Basic Reasons and First Philosophy: A Coherentist View of Reasons

This paper develops and defends a coherentist account of reasons. I develop three core ideas for this defense: a distinction between basic reasons and noninferential justification, the plausibility of the neglected argument against first philosophy, and an emergent account of reasons. These three ideas form the backbone for a credible coherentist view of reasons. I work toward this account by formulating and explaining the basic reasons dilemma. This dilemma reveals a wavering attitude that coherentists have had toward basic reasons. More importantly, the basic reasons dilemma focuses our attention on the central problems that afflict coherentist views of basic beliefs. By reflecting on the basic reasons dilemma, I formulate three desiderata that any viable coherentist account of basic beliefs must satisfy. I argue that the account on offer satisfies these desiderata. What has happened to epistemic coherentism? Once a prominent epistemological view held by such luminaries as Nelson Goodman (1965; 1978), W. V. O. Quine (1960; 1970), Wilfrid Sellars (1963), and John Rawls (1999),1 it ∗This paper was originally presented at the Inaugural Orange Beach Epistemology Workshop in May 2009. I am grateful to the participants of that workshop for helpful comments on this paper. I am especially grateful to William Lycan for comments on the penultimate draft of this paper. An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the Central States Philosophical Association meeting in September 2010 and at the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology meeting in March 2011. I am grateful for helpful comments by Jim Pryor, Bruce Russell, John Turri, and Chase Wrenn. I am indebted to Brit Brogaard for spotting a flaw in an earlier formulation of the emergent reasons account. 1(Rawls 1999, 15–19) discusses the method of reflective equilibrium, explicitly noting both that this method is coherentist and that it comes from Nelson Goodman’s attempted justification of the rules of deductive and inductive inference. Also see (Daniels 1996, 2008) for discussion on the method of reflective equilibrium.