But where is the scientific sense is saying that because we don't understand something, even though we can discern its effects, we have to ignore it, scorn it, or suppress it?
Humans perceive colours in categories such as red, even though we can discern red hues including ruby and crimson.
It's surprising, then, when Lawlor says that the early moderns' understanding of what seemed to them like an epidemic of melancholia as a result of the imbalance of bodily humours is "alien to our contemporary world view, even if we can discern similarities with modern symptoms".
Even if we can discern he didn't sing perfectly well (on key, in time), would any of us deny he sang profoundly good (with heart, with purpose)?
For its significance is elemental ("The salt which is in seawater is in our blood and tears and sweat") and ancestral: the thought of its otherness "makes us ache, sea creatures that we once were, as for a country we have lost on the far side of a frontier we can barely even discern".
As we have seen, it is difficult even to discern what methodologic or epistemologic criteria could separate litigation-generated science from other kinds of science.
We have created so many idols as church leaders and Orthodox believers - with our divided jurisdictions, our territorial disputes, and our pious arrogance - that we can no longer even discern the essential identity and ultimate purpose of the church.
This argument, however, is misplaced, for even if we could reliably discern what Congress' intent might have been had it considered the question, we are not at liberty to so speculate; the fact that Congress did not even consider the issue readily disposes of any argument that Congress unmistakably intended to divest state courts of concurrent jurisdiction.
Mr. Aid's comments were quickly drowned out by loud boos from the audience, and inside the hall, it was difficult even to discern what language he had spoken.
At the Jafariya Mosque in the Chindawal neighborhood of Kabul, poor, illiterate women, many with deeply damaged eyesight, struggled to understand how to mark their ballots, or even to discern among the candidate photos.
Even as we try to discern what Jobs wanted Apple to pursue without him, it's hard to read Steve Jobs without seeing ways that the company, and in turn the consumer electronics industry, might benefit from a less obsessive CEO.
