Abstract

In this ambitious book, Paul Thagard develops a theory of coherence as constraint satisfaction that is precise enough to be stated formally, yet general enough to have application to an array of philosophical problems. Working within the framework of cognitive naturalism, Thagard aims to reunite philosophy and psychology by employing “a computational theory of coherence to illuminate both the psychological task of understanding human thinking and the philosophical task of evaluating how people ought to think”. The formal theory of coherence is presented in chapter 2, and is used in chapter 3 to characterize the main kinds of epistemic coherence: explanatory, analogical, deductive, perceptual, and conceptual. Over the next few chapters, Thagard applies these to a variety of venerable philosophical problems, including the nature of reality, the existence of God, the problem of other minds, and the ethics of capital punishment and abortion. In a very interesting chapter, the theory of coherence is extended to account for the role of emotion in human cognition and later applied to understanding judgments of beauty and humor. One should consider this book not as giving the final word on these matters, but as showcasing the promise of cognitive naturalism.