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Roche on Coherentism & Witness Agreement

By Lawrence Solum

William A. Roche has posted Coherentism, Truth, and Witness Agreement (forthcoming Acta Analytica) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

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.

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Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on December 02, 2009 (boomark / email).