Skinner's mythology of coherence finds no clean instance among the vault's myth-ledger cases

Skinner's mythology of coherence names a historian's temptation to "supply or find in each of these texts the coherence which they may appear to lack" — imposing a unified system onto one thinker's own body of work, discounting that thinker's explicit statements or entire sub-bodies of work that would spoil the unity. Skinner's own worked examples (Hobbes read as a "religious whole," Locke read as a lifelong liberal despite an authoritarian decade, Marx and Engels so habitually read as one author that a study of Marx alone had to justify excluding Engels by noting the two were "two distinct human beings") all turn on that single-author scope: "This procedure gives the thoughts of various classic writers a coherence, and an air generally of a closed system, which they may never have attained or even been meant to attain."

None of the vault's tested myth-ledger cases have that shape. The closest structural cousin is claim-schmidhubers-annotated-history-projects-deep-learning-onto-pre-1900-mathematics, which does impose a continuous narrative line — "the chain rule (1676), the first NNs (circa 1800), the first practical AI (1914)" — across otherwise disconnected episodes. But that continuity is a modern historian narrating many different authors across centuries, not a historian imposing false unity on one author's own contradictory output. The distinction is load-bearing for Skinner's own definition, whose examples all turn on discounting a single author's stated intentions or inconvenient texts. So the Schmidhuber case stays classified as prolepsis, not coherence.

claim-skinner-1969-names-four-mythologies-doctrines-coherence-prolepsis-parochialism's commentary flagged coherence (with parochialism) as a "drawer standing empty," untested against any vault entry. This is a direct test of that drawer, and it stays empty — not because no vault case resembles coherence-mythology, but because the vault's back-projection cases are mostly claims about a field's narrative, a genre Skinner's coherence-mythology was never built to describe.