•  4
    Ein prominenter Einwand gegen Kohärenztheorien der Rechtfertigung lautet, dass der zugrunde liegende Begriff der Kohärenz vage ist. In diesem Buch geben wir einen Überblick über die neuere Forschung im Bereich probabilistischer Kohärenzmaße, die den Begriff der Kohärenz mit Hilfe der Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie zu präzisieren versuchen. Im ersten Teil des Buches werden sämtliche Kohärenzmaße sowie ihre jeweiligen Vor- und Nachteile vorgestellt. Dabei werden sowohl Adäquatheitsbedingungen als auch…Read more
  •  23
    Coherence is a property of propositions hanging together or dovetailing with each other. About two decades ago, formal epistemologists started to engage in the project of explicating the seemingly elusive concept of coherence by means of probability theory. Since then, a plethora of coherence measures have been discussed in the literature. In this paper, we propose a general framework for coherence measures that encompasses the different frameworks of deviation measures, overlap measures and mut…Read more
  •  26
    New Hope for Relative Overlap Measures of Coherence
    with Jakob Koscholke and Alexander Stegmann
    Mind 128 (512): 1261-1284. 2019.
    Relative overlap measures of coherence have recently been shown to have two devastating properties: according to the plain relative overlap measure, the degree of coherence of any set of propositions cannot be increased by adding further propositions, and according to the refined relative overlap measure, no set can be more coherent than its most coherent two-element subset. This result has been taken to rule out relative overlap as a foundation for a probabilistic explication of coherence. The …Read more
  •  45
    Coherence and Common Causes: Against Relevance-Sensitive Measures of Coherence
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (3): 771-785. 2019.
    Changing weather conditions and barometer changes usually coincide. Accordingly, the propositions that my barometer falls and that the weather conditions deteriorate are quite coherent—especially under the assumption that there is a drop in atmospheric pressure. Nevertheless, scenarios like these involving common causes turn out to be highly problematic for a prominent class of probabilistic coherence measures, namely, those explicating coherence based on the idea of relevance-sensitivity. In th…Read more
  •  74
    Coherence is the property of propositions hanging or fitting together. Intuitively, adding a proposition to a set of propositions should be compatible with either increasing or decreasing the set’s degree of coherence. In this paper we show that probabilistic coherence measures based on relative overlap are in conflict with this intuitive verdict. More precisely, we prove that according to the naive overlap measure it is impossible to increase a set’s degree of coherence by adding propositions a…Read more
  •  15
    The logic of coherence
    Synthese 198 (8): 7697-7714. 2020.
    To remedy the lack of precision attached to the concept of coherence, a plethora of probabilistic measures has been developed. To broaden the perspective, we do not focus on the differences between these quantitative but the differences between qualitative approaches to coherence by comparing three probabilistic definitions for the relation denoted by ‘coheres with’. To reveal the different logics underlying these relations, we introduce a considerable number of formal properties and examine whe…Read more
  •  35
    Genuine confirmation and tacking by conjunction
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (1): 321-352. 2018.
    Tacking by conjunction is a deep problem for Bayesian confirmation theory. It is based on the insight that to each hypothesis h that is confirmed by a piece of evidence e one can ‘tack’ an irrelevant hypothesis h′ so that h∧h′ is also confirmed by e. This seems counter-intuitive. Existing Bayesian solution proposals try to soften the negative impact of this result by showing that although h∧h′ is confirmed by e, it is so only to a lower degree. In this article we outline some problems of these p…Read more
  •  142
    The debate on probabilistic measures of coherence has focused on evaluating sets of consistent propositions. In this paper we draw attention to the largely neglected question of whether such measures concur with intuitions on test cases involving inconsistent propositions and whether they satisfy general adequacy constraints on coherence and inconsistency. While it turns out that, for the vast majority of measures in their original shape, this question must be answered in the negative, we show t…Read more
  •  23
    A Representation Theorem for Absolute Confirmation
    Philosophy of Science 84 (1): 82-91. 2017.
    Proposals for rigorously explicating the concept of confirmation in probabilistic terms abound. To foster discussions on the formal properties of the proposed measures, recent years have seen the upshot of a number of representation theorems that uniquely determine a confirmation measure based on a number of desiderata. However, the results that have been presented so far focus exclusively on the concept of incremental confirmation. This leaves open the question whether similar results can be ob…Read more
  •  53
    Towards a Grammar of Bayesian Coherentism
    Studia Logica 103 (5): 955-984. 2015.
    One of the integral parts of Bayesian coherentism is the view that the relation of ‘being no less coherent than’ is fully determined by the probabilistic features of the sets of propositions to be ordered. In the last one and a half decades, a variety of probabilistic measures of coherence have been put forward. However, there is large disagreement as to which of these measures best captures the pre-theoretic notion of coherence. This paper contributes to the debate on coherence measures by cons…Read more
  •  51
    The Problem of Coherence and Truth Redux
    Erkenntnis 81 (4): 817-851. 2016.
    In “What price coherence?”, Klein and Warfield put forward a simple argument that triggered an extensive debate on the epistemic virtues of coherence. As is well-known, this debate yielded far-reaching impossibility results to the effect that coherence is not conducive to truth, even if construed in a ceteris paribus sense. A large part of the present paper is devoted to a re-evaluation of these results. As is argued, all explications of truth-conduciveness leave out an important aspect: while i…Read more
  •  47
    Competing accounts of contrastive coherence
    Synthese 193 (10). 2016.
    The proposition that Tweety is a bird coheres better with the proposition that Tweety has wings than with the proposition that Tweety cannot fly. This relationship of contrastive coherence is the focus of the present paper. Based on recent work in formal epistemology we consider various possibilities to model this relationship by means of probability theory. In a second step we consider different applications of these models. Among others, we offer a coherentist interpretation of the conjunction…Read more
  •  113
    The debate on probabilistic measures of coherence flourishes for about 15 years now. Initiated by papers that have been published around the turn of the millennium, many different proposals have since then been put forward. This contribution is partly devoted to a reassessment of extant coherence measures. Focusing on a small number of reasonable adequacy constraints I show that (i) there can be no coherence measure that satisfies all constraints, and that (ii) subsets of these adequacy constrai…Read more
  •  89
    Striving for a probabilistic explication of coherence, scholars proposed a distinction between agreement and striking agreement. In this paper I argue that only the former should be considered a genuine concept of coherence. In a second step the relation between coherence and reliability is assessed. I show that it is possible to concur with common intuitions regarding the impact of coherence on reliability in various types of witness scenarios by means of an agreement measure of coherence. High…Read more
  •  524
    Coherence, Probability and Explanation
    Erkenntnis 79 (4): 821-828. 2014.
    Recently there have been several attempts in formal epistemology to develop an adequate probabilistic measure of coherence. There is much to recommend probabilistic measures of coherence. They are quantitative and render formally precise a notion—coherence—notorious for its elusiveness. Further, some of them do very well, intuitively, on a variety of test cases. Siebel, however, argues that there can be no adequate probabilistic measure of coherence. Take some set of propositions A, some probabi…Read more
  •  37
    The concepts of coherence and confirmation are closely intertwined: according to a prominent proposal coherence is nothing but mutual confirmation. Accordingly, it should come as no surprise that both are confronted with similar problems. As regards Bayesian confirmation measures these are illustrated by the problem of tacking by conjunction. On the other hand, Bayesian coherence measures face the problem of belief individuation. In this paper we want to outline the benefit of an approach to coh…Read more