Why study coherence? In an age of scattered minds, we can learn to make our individual experience of a collective reality coherent. Is not the coherence of our experiences our character, and the coherence of our perspectives meaning? What could be more meaningful than self-awareness? It is true that ambiguity is one of the major characteristics of natural languages, because rhetoric is one of the sublimities of humanity. Could it be that the art of persuasion can be learnt? Is learning only imitation, or is it the acknowledgement of impermanence within us and without us? So, why study coherence when everything changes? Though it is true that rationality is bound and limited to empirical knowledge, what good is humanity if the gift of rationality is not channelled into intellectual pursuits?
It may be harsh to say that a life lived in the rumination of the transcendence of reason for the sake of dwelling in the here and the now and all that lies within is bullshit; the universal and fundamental values of humanity cannot be identified without logic.
Like language, it may be the case that the location of the fundamental and universal values of humanity is also innate. We can apply a variety of logical functions to what lies within and sketch out distinct propositions about our relationship with our surrounding environment or reality. When humanity lies within us, what do you think will arise out of it if the environment collapses? Will reality remain?
Still, the paradox of the Gestalt remains: though the partless component parts, such as conjunctions or cohesive devices and logical symbols, may unite to give the whole its shape, the meaning of the visible shape thus formed is something entirely different from the meaning embedded within all these partless parts.
How necessary then is it to awaken the mind to the fundamentals of humanity that are universal? With that being said, such an education of the mind does not always have to be related to morality or ethics alone. We can always ask ourselves how our environment affects our conception of reality and the meaning of our existence within reality. Reciprocally, we must also awaken to what the human intellect can create that is coherent and of meaning to the stability of the environment, or the collapse thereof.
I have found that thoughts are a consequence of reality. When reality is incoherent, thoughts are incoherent. In Chinese thought, these ideas have immense significance in organising human life and even government (see Zhu Xi's Neo-Confucianist Dualism of Li & Qi). In my opinion, this approach is one way of coming to terms with the disorder of the world. Sometimes, it is okay to be unaware, and knowing that we do not know is also meaningful because it brings us peace. But, all this is beyond the point I am trying to make right now. What was once arrogance can turn to ignorance.
Coming back to from where we digressed, we make use of linguistic artefacts to mindfully note down these fundamental universals of humanity. We can call such linguistic artefacts texts, even when certain ideas are not manifested in writing. Storytelling or narrative is a vital component of literature in language education because language is the medium of instruction irrespective of the discipline. When we take account of the whole process, besides didactics, interpretation and evaluation of learning are equally as important because the level of understanding showcased by the alien entity, or student, determines the pedagogy of the teacher and the economy of the institution/organisation. It is needless to say that one does not only learn through institutions, for life is the greatest of all teachers.
Here, to find coherence in reality, we first identify different component parts of the text or narrative and then attempt to induct our interpretation of the relativity between these partless parts into the narrative of the text to shape the discourse on reality. Can the narrative be the text, yet still the text have narrative? Maybe there is such a thing as subtext or metanarrative. Maybe. Another approach may be to first notice the invisible relativity between partless parts and then deduce what these component partless parts may be. There may be other approaches to name, but I am out of my depth. However, here I can reiterate from my earlier essay on Hegel that the existence of partless parts is logical, but the cohesive devices that keep them together are non-logical, which means they have been created and applied between partless parts to serve predetermined functions only.
The way natural languages use cohesive devices (words or phrases) to make sentences meaningful, logic uses symbols to make meaningful sentences about the environment and about reality. Now, it must be said that not every sentence is true and meaningful, just as not every human being applies their fundamental and universal humanity to leave the world a better place. So, where does the fallacy lie? What might be the source of all this mysterious evil? How can the distortion of reality be the enemy?
Plato was afraid that rhetoric distorts truth and the pursuit of truth. So, how can text achieve meaning? When meaning is governed by grammar, how can different societies and cultures interpret the same text differently? Though the text might exist, does meaning exist, or does it not?
A guided orientation to the text or narrative significantly influences our interpretation of the text and our responses to it. This is why linguistic artefacts in the domain of language education are such an integral portion of our human experience. Even a fictional dream of what we are yet to discover can direct us towards the discovery. A coherent text makes our interpretation coherent. While interpreting the text, we might recognise that certain patterns are governing as rules or laws. In language, it may be recognised and organised as the grammar of that language, and merely with prior knowledge of their grammar, we can learn to create and appreciate the aesthetics of the narratives, and imagination thereof, at work in keeping alien societies and cultures alive and thriving.
So, it is of utmost importance to apply the pre-existing knowledge of logical symbols (in non-natural languages) and cohesive devices (in natural languages) to decipher the narrative and analyse the discourse which is the text, because context gives rise to meaning and removes the arbitrariness of signs and symbols.
The way there are cognitive poetics to reading and listening, there are linguistic aesthetics to writing and speaking. The narrative is text, and the text is a grammatical composition that can be ornamented with style and rhetoric to influence or distort reality.
It can now be concluded with confidence that linguistic creativity can influence the world, and coherence is an important aspect of it, a Trojan horse, so to speak.
So, is it even possible to interpret what the meaning of the entire text is? Can there be a single interpretation of the text? Can there be a human existence without the narrative as text?
This means that when a claim is true, it will have a logical consequence that will give rise to another statement that is true. In this way, many statements can be strung together with logical coherence. With the use of different types of conjunctions or logical functions, the claim a statement makes can be played around with. Textual coherence is the meaning of the text, and it is achieved through language usage. In any given text, there is knowledge about the quality and the journey of an object in the world. The quality and the journey are believed to have originated from the rules governing scientific and fictional worlds. Sentences in a text exist and function within the environment of the text. The text is shaped by the world in which it exists. Each word in a sentence has grammatical attributes, and each sentence in a text has semantic attributes. In the context of other words within the sentence, certain words gain their particular meaning, becoming subjects or predicates. If the predicates follow the rules of the world in which the subject exists, it may be said that the sentence is meaningful or in a way true. However, if the predicate fails to follow the rules of the world in which the subject exists, then it may be said that the sentence is meaningless, or in a way false. Therefore, meaning is largely dependent on the context (reality?). Therefore, the creation of meaning is inherently a world-building exercise within which subjects and objects can exist meaningfully, with logical coherence and grammatical cohesion. In case of an error in building, the world would have to be resolved before the end of the text. This is primarily the task the writer has at hand.
Text or narrative can be interpreted along linguistic lines or socio-cultural lines; each has its theoretical frameworks. Where language is primarily objective, society and culture are subjective. Is meaning a reader's response to the text, or is it the author's intention? Isn't that the question? Anyway, A I Richard categorised the functions of language into four types of meaning, namely, sense, feeling, tone and intention. The school influenced by Richard is called New Criticism. The relevance of this school to this essay is that it creates a distinction between what is literature and what is its lower form, such as a blog.
Definitely, there cannot be any one absolute answer to something so subjective as literature, especially from the point of view of its construction. Needless to say, realism is one such literary trend whose aspiration is to imitate reality as it is; thus it must be the most meaningful of all literary trends till the end of time. To avoid any confusion that individual thoughts and emotional experiences too are real, this opinion of mine on realism for the sake of research here on earth can be narrowed down to socio-realism. The meaning we tend to give a text is psychological. So, when we create grammatically correct and meaningful sentences by putting them together in a paragraph, we continuously give the subjects and predicates an invisible and fictional context underneath all that is real and meaningful. Paragraphs put together must make the context coherent with reality. In this way, the text is an imitation of reality, with or without rhetoric.
Though this is not the time to linger long on what reality is, coherence in the narrative of a text must be a fundamental universal aspect of the humanity we may find within us as we perceive the varying phenomena of reality. Meaning must be infinite in dimension; that is why the greatest philosophers found relief in asserting that life is inherently meaningless, when it is in fact coherence that makes life meaningful.
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