How Somiology emerged
Somiology did not originate as an attempt to found a new discipline. It emerged gradually from sustained efforts to understand a recurring problem across education, psychology, philosophy, and the learning sciences: the persistent gap between performance and understanding.
Across many domains, individuals demonstrate procedural competence, symbolic fluency, or correct answers without exhibiting genuine understanding. Conversely, others struggle to perform despite effort, intelligence, and support. Existing explanatory frameworks—cognitive, behavioral, social, neurological—each account for aspects of this phenomenon, yet none fully explain how understanding comes to be in lived experience.
Somiology arose from the recognition that something essential was missing from these accounts.
A shift in the unit of analysis
Much contemporary scholarship treats understanding as:
- a mental representation,
- an internal cognitive structure,
- a set of transferable skills,
- or a socially mediated performance.
Somiology began by questioning this assumption.
Rather than asking what understanding is as an object, Somiology asks how understanding occurs as a lived event. This shift—from objects to events—marks the theory’s foundational move.
Understanding, from a somiological perspective, is not something one possesses. It is something one can enact: a biologically coordinated activity involving perception, action, purpose, material engagement, affect, and context unfolding over time.
Intellectual influences and limits
Somiology draws insight from several established traditions while also encountering their limits.
Phenomenological approaches emphasize lived experience but often bracket biological processes. Cognitive and neuroscientific approaches describe mechanisms but frequently abstract away from meaning as lived and enacted. Sociocultural perspectives foreground context and practice but can leave the biological grounding of understanding underdeveloped.
Somiology emerged at the intersection of these traditions, asking how biological enactment, lived experience, and contextual meaning-making might be understood as a single, integrated phenomenon.
Rather than synthesizing existing theories, Somiology reframes the problem itself.
Events before concepts
A central insight guiding Somiology is that concepts and symbols do not carry meaning on their own. They become meaningful only when they evoke event-structures the organism can enact.
This insight helps explain why abstraction functions effectively for experts but fails for novices: abstraction compresses lived patterns that must already exist in biological experience. When those patterns are absent, symbols remain empty.
Somiology therefore treats events—not concepts—as the primary unit of understanding, and views conceptual language as secondary, compressive, and derivative.
From theory to field
Over time, recurring questions, analytic tools, and conceptual language began to stabilize:
- understanding as enacted event-structure
- five enacted modalities of activity
- contextual nexus as constitutive of meaning
- stabilization through variation
- symbols as triggers, not containers, of meaning
As these ideas were applied across problems—education, learning design, assessment, pedagogy—it became clear that Somiology functioned not merely as a single explanatory theory, but as a field of inquiry concerned with a distinct phenomenon: understanding as a biological, enacted, contextual event.
Only after this body of work began to cohere did the name Somiology become necessary.
A living field
Somiology remains an open, evolving field. It does not prescribe doctrine, methods, or outcomes. It invites inquiry into how understanding forms, how it fails, and how environments might be designed to support it more faithfully.
Like other fields that emerged in response to explanatory gaps, Somiology did not begin with a declaration. It began with a problem that would not go away—and with a commitment to follow that problem wherever it led.
Authorship and stewardship
Somiology has been articulated and developed by Randall Dana Ulveland, Ph.D. (Western Oregon University) through research, teaching, and design-based inquiry. While its initial formulation is authored, its future development depends on scholarly dialogue, critique, and collaborative exploration.
This site exists to support that ongoing work.