Comment by epestr

Closer to the latter. The narrative gets the reader to empathise with the shepherd and see Mark as representative of people who won't change their beliefs. I understand the educational purpose, but the author decides how reasonable the opposition gets to be. A reader could later cast themselves as the shepherd and their opponent as Mark, taking the resemblance as justification. Also a corpus so broad of such writing can become almost theological.

On the first point, questioning an account of truth isn't the same as claiming the lack of objective truth. Actual coherentists do try to account for observational input, and making Mark unable to understand an elementary explanation doesn't address those attempts. People like reductive accounts of complicated positions. The supposed nuance then comes from covering more positions, rather than engaging deeply with any of them.