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Article published In:
Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 24:1 (2017) ► pp.62–90

Insights and their emergence in everyday practices

The interplay between problems and solutions in emergency medicine

| University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
| University of Gothenburg, Sweden

The aim of this article is twofold. First, it is a theoretical and empirically based contribution to the branch of research that studies enabling conditions of human sense-making. It demonstrates the value of a coherent ecological framework, based on dialogism and interactivity for the study of sense-making, problem-solving and task performance in naturalistic contexts. Second, it presents a promising method for the analysis of cognitive activities, Cognitive Event Analysis (CEA), with which we investigate real-life medical interactions, especially the emergence of insights in procedural task performance in emergency medicine. We show how sense-making and insights are accomplished by medical teams when they integrate cultural expertise, professional skills, inter-bodily dynamics, material constraints and affordances within the environment, i.e. when local co-action is embedded in socio-cultural patterns of behaviour.

Keywords: human sense-making, insight, problem-solving, problem-finding, interactivity, cognitive event analysis, emergency medicine, ecological cognition
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction – Towards an ecological framework of interactivity and sense-making in emergency medicine
  • 2.Some theoretical preliminaries
    • 2.1Problems and solutions in an ecological perspective
    • 2.2Sense-making and double dialogicality
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Cognitive Event Analysis
  • 4.Analyses
    • 4.1Case 1 – Think-aloud strategies: Verbal utterances as material anchors
    • 4.2Case 2 – The emergence of insight: Linking local perceptions with experience
      • 4.2.1Defining the event and its phases: Reverse problem-solving and learning
      • 4.2.2Explanation and procedural observation as insight: The materiality of thinking and professional vision
      • 4.2.3Contextualisation of learning
  • 5.Concluding discussion: Thinking out of the problem box
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 19 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.17002.tra
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