ABOUT

Claire Field is a postdoc at the University of Zürich, where she is a member of the Zürich Epistemology Group on Rationality. Previously, she has held positions at Glasgow, Stirling, and UCL. Her research lies primarily in epistemology, and includes projects on the epistemology of normative beliefs, rational risk-taking, level-(in)coherence, the normativity of logic, and the philosophical implications of neurodiversity.

ABSTRACT

The requirements of structural rationality prohibit incoherence, but paradigmatic examples of incoherence are very diverse. Beyond an intuitive sense that incoherent attitudes do not fit together in the right way, it is difficult to characterize precisely what, if anything, unifies these examples. This paper offers a new analysis of incoherence based on the idea that attitudes are incoherent when they are unintelligible given the conceptual background in play. I argue that this analysis offers a major theoretical advantage: it allows us to make progress in debates about foundational issues, such as the nature of truth, logic, and belief.