It was not possible to confirm the report, nor to discern the purpose of the raid.
If the disruptions hunters cause are apparent, it is less easy to discern the purpose they serve, as they prowl the woods enacting ancient narratives of stalker and prey.
Weblike lattices, now known as "perineuronal nets," surrounded many neurons, but he could not discern their purpose.
How do you discern intention?
So, too, it seems to me, with discerning statutory purpose.
For over two millenniums, discerning our purpose in the universe has been a primary task of philosophers.
But most Northerners and Southerners struggled throughout the Civil War to discern the purposes and intentions of their God.
If a country can't discern a moral purpose in its foreign policy, it will lack resilience.
The crowd are supposed, like the American multitudes before them, to faint with anxiety, empathise through the long nights, discern some noble purpose in his supposed travails in the ice, up pillars, inside glass containers.
Others asked to be bombarded from the air, so that no trace of them would remain.... Nobody could distinguish truth from fiction in these reports, just as it was impossible to discern what the purpose of the conspirators, or even the leader himself, might be.
