Borut Trpin (@boruttrpin.bsky.social)

Just published: Coherence as a Constraint on Scientific Inquiry, Synthese (with @martinjustin.bsky.social). TL,DR: coherence considerations can be good or bad in scientific inquiry. Our paper suggests how to determine when it is the former rather than the latter. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

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Coherence as a constraint on scientific inquiry - Synthese We investigate the epistemic role of coherence in scientific reasoning, focusing on its use as a heuristic for filtering evidence. Using a novel computational model based on Bayesian networks, we simulate agents who update their beliefs under varying levels of noise and bias. Some agents treat reductions in coherence as higher-order evidence and interpret such drops as signals that something has gone epistemically awry, even when the source of error is unclear. Our results show that this strategy can improve belief accuracy in noisy environments but tends to mislead when evidence is systematically biased. We explore the implications for the rationality of coherence-based reasoning in science. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-025-05281-3