Conversation of Humanity and Soft Facts: Autoethnographic Takes on the Non- Academic Presence of Humanities

The article creates a perspective and basic vocabulary that will allow for a broad understanding and description of the non-academic impact of the humanities. The starting point is the broadly experienced feeling of incongruity in the humanities milieu between performed work and how it is presented in reports. I refer to two categories of non-academic presence of humanities proposed by Richard Rorty: epistemology and hermeneutics. Situations of hermeneutics are subject to in-depth recognition, and their detailed examples are presented by using autoethnography as a research method. Various forms of the impact of humanities in non-academic environments are described as "soft facts." The article is complemented by a glossary of concepts aimed at supporting the study of non-academic circulation of humanities knowledge.