This is a fairly long paper, and we will spend a full week discussing it. Although I’d encourage you read it all for Tuesday, we are unlikely to discuss more than the first three sections (pp. 281-299) before Thursday.
Part of the reason for considering this paper is the importance of the issue: as Bonjour notes, coherence will play an important role in just about any account of justification, so we should ask whether it could be the central idea. But we are looking at Bonjour also because of connections with Phi 346: he suggests that the view Quine sketches at the end of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” can be seen as a coherence theory, and Wilfrid Sellars, who keeps popping up in Bonjour’s footnotes, is an important analytic philosopher (roughly contemporary with Quine) who probably would have been included in a full semester version of Phi 346.
• The introduction and section I set out the issue and range of positions Bonjour will consider. His focus will be on the first two of the three sorts of position outlined in section I, with the third appearing again only in a footnote.
• Section II says more about the sort of coherence theory Bonjour will consider and lays out the problems such a theory faces.
• The heart of the paper is probably section III, where Bonjour sketches a way in which observation can play a role in a coherence theory. As Bonjour’s footnotes suggest, this account is close to ideas in Sellars. It is worth asking also how well it fits with what Quine says about the way our we change our beliefs in response to experience.
• In the final section Bonjour tries to use ideas from section III to deal with the problems outlined in section II. You should ask yourself how strong his arguments are. Also, seeing the ways in which he uses ideas from section III might lead you to think further about what he said there.