ABSTRACT
The previous chapters have established the primary forms of and challenges to reasoning by description in everyday life, in the kind of everyday situations that Austen explores and relative to our own everyday actions and understanding of people and circumstances. This penultimate chapter in Part I provides a theoretical account of both what Austen has accomplished and of reasoning by description per se. It answers two fundamental questions:
How should we describe and understand the practice of describing?
How are descriptions constrained?
After answering these questions, the chapter moves beyond Austen into further possibilities for integrating perception and description as basic ethical practices within a modern context, in which the proprieties governing so much in Austen’s fictions no longer have the same ethical force.
