Persistence of everyday categorizations against renewal through induction
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Date
2025-12-15
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Plovdiv University Press
Abstract
The text explores the issue of the persistence of everyday categorizations of citizens from the "Maritsa East" coal basin region during the period 2024–2025, based on interviews conducted within the project "Future Trapped in a Carbon Past", DUECOS, PU. Based on my conceptual connecting of Harvey Sacks’ concept of “protection against induction” and Lyotard’s interpretation of legitimation within language games as a method (a problematic inspired by late Wittgenstein), the argument is made that in a number of utterances stabilized social categories can be identified, which, as stable categorizations, are linked to legitimating strategies that block the potential for a praxeological inductive refutation, and, consequently, for the renewal of social experience. The study traces how specific linguistic constructions – especially quantifications through “everyone”, “no one”, “always” – operate analogously to Sacks’s anti-modifier modifiers which legitimize praxeological boundaries of categorical, and thereby social, immutability. Based on an analysis of fragments from the interviews, a typology of strategies is proposed: some oriented toward maintaining the persistence of categorical
explanations, and others toward inductive practices, related to rethinking, specifying, personalizing, and proposing new life trajectories. In this context, “de-paralyzing possibilities” are conceived as discursive transitions that activate the potential for biographical transformation and the unfolding of alternative regimes of legitimation.
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Keywords
induction, everyday quantification, language games, life trajectories, "Maritsa East"