This chapter takes seriously the concerns of Eliot’s early reviewers with a tension in her fiction between the devoted depiction of life later associated with realism, and a didactic impulse to which they increasingly felt she succumbed. Asking why Eliot interrupted representation with theorisation, the chapter takes as a case study her alternating dramatisation and analysis of incongruous versions of history in Chapter 20 of Middlemarch. It traces the lineage of such alternation, via an allusion to her friend John Sibree’s translation of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, into one of the notebooks Eliot used as she developed Middlemarch, which is read less as a source for either the novel’s theories or its facts than as a laboratory for its experiments in moving between them. The chapter suggests that Eliot valued the dissonance her reviewers detected when dogma intruded upon depiction. It thereby elucidates her contribution to the dialectical novel of ideas this book explores.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus deploys modal vocabulary, especially “possibility.” Some readers take this to signal commitment to substantive modal theories. For others, it is metaphysical nonsense to be thrown away. We steer a middle path. We uncover the central role of possibility in Wittgenstein’s philosophical development from criticism of Russell’s multiple-relation theory of judgment to the conception of propositions as pictures in the Tractatus. In this conception, modality is not the subject matter of theorizing but an ineluctable aspect of picturing of reality whose showing forth Wittgenstein aims to help us see by operationalizing the construction of propositions.

Judicial law-making has frequently been likened to arts and crafts of various sorts, from minting coins to writing novels. While considering these analogies and how they demonstrate the reality of the law’s fabricating processes, the deeper aim of this chapter is to challenge the assumption that facts and truths established in law courts are ‘found’ and ‘discovered’. It is only by acknowledging that legal facts and legal truths are made by judicial crafts that we will come to appreciate the merits of those crafts and to discern the attributes of truth-making in courts that set the standard by which to judge the quality of truth claims in other contexts.

Winston argues that Lon Fuller’s critique of legal positivism was rather special in focusing on issues that lay beneath the surface of the usual intramural disputes, and thus related only indirectly to what positivists, such as Kelsen and Hart, said explicitly when expounding their views. Winston explains that, as a pragmatist, Fuller largely eschewed conceptual or semantic questions, focusing instead on questions of methodology and governance, in particular the adequacy of a scientific approach to understanding human society and the role played by agency and purpose in ordering civic life. In a phrase, Fuller faulted legal positivists for encouraging the kind of social engineering perspective reflected in bureaucratic/regulatory states. The importance of a pragmatic jurisprudence – and its superiority over other social sciences – lies precisely in the practical experience and concerns which lawyers possess (and other social scientists lack) and which they bring to bear in fashioning the participatory social architecture that is better at protecting human freedom.