I don’t understand mountains, and I want to share the fun of my failed investigations. Mountains are pretty concrete things, big and physical, especially compared to abstractions like “knowledge,” “well-being,” and “emotion.” I will show that even “mountain” is an abstract noun in practice, surprisingly. The ways of failing to understand mountains might help ground a deeper and more important failure to understand the abstract nouns that are the subjects of social science.

Bio: I live in Reno, Nevada, to be near the mountains. If you don’t visit them frequently you never know what they will get up to. They are probably at it right now.