ABSTRACT
This chapter points to philosophical arguments, historical descriptions, or reports of scientific experiments that, when they appear, cannot be accounted for or understood in terms of existing norms, and in being received and accommodated bring about permanent changes in those norms. It focuses on verbal but not necessarily literary inventions, and then on what it is that makes possible the literary invention. It attempts to broaden the argument to non-verbal invention and the non-verbal arts, other than by way of the occasional hint of what might be entailed in an extrapolation of the argument to this wider realm. Like all inventions, verbal inventions depend on their reception for their existence. The effect of linguistic innovation may be merely blockage or blankness, a shutting-down of the interpretive mechanism, an experience of baffled perplexity that takes the reader or hearer nowhere.
