KNOWLEDGE AND COHERENCE Paul Thagard, Chris Eliasmith 知识与相干保罗Thagard，克里斯eliasmith.doc

KNOWLEDGE AND COHERENCE Paul Thagard, Chris Eliasmith, Paul Rusnock, and Cameron Shelley Philosophy Department University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1 pthagard@watarts.uwaterloo.ca 1. Introduction Many contemporary philosophers favor coherence theories of knowledge (Bender 1989, BonJour 1985, Davidson 1986, Harman 1986, Lehrer 1990). But the nature of coherence is usually left vague, with no method provided for determining whether a belief should be accepted or rejected on the basis of its coherence or incoherence with other beliefs. Haacks (1993) explication of coherence relies largely on an analogy between epistemic justification and crossword puzzles. We show in this paper how epistemic coherence can be understood in terms of maximization of constraint satisfaction, in keeping with computational models that have had a substantial impact in cognitive science. A coherence problem can be defined in terms of a set of elements and sets of positive and negative constraints between pairs of those elements. Algorithms are available for computing coherence by determining how to accept and reject elements in a way that satisfies the most constraints. Knowledge involves at least five different kinds of coherence - explanatory, analogical, deductive, perceptual, and conceptual - each requiring different sorts of elements and constraints. After specifying the notion of coherence as constraint satisfaction in more detail, we show how explanatory coherence subsumes Susan Haacks recent foundherentist theory of knowledge. We show how her crossword puzzle analogy for epistemic justification can be interpreted in terms of explanatory coherence, and describe how her use of the analogy can be understood in terms of analogical coherence. We then give an account of deductive coherence, showing how the selection of mathematical axioms can be understood as a constraint satisfaction problem. Moreover, visual interpretation can also be understood in terms of satisfaction of mult