Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

According to a common view in epistemology, a set of propositions is justified if it is coherent. Similarly, a new proposition should be accepted if it is coherent with the accepted body of beliefs. But what is coherence? And what, in turn, justifies the above claims? To answer these questions, various Bayesian measures of epistemic coherence have been proposed. Most of these measures are based on the prior probability distribution over the corresponding propositional variables. We criticize this ``static'' conceptualization of coherence and propose instead that the coherence of an information set is related to how well the information set responds when each of the propositions it contains is confirmed by an independent and partially reliable information source. The elaboration of this idea will show that the proposed ``dynamic'' perspective has several advantages and solves some open problems of coherentist epistemology. It also has implications for our understanding of reasoning and argumentation in science and beyond.