ABSTRACT
This chapter explains what coherence is or what sort of a system a belief must cohere with to become justified. Some defenders of the coherence theory conceived of the relationship of coherence as a relation of necessary connection. A coherence theory of justification may affirm that the kind of coherence required for justification is explanatory coherence. Explanatory coherence thus appears to determine justification. The chapter attempts to offer a precise analysis of such justification. The conception of explanation is, unfortunately, so interwoven with epistemic notions that we could not expect to explicate the idea of one explanation being better than another without at least covertly appealing to some epistemic notion. The proposal that justification can be obtained through self-explanation in a system of beliefs, though promising, evokes criticism appropriate to the explanatory coherence theory as a whole. There remain two related objections that illustrate some problems to be solved by any satisfactory form of the coherence theory, explanatory or not.
