ABSTRACT
If scholars in the humanities and social sciences reason honestly enough, they will eventually find themselves faced with inevitable, but I hope not paralyzing, uncertainties. This inevitability has always unsettled the hegemony of rationalism which has manifestly driven Western societies during the past four centuries. Formal rationalism, ultimately the legacy of Greek geometry and Western dualistic philosophy, presses its major influence now in the form of computerized thought. As everyone knows, however, such thought cannot map human thought. Nor can computerized language map human natural language. The situation facing such efforts, and indeed facing the entire rationalistic thrust, is that humans are incorrigibly ambiguous. That ambiguity, inherent in human communica- tive conduct, resists and grinds against the rationalistic disposition toward ever-increasing theoretical and metric precision, which rests at the center of contemporary logico-deductive research (Levine, 1985). Honest, careful thinking would recognize this fact.
