Abstract
Quine has influenced epistemology beyond his own project of naturalization. His early work influenced my own work in the coherence theory of knowledge,1 and I should like to take this occasion to raise some questions about coherence and knowledge. Quine was impressed by the failure of the reductionist program of phenomenalism. I agree with him about the failure of that program. I also agree with him that the consequence of that insight is that it is some system that confronts the world and our sensory experience of it. Knowledge, I concluded, must result from some combination of coherence and truth. I learned that from Quine but am less content to follow him down the path of naturalization. I want to explain why I took another path from his insights, a less revisionary one.
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Notes
Keith Lehrer, Theory of Knowledge (London and Boulder: Routledge and Westview Press, 1990).
Willard Van Orman Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and other essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 74.
Keith Lehrer, Self-Trust: A Study of Reason, Knowledge and Autonomy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), Chap. 1.
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Lehrer, K. (2000). Justification, Coherence and Quine. In: Orenstein, A., Kotatko, P. (eds) Knowledge, Language and Logic: Questions for Quine. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 210. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3933-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3933-5_5
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