Jerome Bruner
         The Narrative Construction of Reality
         Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind
            has centered principally on how man achieves a "true"
            knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of
            course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind's interplay
            with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the
            association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked
            inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right
            reason. The objective, in either case, has been to discover how we
            achieve "reality," that is to say, how we get a
            reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to
            be immutable and, as it were, "there to be observed."
            This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development
            of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have
            dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its
            grasp on the "real world." Indeed, at midcentury
            Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise
            and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of
            mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and
            uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to
            a final competence, in one case attributing it to the work out of
            internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some
            unspecified principle of reflection by which whether through
            reinforcement, association, or conditioning we came to
            respond to the world "as it is." There have always been
            dissidents who challenged these views, but conjectures about human
            mental development have been influenced far more by majoritarian
            rationalism and empiricism than by these dissident voices.
             
            Jerome Bruner is research professor of psychology at New York
            University, where he is also serving as Meyer Visiting Professor of
            Law. His most recent book, Acts of Meaning,appeared in 1990. In
            1987 he received the Balzan Prize for "a lifetime
            contribution to the study of human psychology."
Nina Baym
         Between Enlightenment and Victorian: Toward a Narrative of_American
            Women Writers Writing History
         All the early advocates of women's education, male and
            female, had proposed history as a central subject in women's
            education perhaps as the central subject. They envisaged it
            as a substitute for novel reading, which they viewed as
            strengthening women's mental weakness (if the oxymoron may be
            permitted) and encouraging them in unrepublican habits of idleness,
            extravagance, and daydreaming.6 Many prominent women educators
            wrote history, among them Pierce, Rowson, and Willard. But besides
            such history writing and history advocacy by materialist
            educational reformers, American women wrote history in other modes
            and contexts, and it is on these that I want to focus now.
            Speculating on history as a woman's writing practice from the
            earliest years of the republic, my approach is purely literary in
            taking for granted, but considering it unimportant, that by
            present-day standards none of these women could have been
            "good" historians. More generally, I supposed that
            insofar as our present-day definition of literature or, more
            generally, of writing, invokes such forms as poem, play, story, and
            novel and insofar as the feminist enterprise of recovering
            women's writing further emphasizes such private, putatively
            unpublished forms as journal, diary, and letters we have been
            instructed to perceive women writers as largely sealed off from
            public discourse, writing (if they wrote at all) from somewhere
            outside the public sphere. This currently dominant view of
            women's writing may be an inadvertent artifact of an unself-
            conscious, individualistic, curiously romantic definition of
            writing even among postmodernist critics; or, it may be a strategic
            view designed to focus attention on and valorize previously
            silenced or presently new forms of utterance. In contrast, to
            encompass diverse, already published, programmatically public
            instances of women's writing in our definition is to begin to
            see how often and how openly (albeit from certain ideological
            positions but manifestly not the one taken here how
            unsatisfactorily) American women have written in such forms. We
            then begin to recover a different sort of writing woman from the
            madwoman in the attic and acquire materials with which to begin
            constructing a different narrative of American women's
            literary history.
             
            Nina Baym is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the
            University of Illinois, Urbana. She is the author of many books and
            articles on American and feminist literary topics.
William Flesch
         Quoting Poetry
         A tension between content and form can even be said to be essential
            to the effect of a great deal of rhymed poetry in English. William
            Wimsatt's wonderful essay on "One Relation of Rhyme to
            Reason" argues precisely that rhymes in English poetry work
            when differences of meaning and of part of speech tend to
            counterpoint similarities of sound.3 Rhyming nouns together, for
            example, ought to be avoided, since the salutory tension will arise
            from the fact that a difference in grammatical function will
            coexist with sameness of sound. This means that prosodical
            structure does not mirror content, and that even in rhymed poetry
            the sense may be variously drawn out. Empson makes the
            complementary remark that English is blessed with the fact that
            subjects and verbs cannot in general rhyme:
            The crucial thing about English, as a language for poetry, is that
            you cannot rhyme the subject with the verb, because either
            &lsquo;the cat distracts' and &lsquo;the nerves swerve'
            or &lsquo;the cats distract' and &lsquo;the nerve
            swerves'; this bit of grammar has been enormously helpful to
            English poetry by forcing it away from platitude.4
            This means that the grammar of rhymed poems will not simply be
            determined by the rhyme scheme but will tend to be a kind of
            counterpoint to that scheme, since the predicate is kept from
            rhyming with the subject.
             
            3. William Wimsatt, "On Relation of Rhyme to Reason,"
            The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, Ky.,
            1954), pp. 152-66. In this essay, anticipating some of the
            deconstructive claims he came to find too extreme at the end of his
            life, Wimsatt writes that "verse in general, and more
            particularly rhyme, make their special contribution to poetic
            structure … [by imposing] upon the logical pattern of expressed
            argument a kind of fixative counterpattern of alogical
            implication" (p. 153). See also Wimsatt, "Verbal Style:
            Logical and Counterlogical," The Verbal Icon,pp. 200-217.
            4. Empson, "Rhyme," Argufying,p. 136.
             
            William Flesch teaches English at Brandeis University and is the
            author of The Heart of Generosity: Largess and Loss in Herbert,
            Shakespeare, and Milton (forthcoming).
John Koethe
         Contrary Impulses: The Tension between Poetry and Theory
         A striking fact of our current literary culture is the estrangement
            between poets and critics and reviewers of contemporary poetry on
            the one hand, and proponents of that loosely defined set of
            doctrines, methodologies, and interests that goes by the name of
            "theory" on the other. There are individual exceptions
            to this on both sides, and one can find counterexamples to every
            generalization I shall suggest here. Nevertheless, anyone familiar
            with the climates of opinion to be found in English and philosophy
            departments, poetry workshops and critical symposia, creative
            writing and cultural studies programs, and the (dwindling)&shy;
            nonacademic counterparts of these especially among people in
            their twenties and thirties has to acknowledge the lack of
            acquaintance and interest and often even the disdain and
            contempt that characterizes the relations between poets and
            those engaged in the kind of high-level, quasi-philosophical
            reflective activity that literature, and poetry in particular, used
            to occasion. Illustrations are easy to come by. References to
            modern poetry by younger theorists are typically confined to the
            high modernists and to poets canonized twenty or thirty years ago
            in books like Donald Allen's New American Poetry or Richard
            Howard's Alone with American;and their rare allusions to the
            poetry of their contemporaries often betray a striking lack of
            familiarity and taste. Conversely, the fact that eighty years after
            Ezra Pound called for the breaking of everything breakable, a poet
            as intelligent and conceptually ambitious as Jorie Graham should
            title a book The End of Beauty,and have the theoretical outlook
            evoked by the title hailed as radical by as informed a critic as
            Helen Vendler, surely suggests that the level of reflective
            awareness in the poetry community is not what it might be.2
             
            1. Quoted in Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens
            Remembered An Oral Biography (New York, 1983), p. 43.
            2. See Helen Vendler, "Married to Hurry and Grim Song,"
            The New Yorker,27 July 1987, pp. 74-77.
             
            John Koethe is professor of philosophy at the University of
            Wisconsin, Milwaukee. His most recent book of poetry is The Late
            Wisconsin Spring (1984).
Carlo Ginzburg
         Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian
         In the last 2500 years, since the beginnings in ancient Greece of
            the literary genre we call "history," the relationship
            between history and law has been very close. True, the Greek word
            historia is derived from medical language, but the argumentative
            ability it implied was related to the judicial sphere. History, as
            Arnaldo Momigliano emphasized some years ago, emerged as an
            independent intellectual activity at the intersection of medicine
            and rhetoric. Following the example of the former, the historian
            analyzed specific cases and situations looking for their natural
            causes; following the prescriptions of the latter a
            technique, or an art, born in tribunals he communicated the
            results of his inquiry.2
            Within the classical tradition, historical writing (and poetry as
            well) had to display a feature the Greeks called enargeia,and the
            Romans, evidential in narrtatione:the ability to convey a vivid
            representation of characters and situations. The historian, like
            the lawyer, was expected to make a convincing argument by
            communicating the illusion of reality, not by exhibiting proofs
            collected either by himself or by others.3 Collecting proofs was,
            until the mid-eighteenth century, an activity practiced by
            antiquarians and erudite, not by historians.4 When, in his Traité
            des differentes sortes de preuves qui servent à établir la vérité
            he l'histoire  (1769), the erudite Jesuit Henri Griffet
            compared the historian to a judge who carefully evaluates proofs
            and witnesses, he was expressing a still-unaddressed intellectual
            need. Only a few years later Edward Gibbon published his Decline
            and Fall of the Roman Empire,the first work that effectively
            combined historical narrative with an antiquarian approach.5
             
            2. See Arnaldo Momigliano, "History between Medicine and
            Rhetoric," Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici
            e del mondo antico, trans. Riccardo Di Donato (Rome, 1987), pp. 14-
            25.
            3. See Ginzburg, "Montrer et citer."
            4. See Momigliano, "Ancient History and the
            Antiquarian," Contributo alla storia degli studi classici
            (Rome, 1955), pp. 67-106.
            5. See Henri Griffet, Traité des differentes sortes de preuves qui
            servent à établir la vérité de l'histoire,2d ed. (Liège,
            1770). Allen Johnson, in his Historian and Historical Evidence(New
            York, 1926), speaks of the Traité as "the most significant
            book on method after Mabillon's De re diplomatic" (p.
            114). See also Momigliano, "Ancient History and the
            Antiquarian," p. 81, and Ginzburg, "Just One
            Witness." On Gibbon, see Momilgiano, Sesto contributo alla
            storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome, 1980), pp.
            231-84.
             
            Carlo Ginzburgis Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian
            Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
            His two most recent books are Ecstasies: Deciphering the
            Witches' Sabbath and Il giudice e lo storico.
Lorraine Daston
         Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern_Europe
         I have sketched the well-known distinction between facts and
            evidence not to defend or attack it (as does a vast literature in
            the history and philosophy of science), but rather as a preface to
            a key episode in the history of the conceptual categories of fact
            and evidence. My question is neither, "Do neutral facts
            exist?" nor "How does evidence prove or
            disprove?" but rather, "How did our current conceptions
            of neutral facts and enlisted evidence, and the distinction between
            them, come to be?" How did evidence come to be incompatible
            with intention, and is it possible to imagine a kind of evidence
            that is intention-laden?
            It is my claim that partial answers to these questions lie buried
            in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature on prodigies
            and miracles. I shall argue that during this period prodigies
            briefly became the prototype for a new kind of scientific fact, and
            that miracles briefly exemplified a form of evidence patent to the
            senses and crucially dependent on intention. Both conceptions
            diverge sharply not only from current notions of facts and
            evidence, but also from medieval views on the nature of prodigies
            and miracles. Prodigies were originally closely akin to portent,
            divine signs revealing God's will and things to come;
            miracles were more intimately associated with the private
            experience of grace than with the public evidence of the senses.
            Prodigies were transformed from signs into nonsignifying facts, and
            miracles into compelling evidence, as part of more sweeping changes
            in natural philosophy and theology in the mid-seventeenth century.
             
            Lorraine Daston is professor of history of science at the
            University of Göttingen, Federal Republic of Germany. She is the
            author of Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988) and is
            currently at work on a history of scientific objectivity.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith
         Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account
         Questions of evidence including the idea, still central to
            what could be called informal epistemology, that our beliefs and
            claims are duly corrected by our encounters with autonomously
            resistant objects (for example, fact, rocks, bricks, and texts-
            themselves) are inevitably caught up in views of how beliefs,
            generally, are produced, maintained, and transformed. In recent
            years, substantially new accounts of these cognitive
            dynamics and, with them, more or less novel conceptions of
            what we might mean by "beliefs" have been
            emerging from various nonphilosophical fields (for example,
            theoretical biology, cognitive science, and the sociology of
            knowledge) as well as from within disciplinary epistemology.
            Because of the distinctly reflexive nature of these
            developments that is, new conceptions of concepts, revised
            beliefs about belief, invocations of evidence said to challenge the
            operation of evidence, quasi-logical refutations of the authority
            of logic, and so on the deployment of positions and arguments
            becomes extremely difficult here, as does even the description of
            the relevant events in intellectual history. Indeed, since we are
            dealing here not merely with shifts of, as it is sometimes put,
            "vocabulary," but, often enough, with clashes of
            profoundly divergent conceptual idiom and syntax,every major term
            and discursive move is potentially implicated in the problematic
            itself, and, thereby, open to radical questioning and liable to
            charges of question-begging.
            The aim of the present essay is twofold: first, to suggest the more
            general interest and significance, beyond the fields in which they
            are being developed, of these emerging reconceptions of belief;
            and, second, to frame that suggestion in an account which, since it
            cannot escape the rhetorical difficulties just mentioned,
            foregrounds them. A number of related themes notably,
            symmetry, circularity, reciprocality, and ambivalence recur
            throughout and, at various points, are drawn together in accord
            with the account itself.
             
            Barbara Herrnstein Smith is Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative
            Literature and English at Duke University, and director of its
            Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and Cultural Theory. Her
            current work examines contemporary models of cognition and
            communication.
R. C. Lewontin
         Facts and the Factitious in Natural Sciences
         The problem that confronts us when we try to compare the structure
            of discourse and explanation in different domains of knowledge is
            that no one is an insider in more than one field, and insider
            information is essential. An observer who is not immersed in the
            practice of a particular scholarship and who wants to understand it
            is at the mercy of the practitioners. Yet those practitioners are
            themselves mystified by a largely unexamined communal myth of how
            scholarship is carried on. R. G. Collingwood, although primarily a
            philosopher, was immersed in the community of historians and
            understood how history is done, so that he has had an immense
            influence on our ideas about historiography. Every historian knows
            The Idea of History.1 He was also a metaphysician, yet his
            influence on scientists' understanding of nature, and of
            science, has been nil, and it is a rare scientist indeed who has
            ever heard of Collingwood or read The Idea of Nature.2
            Collingwood's views of the structure of science had to be
            constructed in large part from the elaborate fictions created by
            scientists and by an earlier generation of philosophers and
            historians of science who participated in the Baconian myth of the
            hypothetical-deductive scheme.
             
            1. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946).
            2. See Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford, 1945).
             
            R. C. Lewontinis Alexander Agassiz Professor at Harvard University.
            He is an experimental and theoretical evolutionary geneticist who
            has also worked extensively on epistemological issues in biology.
            He is the author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change (1974)
            and, with Richard Levins, of The Dialectical Biologist (1985). His
            current research concerns the nature of genetic variation among
            individuals within species.
