 This looks much more promising than the circularity theory. If epistemic justification is holistic in this sense, then a central assumption behind the regress is indeed false, and so the regress never gets started. Even so, this holistic approach raises many new questions to which the coherentist will need to respond. First of all, we need to get clearer on what the concept of coherence involves as that concept is applied to a belief system. This is the topic of the next section. Second, the proposal that a singular belief is justified merely in virtue of being a member of a justified totality can be questioned because, plausibly, a belief can be a member of a sufficiently coherent system without in any way adding to the coherence of that system, e.g., if the belief is the only member which does not quite fit in an otherwise strikingly coherent system. Surely, a belief will have to contribute to the coherence of the system in order to become justified by that system. A particular belief needs, in other words, to cohere with the system of which it is a member if that belief is to be considered justified. We will turn to this issue in section 4, in connection with Keith Lehrer’s epistemological work. Finally, we have seen that most coherence theories assign a special role to some beliefs that are close to experience in order to avoid the isolation and alternative systems objections. This fact raises the question of what status those special beliefs have. Do they have to have some credibility in themselves or can they be totally lacking therein? A particularly clear debate on this topic is the Lewis-BonJour controversy over the possibility of justification by coherence from scratch, which we will examine more closely in section 5.