Foundations · Frameworks · Instruments · Translations
Four lines of inquiry. Each begins from the structural problem of its field.
◇ Foundations · Volumes I & II · MMXXVI ◇
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◇ Foundations · Vol. 001
The Predictive Present
Language, Time, and the Rise of Information
On an ordinary morning, the future arrives in small, polite suggestions. The weather as a confidence interval. Traffic as a probability. Sentences finished in pale gray. We have learned to call this a technological condition. The Predictive Present argues that it is also, and more deeply, a linguistic and temporal one.
The predictive present is not only a technological condition. It is a cultural achievement, and a cultural decision.
Dan Herbatschek traces the long civilizational arc through which language, time, and information became braided into a single infrastructure — from the grammar of tense and the discipline of the calendar, to the projects of perfect languages, to the mechanics of measurement, to the contemporary feed.
A note on the cover.
Two curves — TIME and LANGUAGE — meeting at a single point of light. The convergence is the predictive present itself.
Tempo
We publish slowly. A title is a question we have been keeping for years, set down at last on the page.
One discipline · Four series · A small list
A note on the cover.
Two profiles, a soundwave passing between them. Meaning built in the space between people.
◇ Foundations · Vol. 002
How Language Works
Mind, Meaning, and the Human World
Before language is a system of signs, it is a way of being in time with another mind. A sentence is not only a string of symbols; it is an act of coordination — between speaker and listener, between memory and anticipation, between the world as it is and the world as it is taken to be. How Language Works begins there.
Language is not a tool the mind uses. It is one of the shapes the mind takes when it turns toward another mind.
Dan Herbatschek moves through the long structure of the problem — from phonology and the grammar of reference, to the philosophy of meaning and the cognitive architecture of speech, to the silent work of interpretation that every ordinary conversation performs. The book argues that meaning is not lodged inside words. It is built, continually, in the space between people.
Editorial Position
We publish work that does structural work.
A book may inform without altering the shape of its field. Another may re-describe its field so that the questions inside it are different afterward. We are interested in the second kind. Method-bearing, frame-shifting nonfiction that an attentive reader will keep nearby for years.
We publish four titles a year, across four lines of inquiry: Foundations, Frameworks, Instruments, and Translations. Every book is meant to be read more than once.
Four Series
The shape of the catalog.
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Series I ◇
Foundations
002 · In print
Books that reset the floor of a discipline. The structural arguments without which the rest of the field's literature cannot be read clearly.
Series II ○
Frameworks
Opens 2027
Method-bearing books. They give a field a new way of asking its questions, and a new way of recognizing when an answer has been reached.
Series III ·
Instruments
Opens 2027
The reference works. Carefully built, slowly revised, intended to remain useful for a generation rather than a season.
Series IV ◌
Translations
Opens 2028
Works whose absence from English is itself a structural problem. We publish them in editions made to last.
The House in Figures
000 Titles in print
· Series
2026 First publication
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