Has Foundationalism Failed ? By Majid Amini

Foundationalism and coherentism in epistemology, like so many other polar philosophical positions, have been going through periodic bouts of trials and tribulations to the delight of each other’s opponent. In the recent cycle of this ongoing saga, coherentism has suffered a severe blow from the defection of Laurence BonJour, as one of its most prominent and persistent defenders, to the opposition camp. Indeed, in his new foundationalist incarnation, BonJour concludes one of his papers by the stark statement that ‘coherentism is pretty obviously untenable, indeed hopeless’. However, Paul Thagard in his latest book, Coherence in Thought and Action, attempts not only to defend coherentism from its detractors but also to demonstrate that foundationalism does not have a chance of competing with coherentism in an account of human consciousness with its multifarious manifestations. What essentially Thagard does is to tender coherence as the holy grail of human inference and thinking. This is epitomised by his repeated observation that ‘the foundational search for certainty was pointless, and that what mattered was the growth of knowledge, not its foundations.’ (p. 90) Thagard contends that the key to the growth of knowledge and to its very understanding is nothing other than coherence, where in a similar epistemic exercise foundationalism ‘has undoubtedly failed’. (p. 8) The purpose of this critical review is, therefore, to look at the technical details and finesses of Thagard’s conception of coherence to ascertain whether its alleged extensive explanatory power renders foundationalism obsolete. To set the scene and also to have a better appreciation of the significance of Thagard’s contention to ensconce coherence at the centre of philosophy, a brief background to the debate may not be amiss. Generally, coherence has been a recurrent theme in philosophy; indeed, it does not take long to find a philosopher commenting on certain competing accounts to commend the more coherent scientific or ethical theory, or the more coherent plan, or the more coherent theory of something else. Yet, there has not been much of an account of what exactly coherence itself is. The problem was not that of coming by synonymous, or semi-