Abstract
According to a coherentist position in philosophy of science, good theories cohere with the available data and one theory is better than another if it coheres better with the available data. This paper examines that relationship with a special focus on probabilistic measures of coherence. In a first step, it is shown that existing coherence measures satisfy a number of reasonable adequacy constraints for the comparison of two rival scientific theories. In a second step, the virtue of a coherentist position in philosophy of science is considered. More specifically, it is assessed whether coherence implies verisimilitude in the sense that a higher degree of coherence between theory and evidence entails a higher degree of (estimated) truthlikeness. To this end, it is demonstrated that there is an intimate relationship in this sense if we explicate coherence by means of the so-called overlap-measure.
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