clarifying coherence

[Bill Mann]

Dear RSTlist subscribers:

I received some email on the subject criticizing the statement that

"It seems to be taxonomically in the category of personal mental experiences, a
kind of impression that comes out of the process of reading a text.  We treat it
as an attribute of the text."

The criticism was essentially that I could not have it both ways.  Either
coherence is an attribute of text or it is a class of personal mental
experiences, and those two classes exclude each other.

Actually, I want to hold to what I said.  We TREAT coherence as an attribute of
texts, even though it is in the category of personal mental experiences.  We
comfortably say "This one is a coherent text, but that one is not."  Implicitly,
there is wide agreement among people with the same background for understanding
a text as to whether a particular text seems coherent to them.  And when they
differ, they can often discuss the difference and come to the same opinion.
These implicit "facts" about coherence need to be explained.

An explanation might run as follows: People's experience with language, creating
and receiving particular uses of language, is individual and personal, but is
also subject to forces of convergence.  Communication tends to work less well
when speaker and hearer have different reactions than  when their reactions are
the same.  They respond to this by choosing more often those constructs on which
they do not encounter differences with others.  This convergence is so effective
that we can often ignore interpersonal differences, and e.g. treat coherence as
an attribute of a text.

Of course, whether this sort of explanation is meaningful, correct, conceptually
flawed, repairable or dead wrong is an empirical issue.  But it is a way to
"have it both ways."

Onward.

Bill Mann