Supervenience and Meta-Justification

The central coherentist critique of foundationalism brings forward a requirement of meta-justification for putative basic beliefs, which means that the beliefs are not basic after all. The foundationalist response denies this require-ment, because it is in conflict with the doctrine of super-venience. Recently, one of the principal members of the coherentist camp, Keith Lehrer (1997, 60-77), suggested coherentists should reject this doctrine in order to maintain their advantage over foundationalist theories of justifica-tion. I will argue that coherentists need not go so far as to reject the doctrine of supervenience. The denial of this very plausible doctrine would, on the contrary, decrease the attractiveness of coherentism. Even if we assume that such a doctrine is true, and that justification does not i