An Essay Concerning Human Misunderstanding

Here is a treatise on language gone wrong. It begins with a deception, it continues as insanity, and it culminates in tyranny. It all began as a confusion in concept.

So here is a treatise on concept: the silent function of language, the semantics of metaphor, the senses of brotherhood, liberty, intelligence, and sanity. Here is a treatise on knowledge, at once inalienable and lost, resembling the latter epithet for its neglect, and validated as the former in its restoration. The essay within is a criticism of the one, and a guide to the other.



An Essay Concerning Human Misunderstanding is the central entry in the eponymous series. It is a meditation on contemporary passions that burden the modern citizen. Relying on linguistic science, philosophical appeal, and human curiosity, it locates their origin in a conceptual error, which discovery is at once to the reader's satisfaction and the means of recovery.