ABSTRACT
This chapter considers more fundamental criticisms of the theory that knowledge has foundations. It explores the coherence theory and examines two less elaborate rejections of the theory of basic statements, those of J. L. Austin and Nelson Goodman. Some main arguments have been persistently advanced against the coherence theory. The coherence theory implies the doctrine of degrees of truth which holds that no statement is more than partially true. A persistent obscurity in all coherence theories has enveloped the concept of coherence itself. C. S. Peirce perceives that there are two distinct forms of the second alternative: the full-blooded coherence theory, which he rejects, and the doctrine of a relative basis of perceptual judgments, which he accepts. The chapter discusses two comprehensive versions of the fallibilist theory of knowledge, those of Peirce and K. R. Popper, in which knowledge is admitted to have foundations but in which the foundations are not held to be incorrigible or to be phenomenological.
