 There are responses to the charge of vicious regress facing anti-foundationalists. One is to deny the premise that circular inferences are vicious or no good: granted, one can’t effectively convince someone who is skeptical of the truth of P that it is true by relying on an inference that ultimately comes back to P, but perhaps circular inferences can provide justification despite being dialectically ineffective (i.e., ineffective in persuading others). Still, it seems odd to say that one could justify P by use of an inference from P . After all, if P is already justified, the subject does not need to use it to justify P; and if it is not justified then, in line with the first clause of PIJ, one could not use it to justify P. More plausibly, the anti-foundationalist might reject the presupposition that all justification is linear or one-directional, that it flows from one belief to another, or is inherited by a belief from others. According to coherentism about epistemic justification, beliefs are justified “holistically” rather than in a linear, piecemeal way. Each belief is justified by virtue of its coherence with the rest of what one believes—in other words, by virtue of belonging to a coherent set or web of beliefs. The coherentist avoids the appearance of vicious circularity by insisting that one needn’t first have justification for believing the other propositions in one’s belief system. The coherence theorist’s response to the argument for foundationalism is, of course, only as plausible as the coherence theory of justification (see  coherentist theories of epistemic justification).