Repository | Journal | Volume | Articles
(2014) Synthese 191 (16).
Probabilistic measures of coherence
from adequacy constraints towards pluralism
Michael Schippers
pp. 3821-3845
The debate on probabilistic measures of coherence flourishes for about 15 years now. Initiated by papers that have been published around the turn of the millennium, many different proposals have since then been put forward. This contribution is partly devoted to a reassessment of extant coherence measures. Focusing on a small number of reasonable adequacy constraints I show that (i) there can be no coherence measure that satisfies all constraints, and that (ii) subsets of these adequacy constraints motivate two different classes of coherence measures. These classes do not coincide with the common distinction between coherence as mutual support and coherence as relative set-theoretic overlap. Finally, I put forward arguments to the effect that for each such class of coherence measures there is an outstanding measure that outperforms all other extant proposals. One of these measures has recently been put forward in the literature, while the other one is based on a novel probabilistic measure of confirmation.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/s11229-014-0501-7
Full citation:
Schippers, M. (2014). Probabilistic measures of coherence: from adequacy constraints towards pluralism. Synthese 191 (16), pp. 3821-3845.
This document is unfortunately not available for download at the moment.