Coherence as Joint Satisfiability

ABSTRACT

According to many philosophers, rationality is, at least in part, a matter of one’s attitudes cohering with one another. Theorists who endorse this idea have devoted much attention to formulating various coherence requirements. Surprisingly, they have said very little about what it takes for a set of attitudes to be coherent in general. We articulate and defend a general account on which a set of attitudes is coherent (roughly) just in case and because it is logically possible for the attitudes to be jointly satisfied in the sense of jointly fitting the world. In addition, we show how the account can help adjudicate debates about how to formulate various rational requirements.

KEYWORDS:

• Coherence
• incoherence
• rational requirements
• rationality

Acknowledgements

For helpful discussion, questions, and comments, we’re grateful to John Brunero, Pietro Cibinel, Daniel Fogal, Tom Kelly, Benjamin Kiesewetter, Philip Pettit, Sera Schwarz, Michael Smith, Alejandro Vesga, and audiences at the 10th Princeton-Humboldt Graduate Conference in Philosophy, and the 2022 ANU-Humboldt-Princeton Summer Institute on Practical Normativity. We also thank two anonymous referees for AJP and one anonymous referee for a different journal for their valuable comments on the manuscript. This publication was supported by the Princeton University Library Open Access Fund.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We assume only that structural rationality is a unified phenomenon, but we make no assumptions about whether it can be reduced to substantive rationality (as Kiesewetter 2017 and Lord 2018 argue), or whether the reduction goes the other way around (or, indeed, whether we should be eliminativists about substantive rationality). However, we hope that by getting clearer on the target phenomenon (namely, structural rationality), we can help further this debate.

2 The precise formulation of some of these requirements is controversial. As we discuss below, our view of coherence offers a principled way of resolving disputes between theorists about the right way of formulating some coherence requirements.

3 By ‘attitudinal mental states,’ Worsnip refers both to attitudes and absences of attitudes (2018: 188). As we discuss in the next section, any account of coherence must refer to the absence of certain attitudes.

4 Of course, the agent need not realize de dicto that they’re incoherent. After all, small children and some animals seem capable of reasoning out of incoherence, but they lack the concepts needed to form the thought that they’re incoherent. All that is needed is that the agent realizes de re that they’re incoherent, in the sense of realizing that their attitudes instantiate a property that calls for them to be revised.

5 This is why we characterized Brunero as only offering a sufficient condition for coherence, rather than a set of necessary and sufficient conditions.

6 We would like to thank an anonymous referee for suggesting this fix.

7 This new account still doesn’t deliver the verdict that violations of the Modus Ponens requirement are incoherent. However, as we’ll argue in section 5, this requirement (as typically formulated) isn’t a genuine coherence requirement.

8 You may be thinking that CJS cannot explain the incoherence of being akratic. If you believe that you ought to $\mathrm{\Phi }$ but lack an intention to $\mathrm{\Phi }$, your belief can be true without any change to your psychology. As we noted in the introduction, we’ll address this objection in section 6.

9 Even if closure isn’t a coherence requirement, it might still be a desideratum of theoretical rationality, in the sense that ideally rational agents believe all of the logical consequences of their beliefs. We thank Philip Pettit for bringing this point to our attention.

10 According to a once-influential view, preferences aren’t mental states at all. Instead, they are regularities in an individual’s behaviour. On this view, one cannot act against one’s preferences. Rather, these are always revealed in one’s actual choices. We put aside this view here, as we are interested in offering an account of psychological coherence.

11 For a detailed treatment of the logic of better than and other value-theoretic concepts, as well as discussion of the connections between someone’s good and their rational preferences, see Broome 1991.

12 To prefer $a$ over $b$ isn’t simply to regard $a$ as better than $b$ in some respect. You might prefer heavy metal to classical music, while still thinking that classical music is better along some dimensions, such as harmonic complexity. So, we think that the most plausible rendering of this idea is that to prefer $a$ to $b$ is to believe that $a$ is better than $b$, all things considered.

13 Broome (2013: ch. 9.5, ch. 16) devotes considerable attention to this putative requirement. See also Kolodny 2005, Scanlon 2007, and Setiya 2007.

14 Worsnip recognizes this objection and defends a moderate form of judgment internalism to explain why akrasia is at least somewhat incoherent on his view (2018: §9.4, 2021: ch. 5.4.3). We explain below how judgment internalism also provides a way for akrasia to count as genuine incoherence on our theory.

15 Brunero appreciates this problem and expresses skepticism about finding one unifying theory to cover all requirements (2020: 206).

16 This claim is controversial in epistemology. Lord notes that the cases in which permissivism seems plausible involve less than fully transparent evidence. However, he thinks that the only permissible response in these situations is to suspend judgment (2018: 47–48).

17 We believe that cases of epistemic akrasia can be given the same treatment. In these cases, the agent believes that they have decisive reason to believe that $p$, but they don’t believe that $p$. Either their belief about what they have reason to believe is unreasonable, or they fail to believe something that they have decisive reason to believe.

18 We could also handle akrasia as follows: some authors (e.g., Frankfurt 1971) take akrasia to involve a conflict between one’s first order and second order desires. On this picture, being akratic involves desiring to desire to $\mathrm{\Phi }$ and, yet, not desiring to $\mathrm{\Phi }$ (or desiring to not $\mathrm{\Phi }$). This profile is incoherent according to CJS, since any world in which your second order desire is satisfied is a world in which you have the first order desire, and so your psychology is different than in the actual world. We thank Michael Smith for this suggestion.

19 We can give a similar response to a different worry about over-inclusiveness, namely, that CJS entails a belief-desire consistency requirement. If I desire to $\mathrm{\Phi }$ but believe that I will not $\mathrm{\Phi }$, then my psychology would seem to be incoherent according to CJS. However, if my desire to $\mathrm{\Phi }$ is instrumental, then I’m not incoherent on our view. Alternatively, if my desire is non-instrumental, then I seem to be genuinely incoherent because there is no way that I can make the world fit my attitude (assuming that my belief is true). Finally, it is possible that my $\mathrm{\Phi }$-ing is something desirable and yet I don’t do it. Hence, on the view that desires have a mind-to-world direction of fit, I’m not incoherent if I desire to $\mathrm{\Phi }$ but believe that I will not $\mathrm{\Phi }$. We thank John Brunero for raising this objection.

20 Plausibly, there are practical attitudes analogous to these epistemic attitudes, such as deferring one’s decision (Schroeder 2012) or having an inclination to $\mathrm{\Phi }$ while not all out intending to $\mathrm{\Phi }$ (Goldstein 2016; Shpall 2016). We will focus on the doxastic attitudes because there is more philosophical work on these attitudes for us to draw upon, but we think that our analysis can be extended to these practical attitudes, as well.

21 Some think of suspension as a sui generis attitude (Friedman 2013a, 2013b, 2017). Others offer reductive accounts that invoke attitudes such as higher-order beliefs and intentions (Masny 2020; McGrath 2021).

22 Several authors argue that this neutrality is only temporary. We suspend judgment with the aim of judging later. See, e.g., Friedman 2017: 317, Masny 2020: 5024, and McGrath 2021: 469.

23 Some accounts of suspension incorporate multiple understandings of this idea.

24 According to some philosophers, the credence an agent assigns to a proposition reflects the rate at which they are or should be willing to bet on that proposition being true. More precisely, if an agent has credence $x$ in a proposition $p$, then they should be willing to pay up to $$\mathrm{xS}$ for a bet that pays $$S$ if p and $0 if not $p$ (see de Finetti 1974; Jeffrey 2004). However, the idea that an agent’s credences are closely connected to their betting behavior is controversial. See Eriksson and Hájek 2007 for critical discussion.

25 The idea of relative joint satisfiability suggests a general formulation of CJS that applies to both categorical and graded attitudes. On this formulation, a set of attitudes is incoherent if and only if it isn’t jointly satisfiable relative to some relevant alternative (holding fixed the agent’s psychology). Our original version of CJS is a special case of this general formulation. We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this general formulation of our view.