Conditions for Coherence—2
For a sentence to express a statement, it must contain meaningful words (i.e. words with semantic and syntactic criteria for their use). The only way to prove a statement to be incoherent is to show that it entails an obviously incoherent statement, and the main way to prove a statement coherent is to show that it is entailed by an obviously coherent statement. The whole process thus depends on intuitions about what else is coherent or incoherent. But there is an indirect way of showing a statement to be coherent—by showing that by normal inductive criteria there is actual evidence in favour of its truth.
Keywords: coherence, incoherence, meaningfulness
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .