A Tale of Two Justifications by Jimmy Stephens

Foundationalism struggles to comport with infallibility. Coherentism struggles to comport with fallibility. They are both faulty views in a justification dialectic.

Coherentism proposes some criteria of cohesion. Beliefs have to cohere or corroborate or some such to count as knowledge. Crucial to this view is the meta-belief that all our beliefs cohere. However, that would make all our beliefs infallible.

If we try to solve this problem by denying or removing meta-belief in the total coherence of our beliefs, then we cannot claim to know any given belief either. For coherentism rules out beliefs as false on the basis of incoherence, and so any partial or approximate coherence between one belief is rendered irrelevant by its incoherence or the inaccessibility of its coherence on the whole.

Foundationalism proposes a criteria of division. There are foundational and derivative beliefs. But this division ends up in methodism because belief in this division is itself vital to the formulate of any beliefs. Insofar as we follow the method to support it, we only have fallible attempts to justify a foundational belief. Insofar as we do not practice the method toward its own support, it’s unjustified.

So foundationalism is unable to support infallible beliefs and coherentism is unable to abide fallible ones. Both foundationalism and coherentism can only be solved by the human mind having godlike powers of error-avoidance and exhaustive foresight to get around these issues. Magical thinking.

For anyone who readily sees that we want to preserve infallibility and fallibility without reductionism, then foundationalism and coherentism are off the table.