A word can make a distinction available.
A concept can change what becomes possible because of that distinction.
This is a larger claim.
The word property does not merely describe a piece of land.
Once the concept of property is embedded in a social system, land can be bought, sold, inherited, enclosed, taxed and disputed in ways that would otherwise make little sense.
The physical ground has not changed.
But the landscape of possible action has.
This is one of the strange powers of concepts.
They do not merely help us understand a world of possibilities.
They can reorganise the relations through which those possibilities are produced.
Consider a map.
The landscape existed before the map.
But once a boundary is drawn, something new can happen.
One side can become a country.
Another can become a border.
A line on paper can become a fence on the ground, a checkpoint, a jurisdiction, a reason for taxation, a cause of conflict.
The concept has travelled.
It has moved from language into practice, from practice into institutions, and from institutions into material arrangements.
The result is not imaginary.
The landscape itself has been altered.
This is why we should be cautious about saying that concepts are merely "in our heads".
Some concepts certainly begin as ways of construing experience.
But concepts can become embedded in collective practices, technologies, institutions and artefacts.
Once they do, they can acquire causal powers of a peculiar kind.
A road is not merely asphalt.
It embodies decisions about where people should travel.
A school is not merely a collection of buildings.
It embodies distinctions about knowledge, age, authority and learning.
A database is not merely stored information.
It embodies categories that determine what can be recorded, searched and compared.
A legal document is not merely words.
It can alter what people are permitted, required or entitled to do.
Concepts have therefore become part of the environment in which subsequent action takes place.
And this produces a remarkable feedback loop.
The world affords possibilities to organisms.
Organisms develop practices in response to those possibilities.
Practices become organised through language and concepts.
Concepts become embodied in institutions, technologies and material arrangements.
Those arrangements create new affordances.
Those affordances generate new practices.
And those practices generate new concepts.
The landscape is continually being remade.
This is not creation out of nothing.
A concept cannot simply abolish physical constraint.
We can declare a wall to be a door, but we still cannot walk through it.
Yet concepts can alter the social and practical landscape within which physical things acquire new possibilities.
A doorway can become an entrance.
An entrance can become a threshold.
A threshold can become a boundary.
A boundary can become a border.
A border can become a political fact.
At each stage, new relations become possible.
This is why conceptual change can sometimes feel like a change in the world itself.
Something that was previously invisible becomes obvious.
Something that was previously impossible becomes thinkable.
Something that was previously unthinkable becomes ordinary.
And sometimes the reverse happens.
A concept can make a possibility disappear.
Once a category becomes taken for granted, other ways of organising experience may become difficult to see.
The landscape of thought acquires paths and barriers of its own.
This brings us back to the furrow.
A furrow does not determine where the plough must go.
But once it exists, some trajectories become easier than others.
Concepts can work like furrows.
They channel subsequent thought without determining it.
And unlike a physical furrow, a conceptual one can be inherited, deepened, widened and reproduced by those who follow it.
This gives conceptual evolution a peculiar character.
Ideas do not simply succeed because they are true, nor disappear because they are false.
They also inhabit environments.
Some concepts fit the practices and institutions already in place.
Some generate useful distinctions.
Some connect easily with other concepts.
Some become embodied in technologies.
Some acquire authority.
Some become so familiar that we cease to notice them at all.
The conceptual landscape therefore has its own ecology.
But we should not conclude that concepts float above material reality and descend upon it.
The relation runs in both directions.
The world constrains what concepts can successfully organise.
And concepts reorganise what kinds of possibilities become available within the world.
Neither side is sovereign.
There is no purely material world waiting for concepts to describe it, and no purely conceptual world freely constructing reality.
There is a continuing circulation between them.
Perhaps this is one reason the evolution of concepts is so difficult to see.
We tend to notice concepts when they are new.
We notice them less easily once they have become roads.
And eventually we may forget that they were ever furrows at all.
The most powerful concepts may therefore be those we no longer experience as concepts.
They have become part of the landscape.
And once that happens, the question with which we began becomes even more difficult.
What does the world afford?
For the human world is no longer simply the world we inherited.
It is also a world of possibilities we have constructed, institutionalised and materially embodied.
The world affords us possibilities.
But some of those possibilities are now our own work.
And that leaves us with a final question.
If we are continually changing the landscape of possibility, what kind of world are our concepts making possible?
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