M rAKING SENSE: one might take that title, in its strongest sense, as an inquiry into what it means to be human. Prodigious query. I quickly fall back on my subtitle, presumptuous enough, which signals the trials of knowledge, of discourse, in our postmodern moment. But my text is itself part of that moment. How, then, can I reflect on the crisis of meaning, which my meanings already reflect, and still make sense of the crisis of sense in our age? As a part-time pragmatist, I want simply to recount seven useful stories. These are plausible intellectual narratives of our situation. Each is partial, inconclusive; yet, taken together, they may make some sense of the predicament of knowledge in our epoch. It is a synoptic way of understanding our fragments, our culture all in pieces. At the end, in a brief epilogue, I call on some personal beliefs; for they, too, bear on our theories and praxis. Without beliefs, we could not make sense, put together those pieces. Reconstruction is what I mean here modestly to explore.