ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the lived-work of jigsaw puzzles. Work on a jigsaw puzzle involves continually devising ways of searching the pieces to find their relevance to each other. Most puzzle solvers initially sort the pieces to find the border components, but, at the same time, sort the pieces in terms of the general colors of things like the sky, buildings, and grass. When people work on jigsaw puzzles, they are engaged in midenic reasoning and midenic practices, reasoning and actions that are hopelessly situated in the middle of what they are doing. What they might learn from jigsaw puzzles is that the features of a jigsaw puzzle piece, or of a collection of such pieces, can't be characterized independently of the things that they are attempting to do to find those features. Pictorial puzzles of the size introduce all the complications of solving jigsaw puzzles without the expenditure of time usually required for larger or nonpictorial ones.
