Personal knowing always apprehends another as a unique biographical being.

Evidence

By personal knowing, I refer to knowledge of another based on information not only about his roles and statuses, his categories, but on information, however slight, about his biography as well. To know another personally is always to apprehend him as a unique historical event. It is always to recognize him either by face or by name or by some other means and to be able to connect with this face, or name, or whatever, bits and pieces of accumulated material. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 100

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines personal knowing as category plus biography — the terminus the urban stranger-mode lacks, which the reader links to Cole’s unmoored observer.
• XREF: The category-plus-biography contrast is what makes strangers knowable only categorically in cities, dovetailing with the reader’s civil-inattention reading of Cole.