Browsing by Subject "Epistemology"

Now showing 1 - 19 of 19

Epistemicism
(2015-05) Hu, Ivan J.; Sainsbury, R. M. (Richard Mark); Kamp, Hans; Bonevac, Daniel A.; Koons, Robert C.; Dever, Joshua; Raffman, Diana
I propose a new theory of vagueness centered around the epistemology and normativity of vagueness. The theory is a version of epistemicism—the view that vagueness is a fundamentally epistemic phenomenon—that improves upon existing epistemicist accounts by accommodating both the alleged tolerance and open texture of vague predicates, while foregoing excessive metaphysical commitments. I offer a novel solution to the infamous Sorites paradox, one that outrivals alternative contextualist theories in their ability to explain the phenomenology of vagueness as well as its deontic consequences.
An epistemological approach to the mind-body problem
(2011-08) Bogardus, Tomas Alan; Tye, Michael; Pautz, Adam R.; Koons, Robert C.; Bonevac, Daniel A.; Sosa, Ernest D.; Barnett, David B.
This dissertation makes progress on the mind-body problem by examining certain key features of epistemic defeasibility, introspection, peer disagreement, and philosophical methodology. In the standard thought experiments, dualism strikes many of us as true. And absent defeaters, we should believe what strikes us as true. In the first three chapters, I discuss a variety of proposed defeaters—undercutters, rebutters, and peer disagreement—for the seeming truth of dualism, arguing that not one is successful. In the fourth chapter, I develop and defend a novel argument from the indefeasibility of certain introspective beliefs for the conclusion that persons are not complex objects like brains or bodies. This argument reveals the non-mechanistic nature of introspection.
Evidentiary criteria in Galen : three competing accounts of medical epistemology in the second century CE
(2012-12) Salas, Luis Alejandro; Hankinson, R. J.; White, Stephen A
This report examines the sectarian backdrop for Galen of Pergamum's medical epistemology. It considers the justificatory role that experience (empeiria) and theoretical accounts (logoi) play in Empiricist and Dogmatist epistemology in an attempt to track how Galen incorporates experience into theoretical accounts as a means by which to undergird them. Finally, it briefly considers the exiguous evidence for Methodism, Galen's main medical rivals in the Roman world and claims that Galen forges a middle path between these sects.
Evolutionary debunking and disagreement
(2024-05) Grossman, Alexander P. ; Dever, Josh; Dogramaci, Sinan; Sosa, David; Sinhababu, Neil; Juhl, Cory
According to proponents of evolutionary debunking arguments that target moral realism, there is an important difference between the evolutionary etiology of our perceptual faculties and the evolutionary etiology of our moral faculties. The evolutionary explanations of why we have the perceptual faculties that we do appear to vindicate the reliability of those faculties because, roughly and all else equal, perceptual faculties are more fitness-enhancing the more accurate they are. But the (perhaps speculative) evolutionary explanations of why we have the moral faculties that we do are not vindicating in this way - such explanations do not make reference to accuracy about a realistically-construed domain of moral facts. Something has to give: Either our moral beliefs do not constitute knowledge or they do not concern an objective moral realm. The dissertation is divided into three chapters. The first chapter lays out and defends an evolutionary debunking argument against moral realism premised on the epistemic significance of disagreement. According to this argument, evolutionary considerations reveal that nearby modal space is populated with a large number and wide variety of possible creatures whose evolutionary history differs from ours and who, consequently, disagree with us about the contours of morality and defeat our claim to moral knowledge. The second chapter considers an argument about the reach of disagreement debunking. According to this argument, while debunking should be worrying to proponents of moral epistemological accounts on which moral beliefs are formed on the basis of mental intermediaries, they are not a problem for proponents of accounts on which at least some moral beliefs are formed on the basis of direct apprehension of moral facts. I show that this is mistaken - disagreement-based debunking arguments threaten both. The third chapter considers an objection to evolutionary debunking arguments generally. According to this objection, evolutionary debunking arguments that appeal to evolutionary explanations run afoul of a view in the philosophy of biology about the explanatory scope of selection. I show that both disagreement-based debunking and a more traditional accidentality-based debunking argument can avoid this objection.
Hate: To Tolerate or To Legislate
(2021-05) Wade, Jack
What are the values that people weigh when discussing limitations on hate speech? Can hate speech laws be written such that they don't infringe upon other values? If not, does the good of such laws outweigh the bad? These philosophical questions are necessary to fully understand contemporary arguments about hate speech. In answering these questions, my thesis explores various viewpoints, traversing between the classical views of Milton and Mill, who provide an epistemological defense of free speech; the views of critical race theorists such as Matsuda, Lawrence, Delgado, and Crenshaw, who argue for hate speech restrictions; and the anti-restriction views of Strossen, who argues that hate speech laws are ineffective and counterproductive. I don't intend to provide a definitive answer to the question of hate speech (although I do line up with one of these schools of thought), but rather to try to encapsulate as best as possible the various arguments, laying out their differences in valuations and their objections to each other.
I am afraid this ship is on fire
(2021-08-13) Mininkova, Anna; Stoney, John
The purpose of this report is to examine core themes of my artistic practice: human relationships with nature and knowledge, trace influences of related ideas from the history of science and philosophy on my studio process, and a body of work I completed over the last two years. I examine the roots of my interest in metaphors of nature to analyze my approach to object- and video-making. I note and discuss the shift from formal ways of knowing and making towards an embodied practice grounded in hands-on knowledge of the landscape and history of the American West. I provide context for language and material references used in the work to hint at the danger of recurring expansionist narratives and reductionist views of the natural world throughout history. Additionally, I describe the epistemological approach I have adopted as an important part of my studio practice.
The intellectual given
(2010-05) Bengson, John Thomas Steele; Sosa, David, 1966-; Bealer, George; Dancy, Jonathan; Pautz, Adam; Sainsbury, Mark; Tye, Michael
Some things we know just by thinking about them: for example, that identity is transitive, that three are more than two, that wantonly torturing innocents is wrong, and other propositions which simply strike us as true when we consider them. But how? This essay articulates and defends a rationalist answer which critically develops a significant analogy between intuition and perception. The central thesis is that intuition and perception, though different, are at a certain level of abstraction the same kind of state, and states of this kind are, by their very nature, poised to play a distinctive epistemic role. Specifically, in the case of intuition, we encounter an intellectual state that is so structured as to provide justified and even knowledgeable belief without requiring justification in turn—something which may, thus, be thought of as given. The essay proceeds in three stages. Stage one advances a fully general and psychologically realistic account of the nature of intuition, namely, as an intellectual presentation of an apparent truth. Stage two provides a modest treatment of the epistemic status of intuition, in particular, how intuition serves as a source of immediate prima facie justification. Stage three outlines a response to Benacerraf-style worries about intuitive knowledge regarding abstract objects (e.g., numbers, sets, and values); the proposal is a constitutive, rather than causal, explanation of the means by which a given intuition connects a thinker to the fact intuited.
Locating epistemic value
(2019-02-06) Pollex, Brian William; Dogramaci, Sinan; Buchanan, Lawrence; Juhl, Cory; Evans, Matthew
Many epistemologists are attracted to the idea that knowledge is valuable in a way that stands out when compared to the value of other doxastic attitudes. Some philosophers, including Linda Zagzebski, Jonathan Kvanvig, Richard Swinburne, and Duncan Pritchard have objected to contemporary theories of knowledge on the grounds that the analyses these theories offer fail to sufficiently distinguish knowledge from mere true belief. One particularly clear instance of this is the Swamping Problem for Process Reliabilism. Goldman and Olsson try to respond to the Swamping Problem on behalf of Reliabilism. In what follows, I first try to motivate and defend an approach to epistemic value. Then I review the Swamping Problem and evaluate Goldman and Olsson’s response to it. Finding their response unsatisfying, I suggest that we try to satisfy Zagzebski et al. by introducing a theory of understanding which answers to the intuitions many endorse about epistemic value.
Pragmatic Encroachment : entailments and evaluation
(2018-06-21) Eaton, Daniel Mark; Sosa, David, 1966-; Dever, Josh; Dogramaci, Sinan; Schoenfield, Miriam; McGrath, Matthew
Pragmatic Encroachment, the view that knowledge is sensitive to one’s practical situation, is a marked departure from traditional epistemology. A popular way of endorsing it requires that one’s evidence be practically adequate. I derive the following entailments from this view: one can gain knowledge that p by getting evidence against p, there is a significantly stronger evidential requirement for knowing atheism than there is for Christianity, and some tiny bets can bring about very strong evidential requirements. I argue that these entailments count as evidence against Pragmatic Encroachment.
Rational belief in classical India : Nyaya's epistemology and defense of theism
(2010-05) Dasti, Matthew Roe; Phillips, Stephen H., 1950-; Sosa, Ernest D.; Koons, Robert C.; Bonevac, Daniel; Juhl, Cory; Bryant, Edwin F.
Nyāya is the premier realist school of philosophy in classical India. It is also the home of a sophisticated epistemology and natural theology. This dissertation presents a distinctive interpretation of Nyāya’s epistemology and considers how it may be developed in response to various classical and contemporary challenges. I argue that it is best understood as a type of reliabilism, provided relevant qualifications. Moreover, I show that a number of apparently distinct features of Nyāya’s approach to knowledge tightly cohere when seen as components of a thoroughgoing epistemological disjunctivism. I defend Nyāya epistemology as a viable contemporary option, illustrating how it avoids problems faced by generic reliabilism. In the second portion of the dissertation, I examine the way in which Nyāya’s knowledge sources (perception, inference, and testimony) are deployed in support of a theistic metaphysics, highlighting Nyāya’s principled extension of its views of knowledge acquisition. In an appendix, I provide a full translation and commentary on an argument for God’s existence by Vācaspati Miśra (a 10th century philosopher who is unique in having shaped several distinct schools), found in his commentary on Nyāya-sūtra 4.1.21.
Re-covering/re-membering the fundamental elements of love : Black women’s wellness in the African Diaspora
(2017-05) Adeleye, Rachel; Smith, Christen A., 1977-
This thesis project imagines future possibilities of humanity for Black women of the African Diaspora. It provides a lay of the land of decolonial projects in Latin American and Information Studies, suggesting alternative directions, strategies and methods for the work. These directions are guided by the knowledges of my ancestors. Using a spiritual-cosmological-pedagogical approach to ground endogenous epistemologies of Black Women in the African Diaspora, the fundamental elements of love connect us back to the essences of nature, so that we may move into alignment and find balance. This thesis imagines future possibilities for Black women that help us to save our own lives and live well.
Remorse and the drama of community in early modern England
(2024-05) Pilkenton, Margaret Mendenhall ; Barret, Jennifer-Kate, 1977-; Bruster, Douglas; Frazier, Alison; Mallin, Eric
In this dissertation, I argue that early modern drama addresses an epistemological problematics of remorse that the contemporary religious and moral literature could not accommodate. By “epistemological problematics,” I refer to the dilemmas of sincerity and trust that were unique to remorse as expressed between human individuals with limited knowledge, as opposed to the religious remorse offered to the omniscient Christian God. Unlike theological writing and moral philosophy, early modern drama has the imaginative resources to explore the tension between two seemingly incompatible truths about the experience and expression of remorse. On one hand, remorse is understood as a pragmatic social ritual, a necessary fiction that operates regardless of inward experience to enable community cohesion against the inevitable conflicts of a flawed and difficult world. On the other hand, expressions of remorse are unsettling because they invite speculation about inward experience, reminding readers and audiences of how fragile ideas like truth and sincerity can be outside the space of the individual, solipsistic mind. The plays I examine find ways of posing the question, “What can be done about the fact that it’s impossible to know for certain whether someone is truly sorry?” Rather than coalescing into a unified theory of secular remorse, they exemplify the eclecticism with which moral ideas must be approached among communities of limited, flawed individuals. These plays question the value of remorse without the reward of Christian salvation; they flirt with the possibility of removing remorse altogether; they treat shows of remorse as contingent and motivated as well as innate and virtuous. In these human, worldly, secular moral universes, we can see the outlines of a moral archive that is far more controversial and innovative than the doctrine of the period would have us believe.
Self-knowledge at the margins
(2021-07-24) Trees, Hannah; Dogramaci, Sinan; Montague, Michelle; Sosa, David; Bettcher, Talia
This dissertation is a collection of three papers – “Knowing Oneself for Others,” “Stereotype Threat and the Value of Self-Knowledge,” and “Self-Knowledge, Epistemic Work, and Injustice” – in which I address the connections between self-knowledge production and social inequality. I explain, using a variety of contemporary political and cultural examples, that marginalized individuals are more likely to be required to know certain things about themselves than socially privileged individuals, especially about those aspects of their lives and identities which are essential to their being marginalized. I argue that this should make us rethink our basic understanding of epistemic injustice, which is typically thought of as involving the prevention of marginalized individuals from producing knowledge. More specifically, in “Knowing Oneself for Others,” I introduce the notion of “compulsory self-disclosure,” a social phenomenon in which an individual is forced to reveal things about themselves, often in ways that further contribute to their oppression. “Stereotype Threat and the Value of Self-Knowledge” addresses how self-ignorance can actually be desirable for individuals facing stereotype threat, and I argue that treating stereotype threat as an epistemic injustice issue can actually harm rather than help individuals in certain cases. Finally, in “Self-Knowledge, Epistemic Work, and Injustice,” I assess the reasoning behind the assumption that marginalized people are self-ignorant; I argue that we need to appreciate the central role that epistemic work plays in self-knowledge production to understand why the standard assumption about marginalized self-ignorance is misguided. Ultimately, I would have us think of self-knowledge production as not just epistemic work but as work that is often emotionally difficult and even metaphysically transformative – coming to have self-knowledge in certain ways can quite literally change who you are. In light of this, the overarching aim of this work is to argue for there being an inextricable link between an individual’s knowledge of themselves and their social status, as well as to discourage readers from thinking of the production of self-knowledge as inherently desirable or as a wholly epistemic issue.
Telling secondhand stories : news aggregation and the production of journalistic knowledge
(2015-08) Coddington, Mark Allen; Reese, Stephen D.; Anderson, C W; Bock, Mary A; Lawrence, Regina G; Strover, Sharon L
News aggregation has become one of the most widely practiced forms of newswork, as more news is characterized by information taken from other published sources and displayed in a single abbreviated space. This form of newsgathering has deep roots in journalism history, but creates significant tension with modern journalism's primary newsgathering practice, reporting. Aggregation's reliance on secondhand information challenges journalism's valorization of firsthand evidence-gathering through the reporter's use of observation, interviews, and documents. This dissertation examines the epistemological practices and professional values of news aggregation, exploring how aggregators gather and verify evidence and present it as factual to audiences. It looks at aggregation in relationship to the dominant values and practices of modern professional journalism, particularly those of reporting. The study employs participant observation at three news aggregation operations as well as in-depth interviews with aggregators to understand the practices of news aggregation as well as the epistemological and professional values behind them. I found that aggregation proceeds by gathering textual evidence of the forms of evidence gathered through reporting work, positioning it as a form of second-order newswork built atop the epistemological practices and values of modern journalistic reporting. Aggregators' distance from the evidence on which they base their reports lends them a profound sense of uncertainty, which they attempt to mitigate by using textual means to communicate their epistemological ambivalence to their audiences and by seeking out technologically afforded means to get closer to news evidence. Aggregators' uncertainty extends to their professional identity, where they attempt to improve their marginal professional status by articulating their own ethical values but also by emphasizing their connections to traditional reporting. Narratively speaking, however, their work does not break down traditional journalistic forms, but instead broadens the narrative horizon to conceive of individual news accounts primarily as part of larger story arcs. The study illuminates the fraught relationship between aggregation and reporting, finding that while aggregation is heavily dependent on reporting, it can be developed as a valid, professionally valued form of newswork. Ultimately, both forms of work have a crucial role to play in providing vital, engaging news to the public.
The (ir)relevance of truth to rationality
(2017-12) Drake, Jonathan Paul; Dancy, Jonathan; Sosa, David, 1966-; Bonevac, Daniel; Buchanan, Ray; Alvarez, Maria
It is possible to act for a reason. We do it all the time. You might have brought her medicine for the reason that she is ill. He might go to the store to get milk. Edmund might skate in the middle of the pond because the ice in the middle of the pond is thin. What must be true of us, and of the world, such that we can act for reasons? In normal cases, when someone acts for the reason that (for example) the ice in the middle of the pond is thin, it really is the case that the ice in the middle is thin. This is mostly due to the fact that we are not often wrong about such mundane ways the world is. But what if one takes it that the ice is thin, and in fact it is not thin? Can one still act for the reason that the ice is thin? In my efforts to give a sufficient answer to this question, I have been led to a package of views, the core tenets of which are at least the following five. First, it is possible to act in the light of a falsehood: a consideration that is not the case can be an agent’s reason for acting. Second, it is not possible to act in unbelief: in order for an agent to act for a reason, the agent must at least believe that reason to be the case. Third, the reasons for which agents act can play a role in explaining the actions done for those reasons –– even when agents act in the light of falsehoods. Fourth, there are very few (if any) formal rules or principles constraining the explanatory role of reasons. Any action explanation that specifies the content of the reason for acting has reserved a legitimate explanatory role for the reason. Fifth, all of these claims apply equally to motivating and normative reasons, so-called practical and epistemic reasons, and reasons for action and reasons for belief.
The instance of the post in the digital unconscious : rhetorical subjects after posthumanism
(2020-05-14) Cowan, Jake Austin; Davis, Diane; Boyle, Casey; Gunn, Joshua; Spinuzzi, Clay; Rickert, Thomas
Joining an active conversation within rhetorical theory and beyond about the agency, boundaries, and conditions of possibility for contemporary subjectivity within online environments, this dissertation aims to articulate the transformative capacity of digital media for contemporary rhetorical subjects. Positioned at the intersection of rhetorical studies, media ecology, and poststructuralist criticism, this project attempts to break with rhetoric’s abiding humanist inheritance, including many of the foundational presuppositions about a writer’s autonomy, being, and consciousness that have historically subtended rhetorical theory. Couching my argument within the evocative wordplay and enigmatic lexicon of Lacanian psychoanalysis, this research complements work by a growing number of rhetoricians from various other-oriented vantages who contend that the conventional belief in a rational and independent human mind at the center of communicative practice is no longer tenable in the face of emergent ecosystems of online presence and digital rhetoric. Technological developments such as these not only have not only threatened the accustomed priority of human being, but can moreover provide novel ways of inventing and enacting an original posthumanist subjectivity, I argue, especially when approached from a psychoanalytic standpoint that emphasizes the convolutions of anfractuous signification, indestructible desire, forged onto-epistemology, and a tropical unconscious. To this end, I suggest that Lacan’s reconfiguring of the classical Freudian unconscious as a cybernetically structured symbolic network of signifiers that he characterizes as the extimate Other provides one avenue for rethinking how modern media affect the means of communicating with and conceiving of one another (as well as ourselves), helping rhetoricians to theorize a compositional practice that embraces rather than represses the various ways technological developments disturb and displace customary notions of solidified and singular human being. From a position that grounds rhetorical subjectivity not according to static sovereign selfhood but in the precarious disruptions of the Other and taking the figure of the social media post as my model for posthumanism, this project opens a way for rhetoricians to reconceive pedagogical practice from a perspective that would relinquish customary commitments to raising consciousness and objective reason in favor of the jocose and allusive contingencies of a hybridized digital unconscious
The structure of perceptual justification
(2016-08) Miller, Brian Townsend; Sosa, Ernest; Dever, Josh; Dogramaci , Sinan; Pryor, James; Sainsbury, Richard; Schoenfield, Miriam
When does a perceptual experience as of my hands provide justification for me to believe that I have hands? One initially plausible positive requirement is that I must have reasons to believe something else: that my experience is veridical. Also plausible is the negative requirement that I must not have reasons to believe that my experience is in this case non-veridical. Dogmatists about perception reject the positive requirement and embrace the negative one, holding that perceptual justification is immediate — it doesn’t rest upon any other justification that I possess — but it is also defeasible, and in particular it is underminable. Whereas Dogmatism is a theory in the epistemology of perception, Bayesianism is a theory of coherence for partial beliefs and of how coherence it to be maintained in the face of new evidence. Just as it is incoherent to believe both I have hands and ¬(I have hands), it is incoherent to be highly confident in both of those propositions. Bayesianism offers a formal account of this latter type of coherence. Importantly, though Bayesianism is a theory of coherence, it is not a coherence theory of the sort defended by Davidson and BonJour: it is not an attempt to explain all facts about justification in terms of facts about coherence. Hence the Bayesian’s claim that partial beliefs are subject to norms of coherence is at least prima facie consistent with the Dogmatist’s claim that some beliefs are immediately justified by experience. I develop and defend Bayesian Dogmatism. I begin by responding to an argument advanced by Cohen, Hawthorne, Schiffer, and White, which purports to show that Bayesians cannot model episodes of perceptual learning in which the proposition learned is both immediately justified and defeasible. I go on to respond to arguments from Weisberg, which purport to show that Bayesianism is inconsistent with underminable perceptual learning. Finally, I defend the superiority of Jeffrey Conditionalization to Holistic Conditionalization as a rule of updating on propositions learned from experience.
Transnational Mexican-origin families : ways of knowing and implications for schooling
(2012-05) Kasun, Gail Sue; Urrieta, Luis; De Lissovoy, Noah; Foley, Douglas E.; Sánchez, Patricia; Valenzuela, Angela
Transnational Mexican-origin Families is a qualitative study of four working class, Mexican-origin families who resided in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. region and who also made return visits to Mexico at least every two years. Through critical ethnographic case studies, the researcher worked with the families for over two years in multi-sited ethnography, with locations in the U.S. and Mexico. The dissertation examines the following question: What are the ways of knowing of Mexican-origin transnational students and their families in the Washington, D.C. area, and how do these transnational families experience their ways of knowing regarding education in formal schooling contexts? Using transnational theory and Gloria Anzaldúa’s theory of conocimiento, or knowing, this study shows how transnational families’ ways of knowing are situated in three mutually-constituted domains. They are: 1) chained knowing, including the ways participants are chained to the Mexican-U.S. border and to their communities in Mexico and the U.S., 2) sobrevivencia or survivalist knowing, in terms of how the families both survive and thrive, highlighting what I call their “underdog mentality” as well as the matters of life and death on both sides of the border, and 3) Nepantlera knowing, or an in-between knowing, which allows for attempts at bridge buildings and creation of Third Spaces. In regards to schooling, the transnational aspects of these families’ lives remained hidden, despite the students’ eagerness to share about their transnationalism. Schools tended to respond to their transnational families along the “continuum of the comfortable,” or a line where schools increased their outreach to these families only moderately and only along their terms. The intention of this research is to disrupt assimilationist discourses about immigrants, particularly in light of the need to be able to navigate an increasingly globalized world. Preliminary findings suggest the need to begin to reframe immigrants as transnational, value their language heritages, disrupt the comfort of educators in their outreach to transnational families, and for educators, in particular, to learn to do the work of border crossing in their outreach to transnational families.
Undressing nature: the uncertain enlightenment and the hermeneutic ontology of the novel
(2015-12) Cowles, Lynn Aysley; Garrison, James D.; Rumrich, John; Bertelsen, Lance; Longaker, Mark; Ingrassia, Catherine
_Undressing Nature_ argues that in some of the writing produced by pioneers working in new literary generic forms at the end of the Early Modern period, the characteristics of irony, self-reflexive discourse, and the consistent examination of the fictional in relation to the real function narratively and culturally to undermine the empiricist project of totalizing knowledge that prescribed the field of natural philosophy during the Enlightenment. These characteristics, which came to be identified with the genre of the novel in subsequent centuries, refuse the determination of perfect or exact meaning within systems of signification, and they excavate the Enlightenment subject from Cartesian epistemological interiority. As they contemplated divisions between the external material world and the inner thinking mind, some Early Modern figures relied on the rhetorical tradition of figuring words or expression as the dress or clothing that brings forth human thought or nature into the world of interaction and communication. Because of the philosophical position of language or dress in between the universal and the particular, these metaphors provide fascinating examples of the philosophical nexus between literature, culture, and philosophy. By approaching the task of interpreting both words and the world with skepticism, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and Henry Fielding scrutinized the ideological infrastructures of Enlightenment thought and reformulated contemporary understandings of knowing and being. Their ironic discourse interrogated the concept of the stable self, and in the process of doing so, these authors tested out, examined, and developed a discursive structure for meaning and interpretation that relied on the subject’s position in a networked system of identification. In such a system, being and identity are contingent upon the subject’s relationship not only with other subjects but also with material objects in the world like books and clothes. The externalizing of subjectivity removes the self from the Cartesian binary of mind and body and implicates the subject in relation to others such that identity and meaning are understood in an hermeneutic network of ontological signification. Undressing Nature argues that the discursive structure of the novel provides a venue in which theorizers of uncertainty and indeterminacy during the Enlightenment produced narratives that exhibit and reconstruct that hermeneutic ontology.