Customer Reviews

Change in View: Principles of Reasoning (Bradford Books)

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Change in View is generally recorded as the exemplary expression of the explanatory coherence theory of justification. It is a fine book, though perhaps other explanatory coherentist texts are more worthy of this title. In terms of clarity and effectiveness of writing, I prefer Lycan's Judgement and Justification; rigor, Jay Rosenberg's One World and Our Knowledge of It; applicability to science, Paul Thagard's Conceptual Revolutions. Harman is a first rate philosopher, though perhaps the least engaging writer of those just mentioned, all of whom are also first rate philosophers. If Harman's book has an advantage over these other texts, it is perhaps that it manages to be slightly more rigorous than Lycan's book, but more accessible than Rosenberg's. In general, I would recommend any of these books only to those fairly well-read in epistemology.