Unifying the Instances of Incoherence

Abstract

This chapter gives an account of what unifies the diverse list of instances of incoherence. In so doing, it defends a biconditional test for when a combination of attitudinal mental states is incoherent. On the view defended, roughly, a set of states is incoherent iff it’s constitutive of these states that any agent who has them together necessarily has some disposition, when conditions of full transparency are met, to revise them. The chapter also relates the view it defends to constitutivism, according to which mental states are (at least partly) constituted by the norms that govern them, and to the view that rationality is a precondition of interpretation. It also explains how, even on the account offered, it is possible to be incoherent, and defends the contention that instances of incoherence in the sense identified are thereby instances of (structural) irrationality.