Creative Multiplicity and Narrative Epistemology in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil
Creative Multiplicity and Narrative Epistemology in George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the epistemological status of literary cri-ticism through the lens of scientific models of knowledge, proposing a con-vergence between the interpretive structures of criticism and the inferential logic of empirical science. Drawing on the logical empiricism of the twen-tieth century – from Carnap to the Vienna Circle – it argues that both scien-tific inquiry and hermeneutic interpretation construct hypothetical-dedu-ctive frameworks that mediate between theory and data, whether empirical or textual. The analysis then turns to George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil (1859), read as a site where nineteenth-century scientific paradigms (determinism, evolutionism, thermodynamics) are displaced by an emergent vision of com-plex, self-organizing systems. In dialogue with Prigogine’s theory of dissipa-tive structures and Calvino’s reflections on order and chaos, Eliot’s narrative exemplifies an autopoietic creativity that transforms entropy into renewal. The essay concludes that literature, like science, participates in a creative multiverse where disorder generates form and interpretation becomes an act of cognitive genesis.

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