 In belief revision theory it has mostly been taken for granted that belief sets correspond to a coherentist epistemology, whereas belief bases represent foundationalism. However, the logical relationships among the elements of a logically closed set do not adequately represent epistemic coherence. Although coherentists typically claim that all beliefs contribute to the justification of other beliefs, they hardly mean this to apply to merely derived beliefs such as “either Paris or Rome is the capital of France”, that one believes only because one believes Paris to be the capital of France. Therefore, the distinction between operations on belief bases and operations on belief sets should not be equated with that between foundationalism and coherentism.