The possible in the real: infrastructures of experience, cosmopolitanism from below and sociology

The paper focuses on the complex relationship between experience, knowledge and information as well as on the ways in which sociology can enhance efforts of emancipation concerning that relationship. This processual relationship, in our view, is particularly crucial as it configures the range of the possible embedded in the real, combining and conditioning in this way both the cognitive and normative dimension. This relationship is addressed as the result of the interplay between what we conceive in terms of infrastructures of experience, on the one side, and what Amartya Sen defines as the informational basis “for judgment and justice”. The paper aims at deepening the emancipatory potential of sociology as far as this relationship is concerned. Its reasoning is then structured in three main parts. First, it resumes some of the most significant features of the relationship between infrastructures of experience and informational basis. Second, it explores the meaning of these analytical (and epistemological) keys and the way they help us to grasp the contemporary transformations of the focused relationship. Finally, it tentatively outlines the way social research should interpret cosmopolitanism from below for contrasting the worst consequences of that transformation and for enlarging the possible embedded into the real.