In making sense of things – of anything, really – there are at least three factors involved: logical coherence, empirical adequacy, and narrative intelligibility. The last item there, “narrative intelligibility,” is the tricky one, and the one that many people tend to forget about. So I will deal with that in a separate post. Not only are logical coherence and empirical adequacy rather more straight forward to deal with, I’ve already said a fair amount bout about logic as such and about methods of formal analysis in previous posts. Still, it would be worth while to say a few words about what is meant by “coherence” before addressing the topic of empirical adequacy.

“Coherence” is a fairly well-liked word in philosophical circles, but its meaning tends to be given short-shrift especially among logicians. For these latter, “coherence” is often treated as meaning nothing more than formal consistency, which is to say, if “p” is a proposition, then it cannot be the case that both p and not-p are true. While this is a valuable resource in formal arenas and in matters of mathematical proof, it is pretty weak-tea from a more general, philosophical perspective of coherence. Whitehead offers the following characterization:

Continue reading →