Because we must deal with the unknown, whose nature is by definition speculative and outside the flowing chain of language, whatever we make of it will be no more than probability and no less than error. The awareness of possible error in speculation and of a continued speculation regardless of error is an event in the history of modern rationalism whose importance, I think, cannot be overemphasized. This is to some extent the subject of Frank Kermode's Sense of an Ending, a book whose justifiable bias the connection between literature and the modes of fictional thought in a general sense. Nevertheless, the subject of how and when we become certain that what we are doing is quite possibly wrong but a least a beginning has to be studied in its full historical and intellectual richness."

--Edward Said, Beginnings, Intention and Method, p. 75, 1985