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)

An overview of the German philosophy of science community is given for the years 1992–2012, based on a survey in which 159 philosophers of science in Germany participated. To this end, the institutional background of the German philosophy of science community is examined in terms of journals, centers, and associations. Furthermore, a qualitative description and a quantitative analysis of our survey results are presented. Quantitative estimates are given for: (a) academic positions, (b) research foci, (c) philosophers’ of science most important (...) publications, and (d) externally funded projects, where for (c) all survey participants had indicated their five most important publications in philosophy of science. In addition, the survey results for (a)–(c) are also qualitatively described, as they are interesting in their own right. With respect to (a), we estimated the gender distribution among academic positions. Concerning (c), we quantified philosophers’ of science preference for (i) journals and publishers, (ii) publication format, (iii) language, and (iv) coauthorship for their most important publications. With regard to research projects, we determined their (i) prevalence, (ii) length, and (iii) trend (an increase in number?) as well as their most frequent (iv) research foci and (v) funding organizations. We also distinguished between German-based and non-German-based journals, publishers, and funding institutions, making it thereby possible to evaluate the involvement of the German philosophy of science community in the international research landscape. Finally, we discuss some implications of our findings. (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.

Coherentism in epistemology has long suffered from lack of formal and quantitative explication of the notion of coherence. One might hope that probabilistic accounts of coherence such as those proposed by Lewis, Shogenji, Olsson, Fitelson, and Bovens and Hartmann will finally help solve this problem. This paper shows, however, that those accounts have a serious common problem: the problem of belief individuation. The coherence degree that each of the accounts assigns to an information set (or the verdict it gives as (...) to whether the set is coherent tout court) depends on how beliefs (or propositions) that represent the set are individuated. Indeed, logically equivalent belief sets that represent the same information set can be given drastically different degrees of coherence. This feature clashes with our natural and reasonable expectation that the coherence degree of a belief set does not change unless the believer adds essentially new information to the set or drops old information from it; or, to put it simply, that the believer cannot raise or lower the degree of coherence by purely logical reasoning. None of the accounts in question can adequately deal with coherence once logical inferences get into the picture. Toward the end of the paper, another notion of coherence that takes into account not only the contents but also the origins (or sources) of the relevant beliefs is considered. It is argued that this notion of coherence is of dubious significance, and that it does not help solve the problem of belief individuation. (shrink)

When we talk about the coherence of a story, we seem to think of how well its individual pieces fit together—how to explicate this notion formally, though? We develop a Bayesian network based coherence measure with implementation in _R_, which performs better than its purely probabilistic predecessors. The novelty is that by paying attention to the network structure, we avoid simply taking mean confirmation scores between all possible pairs of subsets of a narration. Moreover, we assign special importance to the (...) weakest links in a narration, to improve on the other measures’ results for logically inconsistent scenarios. We illustrate and investigate the performance of the measures in relation to a few philosophically motivated examples, and (more extensively) using the real-life example of the Sally Clark case. (shrink)

There is a popular theory in the metaphysics of time according to which time is one of four similar dimensions that make up a single manifold that is appropriately called spacetime. One consequence of this thesis is that changing an object’s orientation in the manifold does not change its intrinsic features. In this paper I offer a new argument against this popular theory. I claim that an especially good performance of a particularly beautiful piece of music, when oriented within the (...) manifold in the normal way, adds to the intrinsic value of the world, but that if the same performance is turned sideways within the manifold, so that it involves a number of different notes spread out in space and all occurring at the same time, then it does not add the same intrinsic value to the world. (shrink)

Relative overlap measures of coherence have recently been shown to have two devastating properties: according to the plain relative overlap measure, the degree of coherence of any set of propositions cannot be increased by adding further propositions, and according to the refined relative overlap measure, no set can be more coherent than its most coherent two-element subset. This result has been taken to rule out relative overlap as a foundation for a probabilistic explication of coherence. The present paper shows that (...) this view is premature: we propose a relative overlap measure that does not fall victim to the two properties. The guiding idea is to employ a well-established recipe for the construction of coherence measures and to adapt it to the idea of relative overlap. We show that this new measure keeps up with, or even outperforms, former overlap measures in a set of desiderata for coherence measures and a collection of popular test cases. This result re-establishes relative overlap as a candidate for a proper formalization of coherence. (shrink)

Changing weather conditions and barometer changes usually coincide. Accordingly, the propositions that my barometer falls and that the weather conditions deteriorate are quite coherent—especially under the assumption that there is a drop in atmospheric pressure. Nevertheless, scenarios like these involving common causes turn out to be highly problematic for a prominent class of probabilistic coherence measures, namely, those explicating coherence based on the idea of relevance-sensitivity. In this article, we show that none of these measures accords with the intuition that (...) in the light of a common cause, two propositions referring to the cause’s effects should turn out to be coherent. This result casts doubts on the view that these measures can be considered proper explications of the concept of coherence. 1Introduction2Relevance-Sensitive Coherence Measures3Common Causes, Screening-off, and Coherence4Discussion 4.1Multiple explications of coherence4.2Conditionalization versus set expansion5Conclusion. (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.”.

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)

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.

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)

This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of the notion of coherence by explicating in probabilistic terms, step by step, what seem to be our most basic intuitions about that notion, to wit, that coherence is a matter of hanging or fitting together, and that coherence is a matter of degree. A qualitative theory of coherence will serve as a stepping stone to formulate a set of quantitative measures of coherence, each of which seems to capture well the aforementioned (...) intuitions. Subsequently it will be argued that one of those measures does better than the others in light of some more specific intuitions about coherence. This measure will be defended against two seemingly obvious objections. (shrink)

The debate on probabilistic measures of coherence flourishes for about 15 years now. Initiated by papers that have been published around the turn of the millennium, many different proposals have since then been put forward. This contribution is partly devoted to a reassessment of extant coherence measures. Focusing on a small number of reasonable adequacy constraints I show that (i) there can be no coherence measure that satisfies all constraints, and that (ii) subsets of these adequacy constraints motivate two different (...) classes of coherence measures. These classes do not coincide with the common distinction between coherence as mutual support and coherence as relative set-theoretic overlap. Finally, I put forward arguments to the effect that for each such class of coherence measures there is an outstanding measure that outperforms all other extant proposals. One of these measures has recently been put forward in the literature, while the other one is based on a novel probabilistic measure of confirmation. (shrink)

Mark Siebel has presented a compelling argument against Branden Fitelson’s probabilistic measure of coherence. The present paper shows how Siebel’s argument can be strengthened and thereby extended to an argument against a huge class of coherence measures from the literature including William Roche’s average mutual firmness account, which has not been challenged up to now.

Two of the probabilistic measures of coherence discussed in this paper take probabilistic dependence into account and so depend on prior probabilities in a fundamental way. An example is given which suggests that this prior-dependence can lead to potential problems. Another coherence measure is shown to be independent of prior probabilities in a clearly defined sense and consequently is able to avoid such problems. The issue of prior-dependence is linked to the fact that the first two measures can be understood (...) as measures of coherence as striking agreement, while the third measure represents coherence as agreement. Thus, prior (in)dependence can be used to distinguish different conceptions of coherence. (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)

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)

To remedy the lack of precision attached to the concept of coherence, a plethora of probabilistic measures has been developed. To broaden the perspective, we do not focus on the differences between these quantitative but the differences between qualitative approaches to coherence by comparing three probabilistic definitions for the relation denoted by ‘coheres with’. To reveal the different logics underlying these relations, we introduce a considerable number of formal properties and examine whether the given coherence relations possess them. Among these (...) properties are not only the classics reflexivity, symmetry and transitivity, but also a variety of features that concern propositions containing negation, conjunction and disjunction, as well as features that concern inconsistency, entailment and equivalence. (shrink)