![]() I no longer believe that my attempt-or probably any of this general sort-succeeds. My coherence theory attempted to show how experience could affect such a system in a way that would be relevant to epistemic justification. But a simple response is that as long as truth is understood as correspondence to independent reality (as I believe that it must be, though Davidson apparently would not agree), there is no basis for thinking that an internally coherent system of beliefs having merely causal relation to experience is thereby likely to be true-and therefore no reason to think that the beliefs in such a system are epistemically justified. ![]() A further problem is that Davidson’s epistemology is thoroughly enmeshed in his views on language and meaning, and his views on truth, in a way that makes it hard to sort out in any brief space. LB: Here I am hampered by no longer having a copy of Davidson’s paper readily available. Given that your and Davidson’s theories are frequently discussed together, could you describe your general views, particularly before you renounced Coherentism, towards Davidsonian Coherentism, and how you view his theory in relation to yours? Importantly, your Coherentism accommodates experiential input through what you call the Observation Requirement, whereas Davidson denies outright that a belief can have anything but a causal relationship to experience. The other, of course, is Donald Davidson’s, which he gives in the paper “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge”. Braeden Giaconi, Editor-in-ChiefīG: Your Coherentist theory, given primarily in your book The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, is one of the two most important Coherentist theories of recent epistemology. Professor BonJour and I spoke about coherentism, foundationalism, Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, and the influence of his teacher Richard Rorty. His major work, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (1985), is, along with Donald Davidson’s “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge” (1986), one of the two most important coherentist theories of the late twentieth century. Professor BonJour is one of the most eminent epistemologists in recent analytic philosophy. I was honored to speak with Laurence BonJour, professor emeritus of philosophy at The University of Washington, via email over the last month. Note: the interview has been lightly edited for print.
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