Coherentism and the Web of Belief

Coherentism rejects the foundationalist premise that any belief can be justified independently of, or prior to, its relations with other beliefs. On the coherentist view, justification is holistic: a belief is justified to the extent that it coheres, fits together consistently and mutually supportingly, with the rest of an agent's belief system, and no belief is epistemically privileged or self-standing in the way foundationalism's basic beliefs are supposed to be. Coherence is generally understood as more than mere logical consistency; it typically also involves relations of mutual explanatory and probabilistic support among beliefs, so that a set of beliefs coheres well when they render each other more credible, fit together into an intelligible overall picture, and contain no unexplained anomalies.