If topology gave possibility its space, and temporality gave it its pulse, coherence is the music they make together — the holding-together of difference in motion.
It is not stability after movement, but the internal rhythm that lets movement continue without disintegration.
Coherence is the mode by which the world keeps becoming while remaining recognisable to itself.
1. Coherence as Relational Persistence
In a relational ontology, nothing persists by existing apart; it persists by maintaining relation across change.
A form endures not because it resists transformation, but because it transduces transformation into self-similarity.
Coherence is thus not the opposite of flux — it is the pattern of flux.
Every system, every meaning, every organism sustains itself through recursive alignment: the continual negotiation between internal differentiation and external resonance.
To be coherent is to keep finding oneself again through variation.
2. From Consistency to Consonance
Traditional metaphysics equates coherence with consistency — a logical harmony of propositions.
But consistency presumes static identities; relational coherence is consonance: the resonance of differences across scales.
A melody is coherent not because every note is the same, but because their differences sustain a shared intervallic relation.
Likewise, a theory, a language, or a life becomes coherent through the intervals that hold its variations in communicative tension.
Consonance is dynamic stability — pattern without rigidity, alignment without closure.
3. Construal as Coherence-Making
Construal is the local mechanism of coherence.
Each act of construal cuts a segment of potential into alignment, and that alignment holds only insofar as it sustains coherence with other construals.
Meaning persists through recursive calibration: every new construal tests the relational fabric, tightening or loosening the weave.
This is why interpretation, dialogue, and learning are not additive processes but coherence-seeking ones.
We do not accumulate knowledge; we refine relational fit.
4. Coherence and the Grammar of Meaning
Language is perhaps the most intricate coherence-machine the world has produced.
Its grammar does not describe things; it organises the conditions under which meaning can remain coherent across difference.
Each grammatical system — transitivity, mood, theme, cohesion — orchestrates resonance across strata and scales.
When we speak, we are not transmitting information; we are maintaining coherence between construals — aligning experiential, interpersonal, and textual potentials so they can continue to mean together.
Grammar is coherence made reflexive.
5. The Ethics of Coherence
Coherence also carries ethical weight.
To align well is not to impose unity but to cultivate compatibility — to let differences sustain relation without collapse.
Ethical action, then, is coherence enacted socially: the art of allowing multiplicity to remain in touch with itself.
Violence, by contrast, is the imposition of false coherence — a forced alignment that denies relational autonomy.
True coherence cannot be coerced; it can only be resonated into being.
6. Coherence and Reflexivity
As the ontology becomes reflexive — as construal construes itself — coherence shifts again.
It no longer marks only persistence within the world, but the world’s awareness of its own persistence.
Meaning becomes coherence seeing itself: relation reflecting upon relation.
Reflexive coherence is the threshold of symbolic life — the point where the world begins to sustain its own modes of interpretation.
Through it, possibility becomes self-referential, self-correcting, and self-inventive.
7. Coherence as Living Alignment
Ultimately, coherence is not an attribute but a practice — the ongoing labour of keeping the relational field alive.
It is the heartbeat of meaning, the continual recalibration that lets difference remain communicable.
Where topology mapped the field and temporality marked its rhythm, coherence is the living pattern through which the field sings itself into continuance.
To live coherently, then, is not to be consistent but to be attuned:
to feel when a relation tightens, when it drifts, when a new interval must be found.
It is to inhabit the world as an unfolding score of mutual becoming.
Next: The Recursion of Possibility
If coherence is the form of becoming, recursion is its logic — the way becoming folds back upon itself to generate new scales of alignment.
The next post traces how possibility loops through its own structures, how systems emerge not from accumulation but from reflexive return —
how the world becomes worlding through recursive construal.
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