Coherentism Of Language

Induction attempts to justify scientific statements by reference to other specific scientific statements. It must avoid the problem of the criterion, in which any justification must in turn be justified, resulting in an infinite regress. The regress argument  has been used to justify one way out of the infinite regress, foundationalism. Foundationalism claims that there are some basic statements that do not require justification. Both induction and falsification are forms of foundationalism in that they rely on basic statements that derive directly from immediate sensory experience.

The way in which basic statements are derived from observation complicates the problem. Observation is a cognitive act; that is, it relies on our existing understanding, our set of beliefs. An observation of a transit of Venus requires a huge range of auxiliary beliefs, such as those that describe the optics of telescopes, the mechanics of the telescope mount, and an understanding of celestial mechanics. At first sight, the observation does not appear to be ‘basic’.

Coherentism offers an alternative by claiming that statements can be justified by their being a part of a coherent system. In the case of science, the system is usually taken to be the complete set of beliefs of an individual scientist or, more broadly, of the community of scientists. W. V. Quine argued for a Coherentist approach to science, as does E O Wilson, though he uses the term consilience (notably in his book of that name). An observation of a transit of Venus is justified by its being coherent with our beliefs about optics, telescope mounts and celestial mechanics. Where this observation is at odds with one of these auxiliary beliefs, an adjustment in the system will be required to remove the contradiction.

The practice of scientific inquiry typically involves a number of heuristic principles that serve as rules of thumb for guiding the work. Prominent among these are the principles of conceptual economy or theoretical parsimony that are customarily placed under the rubric of Ockham’s razor, named after the 14th century Franciscan friar William of Ockham who is credited with giving the maxim many pithy expressions, not all of which have yet been found among his extant works.

The motto is most commonly cited in the form “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. As interpreted in contemporary scientific practice, it advises opting for the simplest theory among a set of competing theories that have a comparable explanatory power, discarding assumptions that do not improve the explanation. The “other things being equal” clause is a critical qualification, which rather severely limits the utility of Ockham’s razor in real practice, as theorists rarely if ever find themselves presented with competent theories of exactly equal explanatory adequacy.

Among the many difficulties that arise in trying to apply Ockham’s razor is the problem of formalizing and quantifying the “measure of simplicity” that is implied by the task of deciding which of several theories is the simplest. Although various measures of simplicity have been brought forward as potential candidates from time to time, it is generally recognized that there is no such thing as a theory-independent measure of simplicity. In other words, there appear to be as many different measures of simplicity as there are theories themselves, and the task of choosing between measures of simplicity appears to be every bit as problematic as the job of choosing between theories. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to identify the hypotheses or theories that have “comparable explanatory power”, though it may be readily possible to rule out some of the extremes. Ockham’s razor also does not say that the simplest account is to be preferred regardless of its capacity to explain outliers, exceptions, or other phenomena in question. The principle of falsifiability requires that any exception that can be reliably reproduced should invalidate the simplest theory, and that the next-simplest account which can actually incorporate the exception as part of the theory should then be preferred to the first. As Albert Einstein puts it, “The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience”.

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