that is, to reach the correct answer to a given binary issue. An analysis of the results suggests the following: First, whether the truth-tracking ability of groups is helped or hindered by myside bias crucially depends on how the strength of myside bias is differentially distributed across subgroups of discussants holding different beliefs. Second, small groups are more likely to track the truth than larger groups, suggesting that increasing group size has a detrimental effect on collective truth-tracking through discussion. (shrink)

What is structural rationality? Specifically, what is the distinctive feature of structural requirements of rationality? Some philosophers have argued, roughly, that the distinctive feature of structural requirements is coherence. But what does coherence mean, exactly? Or, at least, what do structuralists about rationality have in mind when they claim that structural rationality is coherence? This issue matters for making progress in various active debates concerning rationality. In this paper, I analyze three strategies for figuring out what coherence means in the (...) debates on structural rationality. I argue that these strategies face problems. (shrink)

This thesis is a collection of three self-contained papers on related themes in the area of formal and social epistemology. The first paper explores the possibility of measuring the coherence of a set with multiplicative averaging. It has been pointed out that all the existing probabilistic measures of coherence are flawed for taking the relevance between a set of propositions as the primary factor which determines the coherence of the set. What I show in this paper is that a group (...) of measures, namely the confirmation-based ones, can be saved from this problem if we adopt a nonlinear averaging function to measure the coherence of a set. The second paper discusses how people should conciliate in disagreements. Some epistemologists take linear averaging as the only way of conciliating and claim that conciliating leads to fallacious results. In the paper, I show that the problem is not conciliating, but taking linear averaging as the only way to conciliate. Since there is no reason for us to insist on conciliating with linear averaging, we can adopt nonlinear averaging functions for conciliating and thereby avoid the formal deficiencies. The third paper focuses on the pragmatic results of taking conciliating as a general strategy in disagreements. There is a potential dilemma about conciliating: if everyone always conciliates, it is likely for an epistemic bubble to arise. If everyone refuses to conciliate, an epistemic echo chamber may appear. A possible way of solving the dilemma is to develop a diachronic strategy which tells people how to both conciliate and update their estimate of their interlocutors’ reliability. Although the three papers differ in the subject, they jointly offer some unifying reflections on the way we approach philosophical problems with formal tools. From 5 the first two papers, we see that a formal analysis of a philosophical position is incomplete if philosophers fail to consider a sufficiently wide range of formal tools. The third paper, on the contrary, shows that we should change the ordinary way of modelling a notion if required. This thesis concludes by proposing a pluralistic view of formal methods in formal epistemology. (shrink)

In recent years, some authors have proposed quantitative measures of the coherence of sets of propositions. Such probabilistic measures of coherence (PMCs) are, in general terms, functions that take as their argument a set of propositions (along with some probability distribution) and yield as their value a number that is supposed to represent the degree of coherence of the set. In this paper, I introduce a minimal constraint on PMC theories, the weak stability principle, and show that any correct, coherent, (...) and complete PMC cannot satisfy it. As a matter of fact, the argument offered in this paper can be applied to any coherence theory that uses a priori procedures. I briefly explore some consequences of this fact. (shrink)

Tomoji Shogenji is generally assumed to be the first author to have presented a probabilistic measure of coherence. Interestingly, Rudolf Carnap in his Logical Foundations of Probability discussed a function that is based on the very same idea, namely his well-known relevance measure. This function is largely neglected in the coherence literature because it has been proposed as a measure of evidential support and still is widely conceived as such. The aim of this paper is therefore to investigate Carnap’s measure (...) regarding its plausibility as a candidate for a probabilistic measure of coherence by comparing it to Shogenji’s. It turns out that both measures satisfy and violate the same adequacy constraints, despite not being ordinally equivalent exhibit a strong correlation with each other in a Monte Carlo simulation and perform similarly in a series of test cases for probabilistic coherence measures. (shrink)

It is shown that the probabilistic theories of coherence proposed up to now produce a number of counter-intuitive results. The last section provides some reasons for believing that no probabilistic measure will ever be able to adequately capture coherence. First, there can be no function whose arguments are nothing but tuples of probabilities, and which assigns different values to pairs of propositions {A, B} and {A, C} if A implies both B and C, or their negations, and if P(B)=P(C). But (...) such sets may indeed differ in their degree of coherence. Second, coherence is sensitive to explanatory relations between the propositions in question. Explanation, however, can hardly be captured solely in terms of probability. (shrink)

Coherence is a measure of how much our beliefs hang together. Understanding is achieved when we see that something is not just a brute, isolated fact. This suggests that it might be possible to use the extant probabilistic measures of coherence to formulate a measure of understanding. We attempt to do so, but it turns out that a coherence theory runs into trouble with the asymmetry of understanding. We identify four difficulties and show how they have been solved by a (...) unification approach to explanation. We also identify four advantages of the coherence approach, and assess the possibilities of reconciling the strengths of the two approaches.La coherencia es una medida sobre cuanta interdependencia hay entre nuestras creencias. La comprension se obtiene cuando vemos que algo no es un hecho bruto, aislado. Esto sugiere la posibilidad de usar las medidas probabilisticas de coherencia al uso para elaborar una medida de la comprension. Explorare esta posibilidad, a pesar de que una teoria de la coherencia tropieza con problemas aqui dado el caracter asimetrico de la comprension. Identifico cuatro dificultades al respecto y muestro como han sido resueltas mediante un enfoque de la explicacion basado en la nocion de unificacion. Tambien identifico cuatro ventajas en la aproximacion desde la coherencia y examino que perspectivas hay de reconciliar los puntos fuertes de ambos planteamientos. (shrink)

Probabilistic dependence and independence are among the key concepts of Bayesian epistemology. This paper focuses on the study of one specific quantitative notion of probabilistic dependence. More specifically, section 1 introduces Keynes’s coefficient of dependence and shows how it is related to pivotal aspects of scientific reasoning such as confirmation, coherence, the explanatory and unificatory power of theories, and the diversity of evidence. The intimate connection between Keynes’s coefficient of dependence and scientific reasoning raises the question of how Keynes’s coefficient (...) of dependence is related to truth, and how it can be made fruitful for epistemological considerations. This question is answered in section 2 of the paper. Section 3 outlines the consequences the results have for epistemology and the philosophy of science from a Bayesian point of view. (shrink)

Striving for a probabilistic explication of coherence, scholars proposed a distinction between agreement and striking agreement. In this paper I argue that only the former should be considered a genuine concept of coherence. In a second step the relation between coherence and reliability is assessed. I show that it is possible to concur with common intuitions regarding the impact of coherence on reliability in various types of witness scenarios by means of an agreement measure of coherence. Highlighting the need to (...) separate the impact of coherence and specificity on reliability it is finally shown that a recently proposed vindication of the Shogenji measure qua measure of coherence vanishes. (shrink)

Why should coherence be an epistemic desideratum? One response is that coherence is truth-conducive: mutually coherent propositions are more likely to be true, ceteris paribus, than mutually incoherent ones. But some sets of propositions are more coherent, while others are less so. How could coherence be measured? Probabilistic measures of coherence exist; some are identical to probabilistic measures of confirmation, while others are extensions of such measures. Probabilistic measures of coherence are fine when applicable, but many situations are so information-poor (...) that the requisite probabilities cannot be determined. To measure coherence in these cognitively impoverished situations, this article proposes that the discussion be broadened to include plausibilistic measures of coherence. It shows how plausibilistic measures of coherence can be defined using plausibilistic measures of confirmation. It then illustrates how plausibilisic coherence can be measured in situations where probabilistic coherence cannot be determined. The coherence values obtained through the use of plausibilistic measures are often, though not always, comparable. The article also shows that coherence can be instantiated on different levels, one of which permits connections to inductive strength and deductive validity. (shrink)

I argue that coherence is truth-conducive in that coherence implies an increase in the probability of truth. Central to my argument is a certain principle for transitivity in probabilistic support. I then address a question concerning the truth-conduciveness of coherence as it relates to (something else I argue for) the truth-conduciveness of consistency, and consider how the truth-conduciveness of coherence bears on coherentist theories of justification.

The aim of this essay is to develop a coherence theory for the justification of evidentiary judgments in law. The main claim of the coherence theory proposed in this article is that a belief about the events being litigated is justified if and only if it is a belief that an epistemically responsible fact finder might hold by virtue of its coherence in like circumstances. The article argues that this coherentist approach to evidence and legal proof has the resources to (...) meet some of the main objections that may be addressed against attempts to analyze the justification of evidentiary judgments in law in coherentist terms. It concludes by exploring some implications of the proposed version of legal coherentism for a jurisprudence of evidence. (shrink)

A measure of coherence is said to be reliability conducive if and only if a higher degree of coherence (as measured) results in a higher likelihood that the witnesses are reliable. Recently, it has been proved that several coherence measures proposed in the literature are reliability conducive in a restricted scenario (Olsson and Schubert 2007, Synthese 157:297–308). My aim is to investigate which coherence measures turn out to be reliability conducive in the more general scenario where it is any finite (...) number of witnesses that give equivalent reports. It is shown that only the so-called Shogenji measure is reliability conducive in this scenario. I take that to be an argument for the Shogenji measure being a fruitful explication of coherence. (shrink)

This paper studies the Lockean thesis from the perspective of contemporary epistemic logic. The Lockean thesis states that belief can be defined as ‘sufficiently high degree of belief’. Its main problem is that it gives rise to a notion of belief which is not closed under conjunction. This problem is typical for classical epistemic logic: it is single-agent and static. I argue that from the perspective of contemporary epistemic logic, the Lockean thesis fares much better. I briefly mention that it (...) can successfully be extended from single-agent to multi-agent settings. More importantly, I show that accepting the Lockean thesis (and a more sophisticated version for conditional beliefs) leads to a significant and unexpected unification in the dynamic behavior of (conditional) belief and high (conditional) probability with respect to public announcements. This constitutes a methodological argument in favor of the Lockean thesis. Furthermore, if one accepts Baltag’s Erlangen program for epistemology, this technical observation has even stronger philosophical implications: because belief and high probability display the same dynamic behavior, it is plausible that they are indeed one and the same epistemic notion. (shrink)

Some recent work in formal epistemology shows that “witness agreement” by itself implies neither an increase in the probability of truth nor a high probability of truth—the witnesses need to have some “individual credibility.” It can seem that, from this formal epistemological result, it follows that coherentist justification (i.e., doxastic coherence) is not truth-conducive. I argue that this does not follow. Central to my argument is the thesis that, though coherentists deny that there can be noninferential justification, coherentists do not (...) deny that there can be individual credibility. (shrink)