ABSTRACT
Perceptual acuity in ethical matters is itself not something people are born with: people create it, develop it, and engrain it in the act of doing it. People learn to play the harp by playing the harp; people learn to become more discerning, more exacting, more articulate, in their perceptions of moral life by practicing discernment, exactitude, and articulateness. Metaphor momentarily stabilizes in language a novel way of seeing—a way of seeing one thing as another, or a way of seeing one thing in the light of another. But then people also make sense, in Williams' sense, of their experience by seeing connections and resemblances between the long-form narrative plot lines within an imaginary literary world and the unfolding of people's lives in the real one. The emergence of plot, the long-form aspect under which we see and interconnect a web of particulars, can be sudden, or gradual.
