How Practices Become Knowable: Towards a Practice Hermeneutics

Abstract This paper asks how practices become knowable in empirical research. Practice theories conceive of social life as organised through nexuses of doings and sayings, but studying those nexuses requires representing them. The resulting tension – how to make practices visible without reducing them to representations – defines the epistemic challenge of practice-based enquiry. Drawing on Dimitri Ginev’s hermeneutic theory of social practices, I develop ‘practice hermeneutics’: an interpretative framework that clarifies how researchers might disclose practices by interpreting their traces. This approach explicates the hermeneutic movement between familiarity and articulation – the circle through which practices become intelligible – and proposes standards of disclosive adequacy for empirical work. By showing how enquiry itself unfolds within the same world of practices it seeks to understand, the paper advances a hermeneutic foundation for practice research and invites further exploration of its methodological implications.