Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. It thereby introduces some unique ideas and approaches to the analysis of concepts. Looking largely to pragmatism’s founder, Charles Peirce, this chapter presents an account of concepts as habits which associate specific kinds of environmental stimuli with schemata of action and ensuing experience, within linguistic communities. I explain how this account avoids Sellars’ ‘Myth of the Given’. I then explore how Peirce’s semiotic approach to philosophy of language and mind theorized signifying habits as symbols which draw icons and indices together into propositional structures, thereby generating meanings that are specifically applicable and indefinitely generalizable. This original account of concept formation is further illuminated through an examination of Peirce’s philosophy of perception, which makes particularly manifest the process whereby primitive indices, or ‘percepts’, are enfolded in symbolic meanings through habitual ‘perceptual judgements’.

Chapter 2 begins with Emerson’s responses to the ineffable character of mystical experience: one of silence and listening, the other of a profusion of terms from a multitude of cultures. Writings on mystical experience by William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein are part of the discussion. This chapter considers Emerson’s skepticism about the “external world” and “other minds” and about both freedom and fate, which form a “knot of nature.” The following section concerns skepticism as an existential condition, as when Emerson writes in “Experience”: “So it is with us, now skeptical, or without unity.” The chapter concludes by considering skepticism as a positive way of life, what Emerson calls a “wise skepticism.” This form of skepticism has roots in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and, in a particularly important form for Emerson, in the Essays of Montaigne.

How did mapping and measurement act as technologies of improvement? By the early seventeenth century, a professional class of surveyors had emerged in England, promoting concepts of geometric justice in print. They also integrated their services into crown estate management, promising to make forest and fen commons profitable. Much has been written about the spread of cartographic literacy among early modern elites, but relatively little is known about how local communities interacted with maps, surveys, and their makers. Fen projects brought the geometric techniques of improvement into contact with local customary knowledge. Examining maps and surveys of the northern fens across three centuries, this chapter traces how they were produced; how they re-organised social environments; and how fen communities negotiated these processes. It situates surveying as one epistemological tool within disputes over the redrawing of land and water in Hatfield Level, which involved legal officials, written documents, crowds, experiential knowledge, and oral testimony. Intended to author and authorise improvement, the boundaries that maps and surveys demarcated did not prove stable.

How we transform our memories and experiences into fiction beyond the injunction to ‘write what you know’. The imaginative process includes filling in the gaps of memory, embracing the freedom to invent, selecting a viewpoint and adding energy through dialogue. We need to consider not only which details and descriptions to include but which to omit: the balancing of information affects the meaning and impact of the story.

Kant claims that to “pick out from ordinary cognition the concepts that are not based on any particular experience and yet are present in all cognition from experience (for which they constitute as it were the mere form of connection) required no greater reflection or more insight than to cull from a language rules for the actual use of words in general, and so to compile the elements of a grammar” (4:323). The analogy with grammar offers a fruitful way to understand how the categories apply to and structure the materials provided by sensibility and empirical concepts. The categories might be described as providing the rules of a kind of ‘transcendental grammar’ that makes experience possible. Attending to the analogy with grammar reveals that the link between the categories and empirical concepts is far closer than one might initially think, since the content to which the categories apply must be grounded in sensible experience. Grammar does not create new content but rather informs propositions by giving structure to linguistic elements available to speakers of a language; likewise, the categories do not produce new cognition but rather ‘inform’ judgments by giving structure to the sensible contents provided by experience.

Unlike the individualist strains of much social science, psychological anthropologists take for granted the proposition that individuality is socially constructed. But at the same time, the discipline has rejected a determinism that understands the individual as a mere reflection of culture, a notion that is the simple inversion of individualist ideology.Experience is usefully conceptualized as the realm within which human subjects can take shape, becoming selves in a socially construable way. Ideally this relationship between culture and self takes shape as a familiar landscape through which the human subject can pass with some sense of purpose and meaning.However, both at the level of society or the individual, this harmony is not guaranteed. The concepts of self and experience – especially when considered together – provide a stronger theoretical foundation for an anthropology that avoids the reification of persons and culture and attends more closely to the processes whereby subjects pursue and follow filaments of meaning in their lives.

This chapter presents Ockham’s theory of demonstration in Summa Logicae III-2, the syllogism that produces scientific knowledge. He relies on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and Grosseteste’s commentary it. Grosseteste, however, founded the necessity of demonstration on necessary relations in the world. For Ockham, the main challenge is to elaborate a theory of science that addresses the singular beings in a contingent world. His theory is characterized by a conception of purely logical necessity, a semiotic conception of cause, and the requirement that subject terms must have reference in order for affirmative propositions to be true. Many propositions about the natural world are not susceptible to demonstration in the strict sense, but Ockham distinguishes different kinds of demonstration. He is not so much trying to limit the field of demonstrable natural knowledge as to relax the meaning of demonstrability so that it includes many dubitable propositions that can be made evident.

Chapter 6 presents a discussion of how one might go about changing the minds of others (and even one’s own). This broad discussion reiterates messages from Chapter 4 in the context of engaging misinformation and reconstructing knowledge. The topic of ‘debunking’ is introduced and how using it to change people’s minds is perhaps more difficult than simply advising others of their ‘mistakes’ (e.g. with respect to the backfire effect), depending on the nature of the belief and the individual’s attachment to it. Persuasion techniques are also discussed, as is how people can ‘change their own minds’ and how we often rationalise poor thinking.

Chapter 4 explores the normative challenge of the experience of dehumanisation. It starts from a paradigmatic case of dehumanisation, as it was described from a first-person perspective: the torture of Jean Améry. This description offers a phenomenology of dehumanisation. In order to deepen the analysis, the experience of dehumanisation is subsequently confronted with recent work on alienation. This opens up the critical potential of the experience of dehumanisation challenging important concepts that figure prominently in debates on (the aftermath of) atrocities.

Not all eighteenth-century mock-arts were satires. The long, mixed blank-verse poems modelled on Virgil’s Georgics that were popular throughout the period always dealt positively with the practical, mechanical world. Georgic poems followed oblique strategies, coded into the genre by their ancient models: their paradoxically rational appeal to slow, unconscious experience and their characteristic swerves into digressive anecdote, haptic description and mythography. Georgic (like satire) is interested in the processes by which people sharpen their wits, not through the exercise of raillery, but through the ‘labor improbus’ of skilled work. Like the Scriblerian mock artists, Georgic writers applied representations of the mechanical arts to political contexts. Comparison between satirical mock arts and georgic poems is fruitful because of what they have in common: a rhetoric of indirection, a psychology focused on extended cognition and tacit knowledge and a fascination with the mechanics of commercial production.