Abstract

The central thesis of this paper is that coherence is more than just the absence of incoherence. We argue that two recently popular accounts of coherence and rationality, based (respectively) on reasons and requirements, fail to accommodate this thesis. Instead, we defend an account of coherence that is based on support. In short, the basic idea is that a set of attitudes is coherent when some of the attitudes in the set support other attitudes in it; incoherent if some of the attitudes oppose other attitudes in it; and neither coherent nor incoherent if the attitudes involved neither support nor oppose other attitudes in it. As this illustrates, this approach—unlike reasons- and requirements-based ones—straightforwardly allows one to distinguish between coherence, incoherence, and the absence of each.

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