Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The aim of this paper is to import basic concepts from information theory into the epistemological debate about probabilistic measures of coherence. Rather than putting forward and defending a new measure, this paper will sketch an account of `external' coherence, which will be defined as a relation between a target variable of interest, sources containing (more or less) information about the target, and a rule or theoretical hypothesis that postulates the relevant connections between source and target. Relations with and potential insights for standard notions of coherence in formal epistemology are explored. More generaly, the paper explores the potential benefits of applying information theory to the epistemological debate about coherence.