Blurb:

Building on Vaia Touna’s response to my chapter on the construction
of the nones, I argue that our academic descriptions
should reflect the contingent nature of descriptions that Touna
emphasizes. Any description of past actions, an item, or a scholar’s
work makes selections and emphases that create the object
of its discussion. Rather than arguing that some descriptions
are true and others are false, I suggest that descriptions can
be more or less convincing and valuable. I propose three ways
of analyzing any description’s incompleteness, including its
correspondence to evidence, the coherence of the connections
presented, and the classifications employed. Then I propose
three strategies to be more self-reflexive about the contingency
of descriptions and their role in constituting the object of their
discourse, and I demonstrate some of those strategies by rewriting
a paragraph of my original chapter in which I failed to
acknowledge the limited nature of the narrative.