To be sure, there were twentieth-century philosophers other than Dewey and Oakeshott whose approach to reality and truth was very consistent with the coherence approach. Heidegger and Marleau-Ponty are two examples. Perhaps these relationships will be fleshed out to a greater extent in future papers. For the present paper, the purpose was to (1) illustrate for the reader that there is another, historically relevant, robust approach to reality and truth other than the correspondence approach, and (2) illustrate that this other approach is completely consistent with science.
Maybe it was the fact that many idealist philosophers used their anti-correspondence frameworks as a means of defending the reality of God that led so many scientifically minded philosophers to avoid it to the point that now, after more than one hundred years of neglect, it is rarely if ever mentioned or utilized in cognitive science. This is precisely why we began this paper with the snake-bracelet story. Coherence approaches have been out of fashion for so long that we felt it necessary for the reader to experience, first hand, the type of thinking that has always fostered questions about reality. Our assumption was that by experiencing the tension between what it means to describe the snake as real and what it means to describe the bracelet as real, the readers would be in a better position to understand that although the coherence approach was ignored during the past century, Oakeshott’s presentation of a non-spiritual, non-absolute, non-transcendental coherence framework leaves the coherence and correspondence frameworks on similar, logical ground. Given the advent of concepts such as external grounding, ultra grounding, and global groundness in contemporary philosophy of science, it seems the coherence approach to reality and truth is, at the very least, once more being discussed.
Wild Systems Theory is only one possible theory of “what people are” that could emerge from a coherence-driven perspective, and we suspect there will be others. But given WST’s description of phenomenology as an evolutionarily, scaled-up form of self-sustaining embodied context, phenomena such as the taste of ice cream are rendered just as “real” as the cream and sugar that constitute the ice cream. We believe this is an important achievement. And when one considers WST’s compatibility with science, it seems reasonable to propose WST as a twenty-first-century coherence framework for cognitive science.