Brief

Sense-making is the activity by which agents — alone and together — construct revisable interpretations of their situation adequate to inform action, binding three layers into one orientation rather than three separate exercises: what is the case (descriptive), what matters (evaluative), what to do (practical). Truth-tracking is only the first layer; knowledge is the settled residue; understanding is the achieved state; sense-making is the connecting activity that turns them into a way of being oriented at all. The essay’s claim is that collective sense-making is a distinct achievement from the individual kind — it depends on a shared world and common memory (substrate), on truth-telling and reason-exchange and mutual recognition (norms), on trust and attention and plural perspectives (resources), and on humility, tenacity, and curiosity (dispositions) — and that it can fail while individual sense-making continues unimpaired. That failure is the diagnosis of the moment: everyone is making sense; almost no one is making sense together. The failure modes are diagnostic — paralysis (no orientation), fragmentation (parallel non-overlapping accounts), reactivity (stimulus straight to action with no interpretation between), cynicism (refusing the activity as futile) — and the frame earns its keep by being sharper than the rivals: post-truth and epistemic crisis name the first layer only, misinformation is narrower still, meaning crisis too spiritual, where sense-making holds all three layers at once, which any honest diagnosis has to. This is the keystone of the Society register and the bridge out of the foundations: it takes Being True to Things, The View From Somewhere, What Cannot Be Faked, and Bullshit and shows why fidelity is a shared problem — and it points straight at the series that follows, because AI is the modern stress-test that runs through all three layers at once.

Outline

Source ownership: Arendt is owned by The Work That Remains (Prologue, ch. I, ch. V) and Sellars by The View From Somewhere; both cut here, where Habermas and Longino do the norms work. Dervin cut — library-science methodology, wrong register, and Weick owns sense-making theory. Odell cut — three texts (Postman, Rosa, Odell) on one resources beat, and Odell argues refusal where this essay diagnoses.

The four failure modes, and what carries each: fragmentation → Nguyen; reactivity → Rosa, where acceleration closes the interpretive gap between stimulus and action; cynicism → O’Neill on the collapse of warranted trust; paralysis → nothing yet, on the shelf or in the queue. That one is still an assertion.

Reading List

• Weick, “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster” (1993)
• Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (1995)
• Varela, Thompson & Rosch, The Embodied Mind (1991)
• De Jaegher & Di Paolo, “Participatory Sense-Making and Mutual Incorporation” (2007)
• Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981)
• Longino, The Fate of Knowledge (2002)
• O’Neill, A Question of Trust (Reith Lectures) (2002)
• Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
• Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (2005)
• McIntyre, Post-Truth (2018)
• Bago, Rand & Pennycook, “Fake News, Fast and Slow” (2020)
• Nguyen, “Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles” (2020)
• Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (2019)
• US House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure, “The Design, Development, and Certification of the Boeing 737 MAX” (2020)