An account can contain several reasonable observations and still leave us uncertain about what it means as a whole. Coherence concerns more than the presence of individually convincing statements.
For Eudira, this raises a question about the character of thought itself. What does it mean for a mind's understanding to hold together, particularly where a situation allows more than one reasonable view?
More than agreement
Agreement can make an account easier to follow, but it does not establish its truth. An explanation may be consistent throughout while resting on a mistaken starting point. Coherence is a quality worth understanding without asking it to establish more than it can.
The opposite difficulty matters too. A complicated situation may resist a simple account because it contains differences that deserve to be preserved. Tidiness can come at the expense of an important qualification.
Room for a difficult answer
Some questions admit competing considerations that cannot all be satisfied. Recognising them need not indicate confusion. It may express a more adequate understanding of the difficulty than an answer which removes the tension too quickly.
A coherent view therefore need not be an effortless one. It can acknowledge an unresolved disagreement, a cost that remains or a question for which the available grounds are insufficient. Such acknowledgement gives the account a more honest shape.
The shape of understanding
Eudira's research includes the meaning of coherence within intelligent thought. We are interested in the quality of an understanding as a whole, including what it accommodates and what it leaves unresolved.
The ambition is a view of intelligence broad enough to recognise complexity without treating every difficult answer as a failure to understand. Sometimes the difficulty belongs to the world being considered.