We simply want to find out where we should focus our limited resources and where we should not waste our time or energy. Our goals are far more pragmatic in nature. That doesn’t mean that we buy into or take a position in the various debates about Coherentism (especially the linguistic variants and the idea of internal coherence) in epistemology, its relation with Correspondence Theories of truth or God help us Foundationalism. Now I should be clear that Thagard is a source, and acknowledged as such, but here in Cynefin Co we have been developing the theory and practice of coherence testing for some time.
#Coherence theory of truth example quote series#
I first set out a series of tests for coherence back in 2016, referencing Thagard’s work as one source. Some things are plain wrong and you have a moral responsibility to call them out, or you are conjoined in guilt. I’d augment that example with the latest tragic shootings in the US, the war crimes in Ukraine along with the constant micro-aggressions and coercive control that impact women and minorities in all organisations. I also added a postscript to that post to challenge the “all beliefs are equally valid” brigade to understand the degree to which that type of thinking places you at moral hazard, using the example of the physical and other threats to a scientist who dared to challenge the beliefs of adherents of a conspiracy theory. In my second post I established differences between theories, laws, hypotheses, conjectures and beliefs as they have different aspects and understanding those is important. Yes, you need to treat people who have genuine beliefs with respect but that doesn’t require you to give credibility to nonsense. To take a pretty straightforward case, if we are looking at evolution there are different theories which can contradict each other and we need to pursue them all, but we can eliminate Young Earth Creationism as incoherent.
That of course applies to the complex domain, on the ordered domain we can run with the orthodoxy of conventional wisdom and practice. In my first post in this emerging series on the naturalising in Naturalising Sense-making, I talked about the need to do multiple parallel probes around any coherent hypothesis in order to find out what is possible.
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