Briefly, the coherence theory says that a statement is true if it is consistent with a larger system of beliefs. The correspondence theory says that a statement is true if and only if it corresponds to, or accurately reflects, a fact or state of affairs in the objective world.
Hard sciences use the correspondence theory. A survey of scientific academic papers show that they use language like "data collected from," "quantitative analysis," "survey results," "statistical significance," "measured," "null hypothesis" or "empirical." Fields like economics which are not quite as predictive as hard science also uses correspondence theory language. An extremely high percentage of scientific papers use one or more of these terms in their abstracts.
Social science likes to pretend that it is like a hard science, but at least in the Israel context, this language is almost entirely absent in the sample of abstracts I had AI analyze. Instead it uses phrases like "must acknowledge," "irrefutable," "undeniable," "only path," "systematic," "structural," "urgent," or "the real reason," language that tries to paper over the lack of hard facts with assertions.
In the case of academic analysis of Israel, this is because there is already an established belief system: that Israel is malign by definition. Anything that is consistent with that belief is accepted as strengthening the belief system itself; anything that contradicts that belief is dismissed or re-interpreted to fit the belief.
So, as we saw in the last post, when Israel’s president said that all of Gaza bears responsibility for the environment that enabled October 7, that quote is taken as proof of genocidal thinking - while in the very same speech he said clearly that civilians are not to be harmed. The latter statement is ignored, because it does not cohere with the prior belief.
We saw the same with Netanyahu’s references to Amalek — even though he explicitly quoted the commandment to remember, it is assumed that he meant annihilate - because the coherence framework allows only one possible interpretation.
This is not simply a disagreement about facts. It is a disagreement about how truth itself is determined.
Coherence theory is often presented as a legitimate alternative theory of truth. But it isn’t merely different — it is epistemologically broken. The reason is simple: Coherence theory is not falsifiable.
In correspondence-based reasoning, if evidence contradicts a claim, the claim must change. In coherence-based reasoning, if evidence contradicts a claim, it is interpreted as misleading, irrelevant, or morally compromised.
This sounds very familiar to those of us who have analyzed antisemitism - because this is the exact mental structure of conspiracy thinking.
Once a field abandons falsifiability - the ability to test a claim against reality and risk being proven wrong - it becomes epistemologically indistinguishable from conspiracy theory.
In a conspiracy model, contradictory facts are reinterpreted as evidence of the cover-up. In a coherence-driven academic model, contradictory facts are reinterpreted as irrelevant, misleading, or morally suspect.
A conspiracy theorist says, “The lack of evidence proves how deep the conspiracy goes.”
A coherence theorist says, “The contradictory facts are irrelevant because they don’t align with what we know about colonial power structures.”
These are functionally identical.
This is not about Israel alone. It affects broader academic domains like identity studies, post-colonial studies, critical race theory, and much of gender theory. When a model becomes too elegant - when it explains everything, and can survive any contradiction - that is when it stops being scholarship and becomes dogma.
Falsifiability is the immune system of truth. If a claim can never be wrong, then it is not science, nor history, nor scholarship. It is theology without God.
People who operate within coherence-based frameworks are often sincere, intelligent, and genuinely unaware of the epistemic trap they are in. Their entire thinking process is wrong but this is how they are trained, how their fields operate. If the underlying theory of truth is wrong, then entire disciplines built upon it are on unstable foundations. Confronting that feels existential to them, so resistance is natural.
But this confrontation is necessary. Unless we return to falsifiability, to the kind of truth that can be tested, challenged, and corrected, we are training generations of students to confuse ideological coherence with actual reality. And life changing political and policy decisions are being made based on frameworks that cannot be wrong because they cannot be tested.
That should concern all of us.
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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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