Construct · 4 fields · 7 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, four constructs Nearest construct by meaningcohesioncompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to coherence is cohesion.
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The degree to which two points, or two moments, of a wave field keep a fixed phase relationship, so that when the field is recombined it produces stable interference fringes. Mandel and Wolf's 1965 treatment defines coherence through correlation functions of the optical field: temporal coherence, set by the coherence time and hence the source's bandwidth, and spatial coherence, set by the size and geometry of the source. The referent is a physical field of radiation, and the unit is a correlation, degree zero to one, that you can measure by fringe visibility. This is the strict, quantitative meaning that makes a laser different from a lamp; it has nothing to do with meaning, health, or belief, only with whether waves stay in step.[1]
The property that makes a stretch of language read as one connected whole rather than a heap of sentences, so that a reader can build a single mental model of what is meant. In discourse study coherence is kept distinct from cohesion: Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English (1976) catalogues the surface ties, such as reference, conjunction, and lexical repetition, that link sentences, while coherence is the deeper meaning that the text is about something and that its parts relate. Hobbs argued in 1979 that coherence rests on inferred coherence relations between clauses, not on surface links alone, so a text can be cohesive yet incoherent, or coherent with few cohesive markers. The referent is a discourse and a reader's interpretation of it, not a wave and not a person.[2][3]
A person's global, lasting confidence that the world is understandable, that they have the resources to meet its demands, and that those demands are worth engaging with. Antonovsky introduced sense of coherence in Unraveling the Mystery of Health (1987) as the core of his salutogenic model, which asks what keeps people well rather than what makes them ill. The construct has three components, comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness, and Antonovsky's 1993 paper reports the structure and reliability of the Orientation to Life Questionnaire built to measure it. The referent is a whole individual and their dispositional stance toward stressors, scored by self-report; it is a personality-like orientation, not a fringe pattern, a text property, or a theory of truth.[4][5]
A relation of mutual support and consistency among beliefs, on which a belief counts as true, or as justified, in virtue of fitting a whole system rather than by matching a fact one by one. Young's survey The Coherence Theory of Truth (2018) sets the coherence theory against the correspondence theory: truth is defined as membership in a coherent set of propositions, not agreement with a mind-independent world. BonJour's The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (1985) develops the parallel coherentist account of justification, where a belief is justified by its place in a coherent, mutually supporting web rather than by resting on foundations. The referent is a system of propositions or beliefs and a normative relation over it; coherence here is a criterion in epistemology, not a measurable property of waves, texts, or persons.[6][7]
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