The Judgment of Structure: Professional Reasoning in the Age of Datafication

Auditing epitomizes the tension between structure and judgment: a practice designed to assure certainty yet sustained by interpretive doubt. As audit work becomes increasingly standardized and data-driven, professional reasoning appears to be displaced by procedural and algorithmic control. This project reinterprets that development. It argues that judgment is not what remains after structure but what makes structure possible—that each layer of standardization and automation is both the sediment of prior judgments and a new site where reflective reasoning must occur.

Building on Nicholas of Cusa’s notion of learned ignorance and Kant’s concept of reflective judgment, the study conceptualizes professional reasoning as a recursive movement between knowing and not-knowing. It asks how the expansion of structure under datafication transforms the conditions and visibility of professional judgment in auditing—how reflective reasoning is reconfigured, displaced, or rendered invisible within increasingly automated systems of verification. Empirically, the project investigates how auditors, working in highly structured legal and “quality management” contexts, interact with standards and digital tools such as artificial intelligence and data-analytic platforms, interpreting algorithmic outputs and negotiating their professional agency in data-intensive environments.

Through this approach, the project seeks to clarify how reasoning changes under standards and automation, and to explore how professional judgment might be understood, supported, and sustained as expertise itself becomes increasingly structured and technologized.