Classical Logical Coherentism

doi:10.1007/s10992-026-09849-3

Classical Logical Coherentism

2026-06-01

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Belastegui, Javier *

DOI：10.1007/s10992-026-09849-3

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Our usual explication of a logic through an axiomatic calculus is structurally foundationalist. Justification gets transferred by applying rules finitely many times from already justified sentences to new sentences in a linear-like fashion, by starting from a base of non-to-be justified sentences (i.e. the axioms). In contrast, this paper develops a coherentist approach to classical propositional logic, by explaining the fundamental notion of deducibility in terms of a primitive notion of logical coherence. This is done by introducing a calculus consisting of rules that capture the properties of classical consistency. The basic logical reasoning process explicated is that of constructing consistent sets of formulas. I show how to define classical deducibility in terms of the primitive relation of logical coherence. As applications, I use the coherence calculus to provide a non-semantic proof of the consistency of an axiomatic calculus for classical propositional logic, I show how the system avoids an impossibility result for semantic resemblance proven by Leitgeb, I show that the strategy of defining deducibility from coherence does not work for intuitionistic logic and I briefly compare my approach to the Simple Theory of Propositions put forward by Stalnaker and Fritz.

Keywords:

Coherentism

Maximally consistent sets

Logical consistency

Classical logic

Semantic resemblance

Philosophy of logic

Boolean algebras

Classical Logical Coherentism

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