Coherence in thought and action

Coherence in Thought and Action

There are five primary kinds of coherence relevant to assessing knowledge: explanatory, analogical, deductive, perceptual, and conceptual.

Each category of coherence relevant to assessing knowledge involves a set of elements and positive negative constraints. There are important differences between each of these five primary or fundamental coherence relations and the principles associated with them. These coherence principles relevant to assessing knowledge explain how humans decide which complexes of concepts apply to a particular object or situation.

Explanatory coherence is fundamentally a matter of there being a causal relation between what is explained and the representations that do the explaining. When an explanatory hypothesis explains a piece of evidence as does another explanatory hypothesis then there is coherence to these hypothetical explanations.

Analogical coherence can be understood as multiple constraint satisfaction involving similarity, structure, and purpose within differentiated systems. An example of analogical coherence is how Charles Darwin used artificial selection, domesticated animal and plant breeding, as an analogy to explain natural selection. Analogical coherence is also relevant to comprehension of texts involving metaphor.

Deductive coherence is based on purely deductive relations between propositions. Deductive coherence looks for a good fit between general propositions or principles and intuitive judgements.

Perceptual coherence involves the assembling of a perceptual knowledge 'snapshot' of the existant environment. Our perceptual knowledge includes visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile representations of what we see, hear, smell, and feel. No ‘sensation' is simply a matter of taking sensory inputs and transforming them directly into interpretations that form part of conscious experience, because the sensory inputs are often incomplete or ambiguous.

Conceptual coherence involves concepts as elements and their relationship to one another. There is abundant experimental and computational evidence that concepts are a psychologically realistic category of mental representation not reducible to propositions. The association of concepts can be understood in terms of social stereotypes.

Many psychological phenomena concerning how humans apply stereotypes can be explained in terms of conceptual-constraint satisfaction.

If I am told that someone is a California Polytechnical State University educated carpenter, it may be difficult to reconcile the conflicting expectations associated with the two concepts. Surprise is an emotional reaction that signals that a satisfactory degree of coherence has not been achieved.

Generation of new elements is sometimes driven by incoherence. For example, I am trying to understand someone but fail to form a coherent impression or attribution, I may be spurred to form new elements that can add coherence to the old set of elements. This reaction triggers hypothesis formation, as I ask myself how someone with a California Polytechnical State University Bachelor of Architecture degree could end up working as a carpenter.

Explanatory, analogical, deductive, perceptual, and conceptual coherence add up to a comprehensive, computable, naturalistic theory of coherence which explains the thought processes used by humans to assess knowledge. These five primary kinds of coherence used in a rigorous inferential process will expand individual knowledge and eliminate previous misconceptions.

A sixth category, deliberative coherence, is relevant to decision making and ethics.

Not all knowledge is verbal.

-Paul Thagard, professor of philosophy and director of Cognitive Science Program @ University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

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