Coherence and truth conducive justification

Abstract

Since Klein and Warfield (1996) insist that it is coherentists that they are addressing, and since the coherence theory of justification advanced by Laurence BonJour (1985) seems to be the theory that most influences their own discussion, one would expect their argument against the truth conduciveness of coherentist justification to apply, if at all, to BonJour's theory. In what follows I will show that this is not the case. I will also show that an important premiss is omitted from Klein's and Warfield's argument against the truth conduciveness of justification as understood in the version of coherentism they explicitly consider, which I will call the Naive Coherence Theory. According to the Naive Coherence Theory, an agent's belief set is justified iff that set is epistemically coherent, the degree of justification of the belief set being defined as the degree of its coherence. Fortunately, the premiss that Klein and Warfield omit can be defended without begging the question against the Naive Coherence Theory. The same cannot be said of an analogous premiss that would make Klein's and Warfield's argument effective against BonJour's theory. In BonJour's version of coherentism, as BonJour takes pains to point out, the coherence of an agent's beliefs at a particular moment is not a sufficient condition for their being justified. BonJour writes: