“How didst thou come beneath the murky darkness?”: sense-making in light of the ancient Greeks and in the spirit of Hegel

Abstract

Purpose

This piece explores the philosophical origins of sense-making as defined in Brenda Dervin’s methodology.

Design/methodology/approach

This conceptual paper locates the origins of sense-making's rich ontological, epistemological and etymological heritage to the Classical Greece and the Pre-Socratic period. The Greek origins of sense-making‘s philosophical undercurrents surface again in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit before the idea is picked up again in twentieth century philosophy and library science.

Findings

This is a conceptual paper and no empirical findings are presented.

Originality/value

This paper makes an original contribution to the study of information seeking and to sense making theory and methodology.

Citation

Gross, M. (2023), "“How didst thou come beneath the murky darkness?”: sense-making in light of the ancient Greeks and in the spirit of Hegel", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 79 No. 6, pp. 1369-1379. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2022-0152