ABSTRACT
This chapter examines early-modern invention and discovery, is that both denote aspects of the experience of novelty; but with mutual and shifting imbrications of agency and subjectivity. Conceptual integration or blending, as explored by recent work in cognitive science, offers a useful way of understanding novelty in terms both of individual experience and of cultural or categorical change. The focus of the current collection is on our understanding of understanding as well as our understanding of the early-modern period, with the presumption that these two matters are intertwined and mutually illuminating. In sum, Harriots work as an exemplary, if exotic, blend of early-modern invention and discovery; and for the theory of conceptual blending as a useful. It is notable that Adrian Robert also employs the mental-space model in his discussion of how we track the specific elements of an imagined configurational situation in mathematical proofs. It have tried to treat Harriots work more flexibly and pragmatically.
