Sense-Making

The Turn to Sense and Sense-Making

The word sense seems so familiar that it is too often assumed to carry with it common understandings. Dictionaries show the term used foundationally to refer to products of human sensory activity—that is, uses of the human senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. In these uses, emphasis is placed on human perceptual capacities to sense accurately what is transmitted via the senses. Over time, some definitions have evolved to include terms such as intelligibility, intuitive knowledge, meaning, and natural understanding. These terms focus on more than the products of sensory activity because they refer instead to the interpretations or understandings resulting from cognitive processes rather than focus on perceptually based activities per se.

In the latest evolutions, some authors go further. They emphasize cognitive processes in frameworks that assume sense-making as socially based activity. This evolution focuses on definitions of sensing that may involve the integration of information and inputs from a wide variety of sources over time as well as the making of sense through social interaction.

Finally, some authors, focusing on how sense-makers navigate between their internal worlds and external circumstances, expand the focus to include a broad set of intrapersonal sense-making activities that are assumed to apply to both communicating with self as well as with others. These approaches deliberately move away from the original emphasis on sensing as accurate perception to individual reflection involving not only what is commonly called cognition, but also emotions, intuitions, spiritual hunches, and other ways in which humans are assumed to make sense of their worlds, both internal and external.

These latest evolutions zone in, in different ways depending on authors, on how sensing can be assumed to involve processes of communicative engagement—intrapersonal, interpersonal, group, organizational, and societal. Here one sees a marked move from the original emphases on individual perceptual processes to emphases that begin to redefine sense-making not merely as interpretation, but as dialogue, both internal and external.

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