The Tapestry of Reason An Inquiry into the Nature of Coherence and its Role in Legal Argument

In recent years coherence theories of law and adjudication have been extremely influential in legal scholarship. These theories significantly advance the case for coherentism in law. Nonetheless, in the field of coherence theory in law a number of problems remain. This ambitious new work makes the first concerted attempt to develop a coherence-based theory of legal reasoning, and in so doing addresses, or at least mitigates these problems. The book is organized in three parts. The first part provides a critical analysis of the main coherentist approaches to both normative and factual reasoning in law. The second part investigates coherence theory in a number of fields that are relevant to law: coherence theories of epistemic justification, coherentist approaches to belief revision and theory-choice, coherence theories of practical and moral reasoning, and coherence-based approaches to discourse interpretation. Taking this interdisciplinary analysis as a starting point, the third part d

Amalia Amaya is Research Fellow in the Institute of Philosophical Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.