“Gearing in”: Categories of understanding as principles of organization which govern action

• In Event: 30462 - Theory Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4. Metatheoretic Considerations

Abstract

The paper focuses on the gap between knowledge of the world and action as part of it and how this gap gets bridged. It aims to explore the underlying logic which guides how people ‘gear’ into the world as one part among many. The paper connects the work of John Dewey and Erving Goffman each of whom give emphasis to the functional importance of a conceptual ‘background’ or framework which governs the inferential and operational determinations people make. While their approaches differ in important ways, each argues this background is shaped by social environments and, further, plays an important regulative and constitutive role in guiding inquiry and social action. I draw on and integrate aspects of their work to argue categories of understanding (e.g. time, space, order, causality, etc.) scaffold the practical imagination, without which operational determinations about the environment and how to participate in it as one part among many would be difficult, if not impossible, to make.

Author

• Lynn Hempel, Colorado State University