Word Help

[bcholmes]

"Discursive"

In pomo circles, I was pretty sure that the term "discursive" describes questions that bring critical assumptions into focus or questions which cause radical rethinking of a set of assumptions.

Am I crazy? Anyone else familiar with that usage? (m-w.com and dictionary.com both give me very different definitions).

Comments

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

1&2 together, and 3, are the groups of definitions I'm finding as well. Given the origin that all the references I can find show (Latin discursus), definition 3 is kind of puzzling, yet it's *likely* the original meaning of the usage that BC's talking about. It's pretty easy to go from "analytic" to "well-thought" to "perceptive" in casual usage among a group.