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

Abstract

This article examines the epistemological status of literary criticism through the lens of scientific models of knowledge, proposing a convergence between the interpretive structures of criticism and the inferential logic of empirical science. Drawing on the logical empiricism of the twentieth century—from Carnap to the Vienna Circle—it argues that both scientific inquiry and hermeneutic interpretation construct hypothetical-deductive 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 complex, self-organizing systems. In dialogue with Prigogine’s theory of dissipative 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.