But he is a hawk on security and foreign policy, positions which cohere with his former service as an intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve, during which he served in Bosnia, Kosovo and Haiti.
On this line of thinking, the judicial decision which coheres best with the principles underlying some specific field of law may not result in increased coherence of the entire system of law.
Berkeley himself sees very well how necessary this is: Much of the Principles is structured as a series of objections and replies, and in the Three Dialogues, once Philonous has rendered Hylas a reluctant convert to idealism, he devotes the rest of the book to convincing him that this is a philosophy which coheres well with common sense, at least better than materialism ever did.
This may provide one reason why sometimes courts should give greater weight to considerations of coherence with pre-existing law in deciding cases which come before them, rather than striking out in a (albeit otherwise morally preferable) direction which coheres less well with settled law.
It is a painting of tumultuous bodies, reaching out, turning, twisting, contorting, many seemingly in desperate conflict with each other, which coheres as if by some miracle.
Yet Malick's movie — with its authentically profound considerations of the links between experience and transcendence, between ordinary life and intuitions of the absolute, between scientific knowledge and religious ecstasy — has an aesthetic, a style, a tone, a mood, which cohere with its grand ideas.
The transcendence objection charges that a coherence theory of truth is unable to account for the fact that some propositions are true which cohere with no set of beliefs.
Are we talking of global coherence, such that judges should strive to reach judicial decisions which cohere to some extent with the settled law of an entire legal system, or should the coherence we seek be more local in nature, e.g. coherence with particular branches or areas of law?
Levenbook very succinctly focuses the dilemma which judges must confront in deciding how much weight is to be placed on considerations of coherence in judicial decisions: should judges always adopt the outcome to a case which best coheres with the pre-existing law, or can they ever be justified in adopting an outcome which is less coherent but morally preferable?
