Truth Might Be Less Valuable Than Coherence

We tend to treat truth as the highest intellectual virtue, as the fixed star around which rational thought orbits. But there is a quieter, more unsettling possibility: that coherence is doing most of the real work, and truth has been taking the credit.

The Problem with Correspondence

In its classical formulation, truth is correspondence: a belief is true if it accurately represents reality. This is the view most of us absorbed without noticing from Aristotle's Metaphysics through to ordinary common sense. A statement is true if things are as the statement says they are.

But this raises an immediate and serious difficulty. We never access reality as it is in itself. Every encounter with the world is mediated by perception, by concept, by language, by interpretive framework. To verify a belief by comparing it directly with unconstructed reality would require stepping outside all possible experience. Which we cannot do. The view from nowhere is not a view any of us can occupy.

This does not render truth meaningless. But it does make it permanently elusive. What we call truth is always already filtered and interpreted, never given in some pure, theory-independent form. Even our most rigorous empirical claims rest on theoretical commitments we cannot fully step outside of. As Wilfrid Sellars argued, there is no 'Myth of the Given', no bedrock of raw, uninterpreted experience on which knowledge can be built without remainder.

So what do we actually rely on, when we cannot reach beyond our representations?

Coherence or truth? That is the question.

The Coherentist Alternative

Coherentism offers a different picture. Rather than grounding justification in some foundational contact with reality, it locates epistemic value in the internal relations among beliefs. A belief is justified insofar as it coheres with a broader system where it fits, it supports, it integrates without contradiction.

This is not merely an academic position. It describes something real about how we actually reason. In science, theories are not judged solely by isolated correspondence to data points but by their explanatory power, their unifying force, their capacity to generate stable and testable predictions across a wide range of phenomena. Thomas Kuhn's account of paradigm shifts is instructive here: scientific communities do not abandon a framework the moment it faces anomalies. They absorb, adjust, reinterpret, and switch only when the incoherence becomes intolerable and a rival framework offers better overall integration.

W.V.O. Quine made this point with structural precision. On his view, our beliefs form an interconnected web, not an orderly hierarchy. When experience creates pressure on that web, we do not simply excise a single false belief and replace it with a true one. We adjust the system, sometimes at the periphery and sometimes deep in the core, to restore coherence. There is no algorithmically correct way to distribute the revisions. There is, Quine argued, a 'freedom to revise': any belief can be retained under sufficient pressure and any belief can be abandoned, so long as the overall web holds together. Truth, in this picture, is not a property a belief has independently of the system it inhabits. It is what the system converges on under sustained pressure from experience.

Nietzsche's More Radical Move

Friedrich Nietzsche went further, and the move is characteristically uncomfortable. In his notebooks and in works like Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche questioned not just the epistemological accessibility of truth but its value as a goal. He asked: suppose a belief is true in some correspondence sense. Why should that, in itself, make it worth holding?

"The falseness of a judgment is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgment ... The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding." - Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

This is a genuinely destabilising thought. Simplifications, narratives, illusions, those things that do not accurately represent how things are, may be what allow us to function coherently in a world that resists comprehensive understanding. A perfectly accurate representation of reality, if such a thing were achievable, might not be livable. It might be paralysing. The person who fully grasps the contingency of their values, the arbitrariness of their social world, and the indifference of the universe to their projects might find that knowledge devastating rather than liberating.

Nietzsche is not straightforwardly endorsing self-deception. He is pointing at something more structural: that the mind is not optimised for truth in the abstract but for what he calls life-enhancement: for the construction of perspectives that enable action, sustain meaning, and hold the world together long enough to move through it.

Truth without coherence is unusable. Coherence without truth is untethered. We live, always, in the tension between the two.

The Dangers of Coherence Alone

And yet coherentism has a serious vulnerability which its critics are right to press. A system can be internally coherent and comprehensively wrong. Conspiracy theories frequently exhibit strong internal consistency where each element of the narrative supports the others, anomalies are absorbed rather than acknowledged, and the whole structure resists disconfirmation precisely because it has been built for closure rather than openness. Closed ideological systems operate similarly. Coherence alone provides no guarantee of contact with anything beyond itself.

This is where the tension sharpens into something philosophically important. Foundationalist epistemologies tried to solve this by anchoring coherent systems to bedrock certainties, like sense data, clear and distinct ideas, and protocol sentences. But each of these candidates has proven vulnerable: the bedrock turns out to be porous, already theory-laden, already part of a system that could be otherwise. The coherentist cannot entirely escape the threat of floating free from the world; the foundationalist cannot find a foundation that stays fixed.

What this suggests is that neither truth nor coherence can do the work alone. They are, in an important sense, co-dependent. Truth without any framework of coherent belief through which to interpret and apply it is unusable. Coherence without any tether to how things actually are becomes self-sealing. The question is not which to choose but how to hold the tension and how to maintain a worldview that is both internally stable enough from which to think and act and permeable enough to revise when the pressure from reality becomes undeniable.

What Our Behaviour Reveals

If we attend carefully to how people actually reason, not how epistemology says they should but how they do, the evidence suggests that coherence typically wins. We reinterpret disconfirming evidence. We resist ideas that would require deep restructuring of our worldview, even when those ideas appear well-supported. We favour explanations that integrate smoothly over ones that are more accurate but destabilising. Leon Festinger's research on cognitive dissonance documented this vividly: when core beliefs are threatened by evidence, people rarely abandon the belief. They work to assimilate the evidence instead.

This is not irrationality in any simple sense. It may be, as Quine's holism implies, a structurally necessary feature of how belief revision works. You cannot revise everything at once. The system has to be held together while repairs are made. And holding it together requires prioritising coherence, at least in the short term and at least locally.

The deeper question this raises is whether we have been wrong about the goal of thinking. If the aim is to discover what is true and to achieve correspondence with a mind-independent reality, then our ordinary cognitive tendencies look like systematic failures. But if the aim is to construct and maintain a framework adequate to acting in the world, then those same tendencies look like features, not bugs. They are how thought sustains itself across time.

Perhaps the honest position is this: we care about truth, and we should. But the conditions that make truth-seeking possible, such as a stable, coherent, integrated framework of belief, are conditions we will sometimes protect even at truth's expense. Not because we are irrational, but because we are finite. And finitude means you have to live somewhere, inside some picture of the world, even while you work to get it right.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, and a researcher of Philosophy of Mind. You may reach her at Kathy@magicinharmony.com.