Did Reid Hold Coherentist Views?

Abstract

In a recent paper, Keith Lehrer and John-Christian Smith show that Thomas Reid, while being mainly foundationalist and reliabilist in his conception of knowledge, also pays attention to the dimension of coherence within our system of beliefs.(1) They describe thus a hitherto not much discussed and very interesting feature of Reid’s philosophy. As they give simultaneously a fallibilist interpretation of the knowledge claims we may derive — according to Reid — from the exertion of our faculties, the consideration of coherence gains in importance: the less we derive completely certain knowledge directly from the exertion of our faculties, the more coherence among our beliefs could become relevant for the justification of knowledge claims. I shall not discuss the question of Reid’s fallibilism here, but restrict my discussion to the possible role of coherence among our beliefs in Reid’s philosophy and give some development to Lehrer and Smith’s argument.