Sosa's Raft

Here, as promised earlier this week, is a link to Ernst Sosa's 1980 essay on coherence versus foundationalism, "The Raft and the Pyramid."

https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/kk3n/epistclass/Sosa%20-%20Raft%20and%20Pyramid.pdf 

The basic dichotomy of the title is taken as self-explanatory, and the "raft" image in particular is attributed to Otto Neurath, a positivist of the famed 'Vienna Circle' between the wars.

What is distinctive about Sosa's essay is the effort to show that coherentism itself is in danger of turning into a meta-foundationalism, with the notion of coherence itself serving as foundation "provide only that the concept of coherence is itself both simple enough and free of any normative or evaluative admixture."