Inside the snow globe: Pragmatisms, belief and the ambiguous objectivity of the imaginary

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Relations between perceiving and knowing are well-worn problems that become visceral encounters with doubt and ambiguity in ‘mixed-reality’ environments. Locative narrative situates participants within stories where existent places function as the setting. Experiential confusion, between what is talked of as real and as imagined, is an often-reported phenomenon. Classical pragmatisms, and more broadly the writings of William James, understand the functioning of the body to be for the production of action, from which flows a naturalistic epistemology. for James, a thought’s reference to an object occurs in the medium of an ‘experienceable environment’ and is a condition of it being known; what something is known-as is how it functions in a particular context and the consequences that follow. Contemporary pragmatists express varying positions on the function of representation in perception at different levels of cognitive awareness, and the extent to which intentionality is derivative of linguistic norms. In the locative narrative iOS application The Lost Index No.1 – Landscape with Figures strategies of directing participant attention, movement, cognitive tasks and propositional content are used to guide the interpretation of events. The complex environment that is created plays with the multi-stability of perception and the ‘multi-stability meaning’ between terms, resulting in ambiguity and an enhanced flexibility of interpretation.</jats:p>