other entries and do not conflict with any other entries.
Entries that conflict with other entries and are not supported by a significant number of entries.
Entries that neither conflict with other entries nor fit with other entries.
Entries that fit with a significant number of other entries but also conflict with other entries.
According to the Supporting Justified Belief Rule, the entries that fit into the second and third categories won't be justified. You won't expect to find these entries in Your Book of Justified Beliefs. The fourth category is tricky. On the one hand, some of these entries might receive strong support from other entries and so you might think that the conflict doesn't really threaten them. Some of these entries might receive weak support and look bad in light of well‐supported entries. Let's set these aside for the time being.
1.44 The best candidates for entries in Your Book of Justified Beliefs will be those in the first group – viz. entries that fit with a significant number of other entries and do not conflict with any other entries. Question: could it be that all it takes for a belief to be justified is for it to fit into the first category? Could mutual support between beliefs be all that's required for these beliefs to be justified? This is indeed what the coherentist thinks. As Catherine Z. Elgin (1996) states the idea, beliefs that are justified are parts of a system where the parts are “reasonable in light of one another” (1996, p. 13).
1.45 There is are two key components to this core idea: (i) items that aren't contained in Your Book of Beliefs simply won't have a direct bearing on whether beliefs that belong to a coherent system are really justified or not; and, second, (ii) justified beliefs are justified because of their place in a system of mutually supporting items. Instead of thinking of your justified beliefs as forming a structure like a tower or pyramid with foundational beliefs at the bottom and inferential beliefs at the top, think about your system of justified beliefs as forming a piece of woven cloth. The strength of a piece of woven fabric has all to do with the interlocking warp and weft strings. It doesn't require any unsupported supporters.
1.46 As you examine your beliefs, you might find that some beliefs aren't supported by any further beliefs. These beliefs, according to the coherentist, lack the kind of support required for justified beliefs. There is not some other source of rational support that isn't some further belief. As Donald Davidson remarked, “nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief” (1986, p. 141). The coherentist will say that there are various causes of our beliefs (e.g. experiences, sensations, apparent memories, etc.), but will insist that it's just relations between beliefs that determine whether they're justified.29
1.47 Even the critics of coherentism will acknowledge that there are cases where coherence seems to play an important role in the justification of our beliefs, but the crucial question isn't whether the overall coherence of a system of beliefs plays some role in the justification of belief, but whether the justification of our beliefs could be wholly determined by the coherence of the system. Coherentists like to think of justified beliefs as part of a web of belief that has a sufficiently high degree of coherence, in part because we cannot divide the parts of a web into parts, isolating the foundations and distinguishing them from the superstructure. In a web, every part is supported by the other parts, and every part lends its support to the structure as a whole.
1.48 Unsurprisingly, coherentism's critics object to the view on the grounds that it fails to recognize the role that things external to the web of belief play in the justification of the beliefs that constitute the web. The coherentist doesn't look at all beyond the web of belief for further support that would justify the beliefs bound up in the web. But shouldn't she do so?
1.49 If coherentists wants to convince us that our justified beliefs are justified because they cohere with each other, they need to show that the beliefs that provide rational support for our beliefs derive their justification exclusively from further beliefs, and not from anything located outside the circle of belief. If they don't, there will always be that nagging feeling that some of the justificatory work is done by intuition, experience, testimony, or something outside the circle of belief.
1.50 An example should help to make this worry vivid. Imagine we are playing a game in which your friend places something on a platter, covers it with a silver cloche, and lifts the cloche with a flourish so that you can see what's on the platter. Before your friend lifts the silver cloche, you have no beliefs at all about what's on the silver platter. (For all you know, it could be anything small enough to fit under a cloche, from a battery to a coin to a piece of cheese.) After the reveal, everything changed – there's a tomato! You quickly came to believe that the thing on the platter was a tomato. Let's suppose that that's all you came to believe and let's suppose that you didn't just believe that the thing on the platter was a tomato. Let's suppose that you knew that it was and so justifiably believed that it was.
1.51 If this is a plausible description of what happens, we have the makings of a good objection to coherentism:
Isolation Objection
P1.The belief that the object is a tomato couldn't be justified before the reveal.
P2. The belief that the object is a tomato could be justified after the reveal.
P3. difference in justification is a normative difference.
P4. If there is a normative difference between beliefs formed before and after the reveal, there must be some further difference between the beliefs that accounts for this normative difference.
C1. There must be some further difference between the beliefs formed before and after the reveal that accounts for this difference in justification before and after the reveal.
P5.According to the coherentist, the only difference between beliefs that could account for a difference in justification is how well they cohere with the rest of the believer's beliefs.
P6.The belief that the object is a tomato coheres with the rest of the subject's beliefs equally well before the reveal and after it.
C2.Thus, if coherentism is true, then there is no difference between the beliefs formed before and after the reveal that could account for the relevant difference in justification before and after the reveal.
The crucial point is this. Prior to the reveal, the belief that the object is a tomato wasn't supported by other beliefs. (You might have had good reason to think something would be under the cloche, but you didn't have good enough reason to believe that it was a tomato, a fruit, something red, etc.) When the tomato was revealed, there was a short time when your beliefs stayed the same but your experiences changed. It's only when there's a difference in your experience that we think that you're in a position to justifiably judge that the object is a tomato. It's worth emphasizing that what changes here and seems to account for the fact that you are now in a good position to judge that it's a tomato on the plate is your experience, not your beliefs. Thus, while it might seem to you that something of great significance changed when your experience changed, there's nothing that the coherentist can appeal to in trying to explain why it's a consequence of the reveal and the experience of the tomato that you can now justifiably judge the object to be a tomato.
1.52 Might the preceding line of objection against the coherentist be too quick? Here's a natural line of response. In setting
