Beyond Cohesion

Introduction

Whenever we communicate through speech, coherence exists, for we humans do not communicate to not understand, but to understand and to be understood. This is not possible without coherence: coherence is the sine qua non for language comprehension.

Humans naturally assume that things “make sense.” Thus, making sense is the unmarked condition or quality of language processing. Because coherence is so much a requisite of language processing, humans take it for granted as much as they do the solidity of the ground beneath their feet. Moreover, coherence is assumed not only of speech production, but also of written language, and indeed, of any text spoken or written. This is especially true for those of us who work in rhetoric and composition.

Documented interest in coherence dates from the classical period of rhetoric.

Aristotle, while not using the term coherence, clearly presupposes it in his Poetics when describing the “organic whole” as “the structural union of the parts [of the text] being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed” (35). Horace exhorts “let your work be what you will, provided only it be uniform and a whole” (68). Longinus, in “On the Sublime,” tells us more: “… we see skill in invention, and due order and arrangement of matter, emerging as the hard-won result not of one thing nor of two, but of the whole texture of the composition” (43). Longinus continues

Now, there inhere in all things by nature certain constituents which are part and parcel of their substance. It must needs be, therefore, that we shall find one source of the sublime in the systematic selection of the most important elements, and the power of forming, by their mutual combination, what may be called one body. (69)

Longinus places particular emphasis on the notion that “there inhere in all things by nature certain constituents which are part and parcel of their substance” (69). However, he does not elaborate on these “certain constituents,” nor on how they “inhere in all things by nature.”

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the word coherence in English occurred in 1604 when Robert Cawdrey published A Table Alphabeticall of Hard English Words, in which he listed, “cohaerence, ioning, and vniting together” (30); in 1659, Thomas Fuller used the word in The Appeal of Injured Innocence: “A naked sentence … disarmed of the coherence before and after it” (5); and in 1678, Thomas Hobbes made use of the word in Decameron Physiologicum: or, Ten Dialogues of Natural Philosophy: “… the points of Contact will be many (which make the coherence stronger)” (ix. 108).

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines coherence as “the quality or state of cohering … systematic or methodical connectedness or interrelatedness esp. when governed by logical principles” (440).

With the word text meaning beyond the level of sentence and paragraph, this work uses the following definition for coherence: the comprehensive, systematic connection of constitutive elements of a text, with a consistent emphasis on both the totality of the text and on the interrelatedness of its constituents.

As the following pages demonstrate, coherence is used in a variety of disciplines, and of course, the concept of coherence figures most prominently in rhetoric and composition. Surprisingly, no single work within the discipline of rhetoric and composition has treated the comprehensive, systematic connection of constitutive elements of a text, with a consistent emphasis on both the totality of the text and on the interrelatedness of its constituents. Beyond Cohesion: Toward a Theory of Coherence does so.

Coherence Across the Disciplines Today

In a multitude of disciplines, authors use the term coherence in wide and varied ways. In Metaphorical Coherence, Aron Sjoblad uses a view of coherence to treat the relationship between body and soul in Seneca’s Epistulae. In The Coherence of Theism, Richard Swinburne uses coherence as the key factor in investigating the philosophy of religion. In Coherence, Continuity, and Cohesion: Theoretical Foundations for Document Design, Kim Sydow Campbell offers a view of coherence based on continuity achieved primarily through Gestalt. Scholarly works in biology, chemistry, physics, and optics abound which use coherence as a principal organizing concept (G. J. Troup 1967, Davies & Spiegel 2011, Tan & Jeong 2018, and Baumgratz, Cramer, & Plenio 2014, to name a few.) In the legal field, we have works such as Coherence: Insights from Philosophy, Jurisprudence and Artificial Intelligence, edited by Michal Araszkiewicz and Jaromir Savelka.