Coherence in thought and action /

This short and ambitious book combines all of Thagard's work on coherence to date. Thagard (Univ. of Waterloo, Ontario) argues that his theory of explanatory coherence (TEC) can be used to solve many problems in philosophy. The scope of Thagard's project is enormous: it includes epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. In his conclusion he admits to falling short in treating some issues, but he ends on an optimistic note, emphasizing the potential of his approach. What drives Thagard's book is his TEC, which exemplifies his "cognitive naturalism" in being both a psychological and philosophical theory. This approach is best illustrated in its application to epistemology and philosophy of science. Thagard argues that his TEC provides both an accurate psychological theory of what goes on in day-to-day and scientific reasoning and a normative theory of how we should reason. He sees this as an advance over Bayesian theories of inference, which notoriously fail to capture the psychological reality of human reasoning processes. In shooting for a combined normative and psychological theory, Thagard has had to compromise; overall, however, his approach provides a refreshing take on some of the central problems of philosophy. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and researchers. S. M. Downes University of Utah