Systems of Justified Belief
Here's more from Auburn University philosopher Roderick T. Long ( Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand ) on coherentism and reflective equilibration . The point of all this is to show that we can rationally construct reality-based systems of belief that do not require infallibility. Aristotle thus appears to be counseling two steps. First, pursue a coherentist strategy for discovering first principles, by provisionally accepting all the beliefs that initially seem true or plausible to us (including, but not limited to, our perceptual beliefs) as defeasibly justified, and then try to see which candidates for first principles best cohere with our total set of beliefs in wide reflective equilibrium. Second, once the first principles have been thus identified, pursue a foundationalist strategy for demonstrating and thus explaining the truth of our initial beliefs (or some of them) by deriving them from these first principles. The things well-known to us are genuinely known but not ...