The Narrative Construction of Reality

Abstract

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 con- centrated on the mind's interplay with an external world of nature, hop- ing to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the princi- ples 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."