A Clarification of 'A Rejoinder to Phillip Gregory.'

I blogged what I thought was a very clear essay yesterday.  But Philip Gregory offered  a rebuttal that, although did not show weaknesses in my intended position, has shown weaknesses in my formulation of that position. To give some background, the following is the paragraph to which Philip Gregory is responding:

"To get back to the problem  at hand: The issue of justification is not solved, because evolution, although it gives us a universal set of expectations, it does not give us a universally valid set of expectations (or innate cognitive abilities). So even if something fits in with our expectations and theories, ie it is coherent with the system, that does not mean they are true, or become more or less true, because they are more or less coherent with that system. If there is something wrong with one of our evolutionary expectations and our background theories, and our theory is coherent with it, then the error contained in the expectation or theory carries over to the hypothesis, and is therefore not justified, we can never know fully whether there is not an error in our expectations or theories. This is just to say that our expectations, and evolution itself, are fallible, i.e not justificatory. There is fallibitilty at the core of human knowledge and experience."

And this is Philip Gregory's rebuttal:

"As a quick rebuttal, I will say that you are missing the point because you have not accepted my revision of epistemology, and your rebuttal amounts to: I don't like coherentism because it can result in some falsities whilst having a coherent web of beliefs. To that I say: oh well, such is life. Whether you like the fact that coherentism can result in false beliefs or not is not a sufficient rebuttal "

I think a relatively clear rebuttal, but it does not quite hit the target.

But first, to clear up any confusion about what I do and don't have to accept, If he claims that I have to accept his epistemology to "get the point", he is merely saying that unless I accept his epistemology as true, he will not believe that I understand it. This is an illegitimate burden to place on somebody and a burden I will not own.

Secondly I did not say I disliked (I never made any claims about my likes or dislikes) coherentism because it leads to false conclusions. I said that human knowledge is fallible at the core and therefore no justificationist stance could work, and in this particular case, coherentism. I further delineated (or tried to) that coherentism fails in its own goals. That goal is (this time I am going to try to make it more clear) is to confer reliability to our theories, statements hypotheses etc. Coherentism says that something increases in reliability if it is logical and it fits in with our already conjectured knowledge and expectations (This, in psychology, is known as confirmation bias). We can attack this view in the same way we can attack other justificationist views by turning it upon itself. in this way we can ask how reliable or justified, or even coherent, coherentism is? To make it clear what I mean, consider the following: If the background knowledge is false, but we believe it to be true, and we confer an increase in reliability to a hypotheses because it fits in with our current theories expectations or whatever and it is (logically) valid, has the reliability of the hypothesis actually increased? if not then coherentism is false and has not done the job that it is intended to do. Therefore we can abandon coherentism, and because all justificatory epsitemologies are false (they founder on the horns of agrippa's/munchausen's trillemma), we can adopt robust fallibalism (not just the weakening to partial justifcatory methods also known perversly as fallibalism) as the only currently rational option (this does not mean I consider it a certain method or even a partially reliable method, I am merely claiming it is the only one that is not logically questionable).  So I am not claiming that I dislike Coherentism because it leads to falsities; I am objecting to it because it does not do the thing it claims to do, namely increase the reliability of our hypotheses, theories or statements.