ABSTRACT

Being something of a social cognitivist (e.g., Bradac, 1983; Berger & Bradac, 1982), I am attracted to the metatheoretical underpinnings of the Kellermann and Sleight essay on coherence: There are knowledge structures and information in the universe, and meaningfulness arises when the former interacts with the latter. And I am attracted to the strong stand that the authors take, for it is clear and forthright; it gives us something definite to react to: “Coherence does not reside in the text, but instead resides in the mind of the perceiver of the text” (p. 116). It seems to me that this view represents a bold alternative to the position that meanings are in “texts”(symbolic artifacts of whatever type), a position taken by “New” literary critics on the one hand (e.g., Empson, 1947) and conversational analysts on the other (e.g., Schenkein, 1977). But I am a chronic skeptic (and a contextualist, e.g., McGuire, 1983), so I choose to ask this question: Under what circumstances are the “meanings-are-in-texts” position and the “meanings-are-in-minds” position alternately plausible in fact? Additionally, it may be useful to distinguish what is essential and novel in Kellermann and Sleight’s chapter from what is inessential, derivative, familiar, and so on. It should be noted at the outset that I regard the Kellermann and Sleight work as substantially more than merely an example of nominalistic gaming, an instance of definitional parrying, or an exercise in verbal purification. Their ruminations over the meaning of “coherence” are theoretically motivated. They attempt to explicate this concept with the purpose of arguing for a particular mechanism that underlies judgments of conversational coherence or incoherence, namely, knowledge structures yielding expectations that can be violated or fulfilled.