Imagining uses for things: Teaching “useful knowledge” in the early eighteenth century

Abstract

There has been an explosion of interest in “innovation-oriented knowledge” and utility in early modern knowledge economies. Despite this, a healthy skepticism surrounding the category of “useful knowledge” persists, at least in part because of its association with intentional concealment. Helpful in many ways, this skepticism has fostered a tendency to overlook a variety of efforts to teach “useful knowledge” in the period: efforts that were anchored in engagement with the real and involved the cultivation of an ability to direct the powers of the imagination. Indeed, for some the imagination served as a faculty central to an epistemology of use. This article takes as its example a handbook written by an early political economist (c. 1700) who endeavored to teach readers how to imagine uses for things they observed in collections while traveling so they would be better prepared to participate in a new, transnational culture of innovation.