hypothetical coherence and its effective actualization. Coherentism claims, at a minimum, that not all knowledge and justified belief rest ultimately on a foundation of noninferential knowledge or justified belief. To defend this view, they may argue that conjunctions (and) are more specific, and thus in some way more defensible, than disjunctions (or).

After responding to foundationalism, coherentists normally characterize their view positively by replacing the foundationalism metaphor of a building as a model for the structure of knowledge