john isbell writes: -The matter of coherence is wide open. There is a paper of Yanofsky -accepted for publication in JPAA which investigates higher dimensional -categories with no coherence assumptions at all -- this coming after a -lot of work on weakened coherence. Benabou's basic point was that -naturally arising 2-dimensional categories are not quite 2-categories -and don't seem to suffer from it. Avoid getting knotted in coherence -questions, especially in 1999. what does "no coherence assumptions at all" mean in this context? does it mean that yanofsky is studying what i call "coarse n-categories", defined recursively as categories enriched over the cartesian closed category where the objects are the coarse [n-1]-categories and the morphisms are the enriched natural isomorphism classes of enriched functors? coarse n-categories are interesting but they're obviously not the whole story; for example it's straightforward to define the "fundamental coarse n-groupoid" of a space, but it's indeed a rather coarse invariant of the homotopy type.