Cognitive Spontaneous Beliefs, and Reliability within the System. Book Review: BonJour L. The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. (Chapters 5–6)

The key point of Laurence BonJour’s coherentist conception of the justification of empirical knowledge is the coherentist concept of observation, which (a) postulates that there is a special class of cognitively spontaneous beliefs with which the system’s beliefs must cohere in order to be considered justified; (b) their reliability is determined within the system as a consequence of our generalization on a set of facts when a belief appears, and it is highly likely to be true, and it is likely to appear in a situation in which it will be true; and (c) the subject has the ability to reflexively grasp the approximate content of his own belief system. Among the main sources of inspiration used by L. BonJour, one can find the conceptions of “language-entry transition” by W. Sellars and “truth-sufficiency” by W. Alston. Much of the material is devoted to arguing for the final argument for cognitively spontaneous beliefs. The review is a detailed analysis of the second part of L. BonJour’s book «The Structure of Empirical Knowledge» (chapters 5–6), dedicated to foundations for a coherentist theory of justification of empirical knowledge.