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.

Glymour's theory of bootstrap confirmation is a purely qualitative account of confirmation; it allows us to say that the evidence confirms a given theory, but not that it confirms the theory to a certain degree. The present paper extends Glymour's theory to a quantitative account and investigates the resulting theory in some detail. It also considers the question how bootstrap confirmation relates to justification.

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.

No abstract

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.Keywords Coherence · Truth · Probability · Bovens · Hartmann · Olsson According to coherentism, a person is justified in holding a belief if, roughly speaking, the belief coheres well with most (or even all, depending on the particular version of coherentism) of her other beliefs, where the notion of coherence is typically circumscribed, at least for starters, in terms of beliefs' hanging well together, or dovetailing with each other, or supporting each other, or in similar metaphorical terms. It is generally thought that a minimal requirement for the tenability of this position is that there be some positive correlation between coherence and truth. Coherence, in other words, should be truth-conducive in the sense that, even if perhaps only under certain specific conditions, one set of beliefs' being more coherent than another entails its being also more probable than that other. In this paper we will call the claim that