Judgments and justifications

Abstract

How do political leaders come to figure out what to do? Trying to answer this question, I develop a meta-theoretical and theoretical argument. Making a case for a compositionist pragmatism, I balance the autonomy of human beings with their embeddedness in social relations, allude to the critical role of judgments and justifications, and propose to trace the interrelations between these two in detail. Arguing for a three-circuit map to do this tracing, I first focus on pre-judgments. When trying to cope with a situation, actors make pre-judgments by falling back upon what are to them deeply taken-for-granted universals (perimeter circuit). Once they have formed these pre-judgments, they enter justificatory encounters - private and/or public - through which they come to flesh out these pre-judgments, forming more detailed resonance judgments (resonance circuit). This judging and justifying, in turn, sediments into actors’ repertoires of universals that give rise to this judging and justifying in the first place (structuration circuit). I illustrate this map by outlining a research design for studying the beginnings of attempts to co-manage the SARS-CoV-2 Crisis. © Anna B. Kayes and D. Christopher Kayes 2021.