Literary notes about discursive (AI summary)
The term "discursive" in literature is deployed in a dual sense. In some contexts it refers to the process of reasoning that unfolds gradually through connected thoughts, as exemplified when a mind’s faculty “forms a concept—the discursive Understanding” ([1]) or when Kant contrasts it with pure intuition ([2], [3]). In other instances it describes a narrative style that is expansive, wandering from topic to topic, sometimes to the detriment of a tight, focused structure, as seen when a character is observed to be thinking “in a discursive way” ([4]) or when conversation meanders during extended discussions ([5]). Thus, authors use "discursive" to capture both the sequential, analytical unfolding of ideas and a literary mode characterized by abundance of detail and digression.
- The faculty of the mind by which it forms a concept—the discursive Understanding—is impotent to conceive what cannot be conceived—the act of creation.
— from Know the Truth: A Critique on the Hamiltonian Theory of Limitation by Jesse Henry Jones - Time is not a discursive, or as it is called, general conception, but a pure form of the sensuous intuition.
— from The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant - A priori conceptions, in discursive cognition, can never produce intuitive certainty or evidence, however certain the judgement they present may be.
— from The Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant - I had not got far into it, when I judged from her looks that she was thinking in a discursive way of me, rather than of what I said.
— from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens - Thus there was held, for three hours, an animated, but intermittent, discursive conversation.
— from Fathers and Sons by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
