Rule-following, Social Ontology and Practice Theory; conceptual and empirical challenges of the turn to practice

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1 rMA-Thesis Philosophy

Jeroen Stuiver

Supervisor: prof. dr. M. Stokhof Second Reader: dr. Federica Ruso

Rule-following, Social Ontology

and Practice Theory

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1. Introduction

The significance of the concept of ‘practice(s)’ in philosophy can be asserted in numerous ways. For one, there is the longstanding tradition of thinkers who have drawn out a dichotomy between theory and practice, distinguishing theoretical activity from practical activity in some substantial way.1 Secondly, representations of everyday practices play supportive roles in philosophical texts; figuring as exemplars, illustrations or in thought-experiments.2 Thirdly, modes of enquiry are set up to study complex sets of practices in detail (e.g., philosophy of education, philosophy of science). And fourthly, another longstanding tradition of philosophy blurs lines of demarcation between theory (and theoretical activity) and practice (and practical activity).3 For example, Aristotle, Hume, Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the American pragmatists could all be said to ‘turn to’ praxis/practice/the practical in some way; they were all antithetic towards some aspect of previous assertions of the practice/praxis vs. theory dichotomy. As a self-conscious member of the fourth category, ‘Practice Theory’ (PT) attempt to construct and do fundamentally practice-based analysis.

Notably, in the first half of the twentieth century, Wittgenstein and Heidegger have gained influence in socio-cultural sciences by inspiring a ‘turn to practices/praxis’. In the second half, a larger group of theorists (e.g., Bourdieu, Lyotard, Giddens) have developed ontological accounts of social practices in a wider range of fields (most prominently in sociology) moving away from traditional oppositions between academic philosophy, anthropology and social theory. More recently, attempts have been made to give a more general and fundamental account of a turn to practice by reintroducing these sociological theories to academic philosophical debates. Namely, philosophically trained theorists interested in social theory and social science, such as Bruno Latour, Theodore Schatzki and Joseph Rouse, have attempted to formulate a social ontology of practices. I will explore what a Wittgensteinian PT has to offer as a philosophy of social practices.

As we will see, PT is similar to poststructuralism in its ‘decentring’ of the binary oppositions that traditionally structured our theories of social order. For example, Foucault’s work on the relation between the production of knowledge, discipline and the body problematizes an attribution of agency to an individual actor, which is traditionally based on an equivocation of agency with rational decision-making. His work shows that such a view neglects the historical context of emotional manipulations that framed the choices available to the individual actor; awareness of the conditions that allowed us to be in the position to choose rationally might displace our sense of agency. In

1 For instance, we can find this line of reasoning in Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant: contrasting practical activity with theoretical activity has led to suggestions that they relate to or constitute separated or separable realms, of meaning or knowledge, which would then justify a hierarchical order favoring theoretical activity as coming closer to truth, and the suggestion that ideally theory should rule over practice. This last notion is not opposed necessarily by PT, but PT complicates such an account in ways which render these traditional lines of thougt somewhat irrelevant.

2 For example, an exercise in geometry in Plato’s Meno, ‘hammering’ in Heidegger’s Being and Time, ‘waitering’ in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness

3 This is not to suggest that the first-mentioned tradition has no members which also partake of the tradition of the fourth. For example, in his Ethica Nicomachea Aristotle argued that in order to flourish the human being has to practice the good life, but he also draws out a strong opposition between the value of the Vita Activa and the Vita Contemplativa in his Metaphysics.

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general, there is no a priori distinction to be made between the essence and context of something we want to describe, because both are defined as such in light of a larger social order. However, in this view, this larger social order does not define everything from the top-down or outside-in. The more we learn about the historical conditions that allowed us to form a social theory, the less we are able to isolate distinct processes as agentic forces. PT is an attempt to do social theory after these mostly negative lessons about our access to the determinants of culture and social order.

While the focus, perspective and aims of individual contributors can vary, practice theorists generally suggest that we have to find ways to reconstruct structures of actual practices in order to do justice to this historical complexity. In a recently published volume on PT, the general propositions of its contributors were represented by the following quote: “that practices consist in organised sets of actions, that practices link to form wider complexes and constellations –a nexus – and that this nexus forms the ‘basic domain of study of the social sciences’ (Giddens, 1984: 2)”.4

Practice theorists from different fields can be grouped under this general assumption on the centrality of social practices – in social order and human activity more in general. However, there are also themes that will continue to divide them. Ongoing debates that challenge PT revolve around the nature of change, language, power, reflection, macro-level reconstructions and on the relevance of different empirical methodologies.

In the following chapters, social theory will be discussed largely in terms of later Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following. I do not intend to suggest that Wittgenstein says all there is to say on Practice Theory (PT), but his Philosophical Investigations does lay down some conceptual issues that as of yet have not been settled in PT. He did not start to delineate our social identities in the way that PT approaches them (e.g., by way of historical and empirical data), but he did show that individualist notions of meaning, knowledge and truth postulate capacities that we cannot be said to possess, or which in the least cannot be shown to support our grasp of language. Furthermore, normativity is key in legitimizing Practice Theory (PT) and its social ontology, because, as Wittgensteinian argues, normative use of language and shared understanding can only be attributed in light of social contexts of learning and use.

We will first discuss crucial aspects of Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following in relation to a practice-oriented approach to meaning, language and mind. Secondly, we will explore the promising aspects and limitations of PT. Here we will use two authors to serve as representatives for the critical debate on PT: Theodore Schatzki and Stephen Turner. Schatzki’s Wittgensteinian PT serves as a potent example of a philosophically informed approach to social theory. And Turner’s criticisms of the theoretical concept of social practices challenges the turn towards social ontology,

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and redirects its critique of methodological individualism back to PT. Thirdly, we will assess how PT’s social ontology can deliver on the promise of becoming operational as a philosophical and empirical account of social practices.

It is not my aim to present a conclusive interpretation of Wittgenstein’s work. For one, not all his aims are necessarily mine, nor do they exhaust those of the theorists that contributed to PT. The many approaches to social theory that focus on practices will also not be represented in detail, because they are too different to allow for a brief and insightful overview. Instead, we will focus on Schatzki’s PT as it attempts to overcome the challenges of PT by way of a (largely) Wittgensteinian social ontology.

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2. Rule-following and Practice Theory

Some of the most notable approaches to social theory developed during the course of the twentieth century are influenced by the Philosophical Investigations (e.g., Bourdieu, Foucault, Garfinkel, Giddens, Habermas, Lyotard). Interestingly for them, Wittgenstein presented a treatment of thought, meaning and language that emphasized their enduring social nature. None of these authors rely on Wittgenstein’s later work in the exact same way. However, in general, they have set themselves the task of uncovering various kinds of socially constituted ‘rules’ that structure social practices. For Kant, a norm was a self-imposed rule of the understanding, and this sets it apart from ‘pure behaviour’, which would be directed by the laws of nature alone. Instead, our normative judgments are governed by conceptual meaning and understanding. Like Kant, Wittgenstein also questions a strict behaviourist account of norms – e.g., in the sense that the criteria for attributing mental states are not readily reducible to physical or other specific causal processes5 – but he attacks the suggestion that grasping a rule in understanding could be self-interpreting more in general. In many of the cases he discusses, interpretation of the norm’s application appears to be secondary to some other capacity to act in accordance with a norm from one’s involved attribution of understanding (to oneself or others) in social contexts (e.g., in §179). This does not necessarily mean that a rule could not be self-imposed by the subject in any meaningful sense; that would only follow if every aspect of the rule-following process is shown to be reducible to its place in a social context. Whilst interpretations of his account of rules differ widely, his treatment of rule-following fuelled the debate on the social nature of normativity.

For some, the social ontological account of rules implied that one has to describe how rule-following works in actual contexts of use, where individuals apply rules without having a conclusive interpretation ready to hand.6 In their move away from individualist and naturalist (i.e., those theories that reify culture as a natural whole) accounts of culture, social theories that focus on historical and local ‘practices’ (e.g., those of Bourdieu, Foucault, Giddens, Lyotard, Schatzki) were informed by Wittgenstein’s arguments and the suggestion of ‘language-games’.

The authors associated with the turn to practice are generally critical of traditional dichotomies adamant in modern philosophy, social sciences and cultural sciences (e.g., structure and agency, individual and totality, nature and culture, mind and body, thought and action, material and symbol). These concepts may retain their use in emphasizing a dominant aspect of a practice, but these authors no longer describe human life and society by employing these concepts as general causes, or transcendental poles. The constructive aim is to describe human behavior as largely situated in social practices, allowing for a more dynamic, historical and localized account of human action in context,

5 For an example, see the remark in the discussion on ‘reading’ as a particular mental state in §157 6 Rouse, J, ‘Practice Theory’, p. 502

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thereby refraining from choosing one pole of these oppositions, while recognizing the relative meaning and value of both.

This might suggest that ‘practices’ adds another teleological master-concept to replace, for example, those of reason and nature. But it is not typically the case that practices have some independent status in PT. However, PT does seem to attribute a general explanatory role to the everyday concept of practices – while reading Wittgenstein should make one wary of attempts to base a generalizing theory on a ‘picture’ drawn from everyday language.

Practice theorists seem rightly concerned with the ‘rules of practices’ in the sense that social practices appear to structure our actions in the background of deliberate conduct, which suggests that shared and normative, but often implicit, rules are in play (e.g., something like customs, traditions or presuppositions). Nonetheless, one basic criticism is that the resulting pictures of human behavior seem to render actors into cultural or judgmental ‘dopes’: as blindly acting in accordance with a set of pre-established rules.7 In response, a PT should be able to give a viable account of individual consciousness, reflection and change that fits with their social ontology.

Conceptually, we can associate this problem (i.e., of individuals who appear as judgmental ‘dopes’ in a social account of language and mind) with the rule-following passages in Wittgenstein’s later work. Note that it is not my aim to tackle the rule-following debate as it was developed in the nineteen-eighties (e.g. Kripke 1982, Wright 1980 and Boghossian 1989). We will consider rule-following in the context of its applications in twentieth-century social theory. This social interpretation of Wittgenstein presents one possible way of reading his remarks on rule-following, and there are good reasons for reading him differently. However, it is not necessary for our discussion of PT to go through these different social theories in detail, nor do we need to describe and evaluate the numerous different accounts of the rule-following passages. For our purposes, it will suffice to describe how the conceptual issues of rule-following allow us to separate problematic from promising approaches to PT.

Rule-following, linguistic competence and social practices

Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following in PI brought attention to social practices, but his comments on rule-following developed from his investigations into the nature of language and linguistic competence. Therefore, before we try to present a Wittgensteinian treatment of rules that is not limited to linguistics, we can agree that there is an intuitive connection to be made between language-use and rule-following. Interestingly, there also seems to be an unresolved two-sidedness to how we use language by way of rules. On the one hand, we are mostly guided by rules that are learned

7 Note that the ongoing debate on how we should understand our experiences of individual autonomy in light of our, to some extent, blind and structural embeddedness into social practices is meaningful (e.g., regarding Giddens, Bourdieu, Foucault), and the fact that some practice-oriented theories challenge our preconceptions about individual autonomy does not mean that they should be rejected.

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and applied implicitly. This begs for a description of the mechanism or “apparatus” behind linguistic competence: individual performance takes on the aspect of automatic behavior in accordance with the rules. On the other hand, we have a normative grasp of language. ‘What’ someone says often does not guarantee ‘how’ it is meant, requiring/allowing us to judge and negotiate whether or not someone uses language appropriately. This begs for some understanding of rules that accords with the need for interpretation. Intuitively, we could separate the causal side from the normative side of rule-following: the latter is established socially while the first is supplied naturally. Instead, Wittgenstein showed that the contexts in which we learn to apply rules ‘automatically’ are also socially established in different ways (e.g., the context of learning in §145; on ‘custom’ in §198). And, inversely, I would argue that the same passages suggest that it would not make sense to view linguistic competence as a ‘mere’ case of social convention, but we will delve further into this issue later.

Keep in mind that the categorization of the normative and causal sides of rule-following are often informed by some division between the inner and outer or internal and external. For example, in a Cartesian picture of the knowing mind, its private essence contributes to the account of a-priori judgments and ideas, which allows us to base our rule-following in rational operations internal to the mind. In this view, introspective knowledge and normative understanding have to be foundationally internal to mind. Similarly, a classical empiricist would emphasize that the building blocks of normative judgment are established and retained in the private mind. However, she would state that the correspondence between terms and objects depends on a causal relation with physical properties of the external world. Therefore, the externality of mental representations, from an epistemological perspective, grounds the normativity of language. Both options reconcile the two sides of rule-following by way of a ‘mentalist’ explanation of how normative understanding is established and accessible for the private mind, and the social aspect of rule-following falls into the background. Conversely, Wittgenstein will place these social aspects of rule-following in the foreground.

First and foremost, Wittgenstein’s arguments reveal the crucial errors in dominant (traditional or modern) and intuitive (philosophical or everyday) accounts of how language functions. These all privilege some mental state in their theory of meaning (i.e., mentalism); understanding an utterance is taken to mean that you have the correct mental image in mind (i.e., representationalism); and a language is essentially shared by virtue of how a word names or signifies an object (i.e., atomism of meaning). All three of these ideas are famously challenged in PI, and Wittgenstein turns on philosophy in particular because, as theories of meaning, these ideas on the nature of language were essentially epistemological in nature (but similar theories of language also exist in linguistic and cognitive sciences).

For example, an empiricist could explain that linguistic competence is grounded in private acts of labelling individuated sensations and impressions. In this view, one could fix a term to an inner sensation and thereby instantiate its meaning. We can indeed meaningfully describe ‘seeing red’ or ‘having a flicker of doubt’ as a private experience, and for various reasons, but Wittgenstein famously

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argued that a truly private act of reference makes no sense (PI §243-315). Interestingly, in Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning Meredith Williams warns us that this line of reasoning (which is considered to be part of the so-called ‘private language argument’) is often represented only partially. She argues that Wittgenstein targets two assumptions which implicitly inform the idea of a private language, and that some philosophers forget the first. This first ‘naming assumption’ suggests that the meaning of a term is fixed by acts of ostensive baptism of an occurrence of sensory experience. The second ‘consistency assumption’ adds that subsequent uses of the term must refer to the same kind of object.8 When the focus is solely on the second assumption, then the argument will revolve around our ability to check the consistent use of a term as a means of reference. This accuses the empiricist of relying on a vague form of “knowledge by association”, which lacks any kind of independent checks on its correct application. But this can then be countered with the suggestion that memory fulfils this function. In response, the critic can go on to state that memory does not allow for any independent checks on its consistency (as Wittgenstein notes in §265), but, as Williams recounts from these debates, this leads to a form of radical doubt that would challenge the “general reliability of memory”, which also implicates public checks on consistent application.9 Wittgenstein does not make a direct attack on memory here. Instead, the reliability of memory is irrelevant as long as there are independent checks on the application of a term. As Williams points out, he shows how knowledge by acquaintance (non-propositional knowledge), which cements the picture of language as consisting of independent units of meaning, has to rely in full on the external checks of ostensive definition (which is discussed early on in PI §28-38).10

The crucial point in the discussion of ostensive definition was that, problematically for a private form of language learning, it already presupposes linguistic competence on the side of the individual. In the primordial stage of acquiring a language there is no meaning to a term that comes about by way of a pure ostensive act, because it will have no content, which means that there is no way to interpret it in terms of right or wrong application. We are instead taught how to use language through socially situated means of ostensive learning: a teacher causes us to associate a word with a thing, but our knowledge of the sign only comes with using it in social practices. The rejected assumptions suggested that the intended meanings of our utterances are ultimately located and checked “in the head’ of an individual. Wittgenstein reverses this order of constitution. The individual’s linguistic competence can only develop in a larger community of speakers, and it only makes sense to say one ‘knows’ what a term means in light of its repeated application. In this sense following a rule is an ongoing practice, and both internal and external objects do not inherently have normative force.

Wittgenstein’s later work demonstrates that linguistic meaning depends on structurally different contexts of use: a specific language-game has its own logic, which informs the rules of application of a

8 Williams, M. Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning (1999), p. 16

9 ibid, p. 18 Williams refers to Norman Malcolm’s interpretation of the private language argument, but he is meant to represent a larger group of philosophers who have also neglected the ‘naming assumption’.

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word or utterance in a specific context. He emphasized the role of agreement in language. And the notion of a language-game suggests for PT that language and action are constitutively interwoven in particular customs or practices. This could wrongly be taken to suggest that our normative understanding of language and practices are constituted by public sets of shared and explicit rules – similar to those of chess. His critical remarks on ‘private language’ implicate private representations and sensations, but it is important for our discussion of PT to be critical towards an overly public account of rule-following and normativity as well. Namely, a public account of rules readily leads us to neglect aspects of individual agency. For instance, we can have different views on what we agree on when we have ‘checked’ – and continue in – our use of a term, and a public check does not guarantee shared understanding. We do distinguish correct from incorrect performances (or interpretations) of a custom, and this suggests that some rule-like understanding is tied to a custom, but it is not always clear what has to be understood the same in order for us to be involved in a practice. Wittgenstein (§242) is aware of this. For example, he explains that agreement is not just about definitions and on what is said, but, as a prerequisite form of agreement, it also has to be about the underlying judgments on how-to come to a definition (for it to be considered at all). These prerequisite forms of agreement are not just in the background, and therefore unknown, but they also have to be open in the sense that they set the stage for further disagreements.

The game of chess itself does not even support a full definition of practices as sets of publicly shared rules. We can explain this with the following example. Note that the basic rules of chess are explicitly available. Someone can make mistakes while playing chess, but individuals can only share a game of chess in compliance with those rules (i.e., that you take turns moving one piece, how you may move each piece, winning conditions, etcetera). Therefore, we continuously rely on those rules in playing or interpreting chess. Each possible move on the chessboard is covered by these rules. When an experienced player goes against the rules of chess this will be interpreted as an accident, a joke, or an attempt to cheat. In this sense, the meaning of an individual’s actions is also confined by the rules of the game. If practices are defined as sets of rules, then the game of chess is defined and delimited by its rules, and every action which does not accord with its rules is traced back to an outside influence (e.g., an individual’s mood, mental health, or ulterior motives).

Now suppose that your opponent rejects your understanding of the rules of chess as follows. After anticipating a series of moves made by your opponent, you take one of his pieces off the board. He responds with the allegation that you tricked him, and that it is unfair to set a trap like that. You explain that you followed all the rules of what you can do with chess pieces on the board, which is all there is to playing chess fairly. He now states that you can follow those rules of chess without setting traps. You respond that such a game would never end, and that the aim of playing chess is to win. After this discussion, his final stance is that he will never play chess with you again. Does this mean that chess is also constituted by our shared willingness to play competitive games? In this case the game breaks down without this ‘rule’, but it does not seem necessary: someone could lose on purpose,

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or have no interest in competitive games, and simply play skilfully in order to entertain her opponent. Nevertheless, beyond its basic rules, this situation implies that mastering chess has to involve some grasp of its competitive aspect in order for it to make sense.

Rules have to describe or institute a norm: if they do not help distinguish correct from incorrect applications then they fail to function as such. While the basic rules do seem to confine the social practice of chess, all further conditions do not literally seem to be in play as rules of chess. They can be expressed as rules, for instance, in trying to teach a child about the competitive nature of chess, but that draws out a general normative dimension of ‘playing competitive games’, not an integral part of the game of chess: the game itself only defines conditions for ‘winning’ or ‘losing’. Our notion of ‘being a good competitor’ could be modified specifically for chess. It could be described by the basic rules and some notion of how to carry out those rules (e.g., anticipate the moves your opponent will make, set traps for your opponent, and do not distract your opponent on his turn). But these considerations seem less essential to chess and appear less robust than the basic rules. For one, because it is not clear in advance what would violate these norms, and a violation could be part of a regular game of chess.

The problem with defining a practice as a set of rules arises when we characterize a practice as a set of constitutive rules like those basic rules of chess: rules that define the game across all instances, and which are reliably possessed by all participants individually. The ‘basic rules’ that we all agree on are not easily separated from those more changeable and open conditions that can sometimes appear to be essential for our shared understanding of the game. When confronted with a social deviant (this could be a visionary or an idiot) that nonetheless follows the explicit rules, we ourselves seem to have followed some additional rules, but we do not necessarily know which ones. If our chess player would allude to shared constitutive rules alone he would not be able to prove why he is right and the social deviant wrong. Instead, our example of a broken down game of chess was ultimately resolved by a demonstration of ‘meaning as use’. Namely, our chess player explained that the deviant’s game would never end, and what use would that activity serve? It either makes sense to play the game his way, or to not play it at all.

Could demonstrative performances contain the interpretive side of rule-following? A sceptic version of the public account of normativity would suggest that communal agreement (e.g., “this is how chess makes sense for us”) is the only substantial check on normative understanding (i.e., Kripke 1982). This would be a sceptic solution in the sense that there is no further connection made between communal agreement and an objective value or truth connected to those rules that the community agrees upon in practice. This seems counter-intuitive. For one, there are no guarantees that public demonstrations will institute a norm, because the performance has to be interpreted. I would not accept this explanation without some account of how agreements are put in place in different practices and contexts. The debate merely seems to shift from the nature of rule-following to the nature of agreement.

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The sceptical solution drops the demand of guarantees (or internal guidance) with regard to normative rules, and instead suggest that agreement is external to an individual’s judgment, and internal to community judgments. However, a further critique of the community view would be that there are other influences that might frame the settling of a norm through demonstration. For example, our chess player depends on the material present for the set-up of a game of chess. Could we not reduce his demonstration and the effected resolution to all present causes, with merely one of them being the history of communal interaction? The problems of mentalism and private language seem to reappear for a strict public account of normative rule-following: they isolate that what norms are supposed to be about, and, as a consequence of this, the distinction between correct and incorrect application becomes vulnerable.

The shift of attention towards normative practices fortunately does not have to trivialize mentality or private experience. Examples of language-games can also draw out that the private and public are intimately related. The one domain does not cause or instantiate the meaning and content of the other. As an illustration of this, the distinction between ostensive definition and ostensive learning or training suggests a lesser role for interpretation and a greater role for “technique”.11 Ostensive definition implies that the meaning of a term could be fixed by the mere act of individuating an object internally and individually (e.g., labelling mental objects introspectively) or externally (e.g., through pointing and labelling). Instead, ostensive learning involves skills that are tied to a somewhat regularized context of use (e.g., material, practices, persons, and situated contexts, etcetera). This does not imply that language and mind are therefore mirrors of public use. In order to avoid the scenario of the ‘judgmental dope’, the distinction between private and public can only be helpful for PT in specific cases. As a foundational dichotomy it tends to obscure the actuality of the complex, developed and practical nature of the relation between inner and outer phenomena. Wittgenstein does not discount all processes that we would label ‘introspective’, but he does suggest that we cannot expect to find the normative grounds of our convictions in something like a private mind.

Wittgenstein shows that explicit rules can always be made to appear as “sign-posts”, because their meaning depends on, and presupposes, some context and background understanding (e.g., §87). Firstly, in the sense that we often act in accordance with a rule as a matter of course: when we get lost they appear as conventional objects open to scrutiny and interpretation. Regularities external to the rule would appear to be necessary in light of indeterminacy and regress arguments. The well-known regress arguments featured in PI suggest that explicit rules and mental images do not singularly determine what counts as a correct application. Ultimately, if we have to rely on the interpretation of such a rule to distinguish correct from incorrect applications, then we in fact lose the ability to make such distinctions. It also counters the suggestion that additional rules of application could apply a

11 Williams, M. Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning (1999), p. 226

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representation to the world by virtue of their possession alone (e.g., in §141, demonstrated with a representation as simple as that of a schematic ‘cube’).

Secondly, sign-posts only function when they are localized properly: rules are normative when they are situated in appropriate contexts. In order to understand a rule one has to be familiar with the relevant contextual demands and expectations of use. This is largely a social affair: we learn to situate a rule interacting with others. Beyond the designation of context as a space organized for restricted purposes (e.g., the class-room), the body is also a marker of contextual meaning and understanding. For example, depending on the context, we can have different meanings of ‘to doubt’ at hand: we recognize some characteristic expression of someone meaning “I doubt it” as ‘I don’t think that that’s the case’ rather than ‘I am doubting it actively’. Separating the ‘meaning as context of use’ (e.g., facial expression, situational queues, tone of voice, etcetera) from the dictionary meaning (i.e., word-object correspondence) of an utterance can be difficult. In this sense, ‘meaning as use’ might seem opaque. But from a Wittgensteinian perspective, both approaches to meaning can only be separated for a specific or further purpose of clarification; in practice they are intertwined as a matter of course. Furthermore, his reflection on the concept of ‘game’, which resulted in the observation that there is no essential feature that all regular applications of the concept have in common, counters the epistemological intuition that there has to be something clear and distinct about a concept in order for it to be knowledgeable. Instead, we can work with family resemblances (an analogy drawn from the crisscross network of similarities in facial features of family-members) between different instances of a concept.

We interpret utterances differently depending on the context, but this often occurs as a matter of course. At one point, this brings Wittgenstein to the allusion of hitting the “bedrock” in seeking justifications for why we obey a rule (§199), and towards the suggestion that at some point we are led to stop giving reasons for our beliefs, and justifications for our actions, because we simply strike ourselves as seeing the world make sense for us, and as acting in it as such (i.e., in a form of life). This does not necessarily has to be interpreted as saying that we can’t go on justifying, questioning and changing what makes sense for us, but it does seem to suggest that, at any moment, some unarticulated ‘background understanding’ seems to be in play. A PT tries to further our understanding of what this background consists in, but it has to make sense of how it relates to individual agency as well, because a person seems to consciously relate to this background in action.

Blindly obeying rules is associated with taking things for granted, and acting on a shared sense of the obvious. For example, situated in training exercises, a student acquires normative rules and concepts in the sense of observing a custom. Some might argue that the suggestion of ‘blind obedience to normative rules’ conflates automatic individual behaviour with normative collective practices.12 This suggests that PT wrongfully ignores the disparity between the unthinking quality of automatic

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behaviour and the informed and involved quality of normative understanding. It is true that blindly following a rule does not make sense when we envision an unthinking actor simply being urged to act a certain way by force or manipulation. A person first has to be involved in a practice that requires mastery of some implications that make up a normative standard, one that can be largely taken for granted afterwards. What makes up this background of normative standards, and how it relates to reflection and deliberation, is what should be elucidated by PT.

Charles Taylor distinguishes two interpretations of how blind rule-following relates to the unarticulated background of understanding. One interpretation suggests that the connections between the individual and the background do not involve justifications: they are conditioned or causally instituted in normative practices. He does not agree with this reading of blind rule-following. His preferred alternative suggests that the background incorporates understanding: despite its lack of direct articulation, background understanding “may allow us to formulate reasons and explanations when challenged”.13

However, a sceptic could argue that the first option allows for articulations of reasons and explanations just the same. In support of this response, she could point towards experiments in cognitive psychology that seem to suggest that we can produce justifications in spite of a lack of information or understanding.14 In general, a theory of the shared background of understanding will have to allow us to establish the identity of our judgments in relation to normative practices and shared understanding. Another solution would be to focus on competence, and not directly on shared understanding, as competence can then be loosely related to how background understanding is made present in interactions (i.e. some version of practical holism), allowing us to share focal points of attention, agreement and disagreement in practice.

A Wittgensteinian understanding of competence, especially with regard to the aspect of technique, could be somewhat similar to that of Foucault, and it could be compatible with Heideggerian influences on PT. Namely, it suggests that sameness should not be located either on the inside (e.g., a mental lexicon) or outside of an individual subject (e.g., an external world of relatively stable objects). Instead, someone’s background understanding relies on a host of regularities that came to be embodied by the person as he or she learns to use them to manipulate or control. They allow for self-regulation in normative social practices, but they also first make aspects of the surrounding world intelligible for the actor. PT suggests that social practices form an organized centre structuring this background, but shared understanding could not be supported in social regulation ‘all the way down’ because this would introduce another regress of rule-following. However, the social organization of practices can be interpreted against the backdrop of externalities that are different in kind, but which can be adapted for a specific social order. This could be understood in the sense of Wittgenstein’s social reading of natural history. For example, human beings have certain natural reactions in common: we have the

13 Taylor, C. Philosophical Arguments (1995), p. 168

14 For example, split-brain experiments suggest that articulation as such does not allow us to establish a link between behavior and understanding. Articulations could be confabulations after the fact, which makes it difficult to separate the interpretational from the mute side of rule-following behavior.

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capacity to ‘automatically’ read signs in our language when we look at them, and this shapes our world (e.g., in how we relate to traffic signs and writings on blackboards). These capacities somehow developed in the natural (evolutionary) history of humankind, and these developments are tied to a history of involvement in social practices. With the risk of over-extending a metaphor, this could also be part of the suggested backdrop in §242, where Wittgenstein refers to a “certain constancy in results of measurements” that is part of agreement.

Wittgenstein remarks on pain-behavior also serve as an illustration of how contexts of learning and language acquisition rely on prelinguistic facts (§244), and it develops into an epistemological discussion on shared understanding. Being in pain is not something you normally infer: you simply undergo it as such, or recognize its characteristic expressions (§246). While outer objects can often be identified on the basis of some features that we can all see, our inner sensations and experiences are shown by Wittgenstein to be primordially lacking in criteria of application. Later on, in our discussion of Schatzki, we will see that this embodied and socially situated chain of events becomes central in his PT. In experiences related to pain-behavior (e.g., in one’s upbringing, sports, or in medical practices) we develop more differentiated sensations, more complex attitudes towards pain, and more socially acceptable expressions of being in pain. As a child we learn to act out more complicated patterns of behavior, as we gain mastery and understanding in social practices. Wittgenstein suggested that we already have a body that makes pain manifest outwardly, and, through becoming involved in numerous and complex practices, Schatzki argues that the development of our understanding of pain-behavior can similarly be part of a shared world, as our expressions can be specific to a context (e.g., shrugging of a feeling of pain when one is playing football), allowing/requiring us to act out characteristic expressions that have to grasped from the involved perspective of someone who has been made familiar with a social practice.

Intuitively the ‘natural’ aspect of these reactions would refer to their innate quality – although not every individual has to share all basic reactions. But such a reaction also has a different epistemological status than the forms of understanding we associate with linguistic meanings, such as those of assertions. Namely, in a primitive language-game, it makes no sense to say you ‘know’ that you are in pain, because it makes no sense to doubt that you are feeling pain, and when we see someone express pain, we do not doubt that the other person is in pain. The same immediacy holds for private sensations, but what is unique about private sensations is that they are neither directly expressible nor shareable. Natural reactions (e.g., a baby crying from pain) and private sensations of whatever (e.g., a contained feeling of joy) are both not known, but are respectively expressed and experienced. However, their meaning is transformed and interpreted in normative practices. For most everyday demands on understanding, it will serve no use to separate the natural from the social, because, throughout the course of one’s life, this natural ‘reactivity’ is repurposed, transformed and contextualized in social practices.

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Following Wittgenstein, normativity is shown to presuppose some similarity in what our actions and utterances are about, and this has to be checked in public. But this ground for normativity is not transparently or exclusively located on the ‘outside’ of the subject. We expect sameness of understanding to be acted out in a certain way (both by what we do and what we say). However, this sameness of understanding (or agreement) is not easily qualified epistemologically (e.g., what are the criteria for recognizing sameness?) nor ontologically (e.g., is it social or natural, internal or external?). Without having reached a conclusion about blind rule-following, our discussion suggests that a problematic reading of rule-following reifies shared rules which are assumed to be distributed in practices. In this view, shared rules will be mostly implicit, because explicit rules are vulnerable: the validity of explicit rules depends at least in part on blindly followed implicit rules. However, a general theory of social practices as sets of shared rules makes the conventional and causal indistinguishable, because normativity then simply consists in being governed by the same rules. In this sense, this ‘collectivist’ social ontology of practices collapses back into the individualist-mechanical side of rule-following. The problematic view fails to clarify, on the one hand, how rules constrain an individual’s actions, and, on the other hand, how they are available for conscious attention and reflection. A promising PT looks towards social practices because they require us to learn how to be understandable for others and ourselves, and, through studying actual practices we might learn how we organize ‘going on together’ and ‘shared understanding’. An important aspect of this approach is that normative sameness is not sought out either on the inside or outside of the individual: the issue of what it means to follow a rule “blindly” is not solved by the turn towards public checks on competence exclusively, nor is it settled exclusively in terms of shared internal(ized) rules.

Wittgenstein’s regression arguments against the logical determinacy of rules in rule-following behavior have come to play a pivotal role in social theory. It suggests that representations in the mind, as such, do not determine criteria of application, and, consequently, that normativity has to be explained otherwise. Accounts stressing the centrality of social practices in human activity claim that the context of action in shared practices forecloses the infinite regress: rule-following problems are solvable in the sense that the public context forms an end to the regress. However, the rule-following issues were not just lead-ins towards an anti-mentalist and social account of linguistic competence. A typical PT attempts to describe the social nature of human behaviour and conduct in more detail. From our discussion of Wittgenstein, we have come across some challenges that could problematize the ambitions of PT. For one, replacing individualist mentalism for socially distributed rules would just relocate the problem of rule-following. A promising PT would have to account for background understanding as a stage-setting that allows for social practices, without completely characterizing shared understanding and participation in practices as being based in typically explicit and shared rules. Secondly, a PT has to make some sense of how the structural features of a social practice relates to individual consciousness. Lastly, the rule-following discussion mostly suggests an anti-reductionist

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approach to meaning in the context of normative practices, making it difficult to systematically isolate constants which can explain how a person is shaped and influenced by the structures of social practices, which could also problematize the empirical goals of most PT’s.

What is Practice Theory?

Presenting the concept of shared practices as a ‘central’ or ‘fundamental’ concept for PT introduces some basic challenges. Firstly, as a blanket term, the concept of ‘practices’ might not be the most suitable rallying point for a theory, because it is not immediately clear how it could support deep explanations to accompany its broad descriptive range (i.e., everything that is discernible as a practice), or what distinguishes a practice from mere actions or generic terms (e.g., ‘science’, ‘sailing’, ‘asking questions’, ‘running for office’, ‘setting the table’, ‘getting lost on purpose’, and so on). Secondly, the ‘PT’s’ mentioned in the introduction also introduce other concepts which seem equally important, and they typically do not reduce to one another. For example, Bourdieu describes how one’s social environment and social positioning relates to one’s embodied traits, dispositions and evaluative schemes, or ‘habitus’, which is staged in a complex order of practices, but his concept of habitus is not substitutable for ‘set of practices’. Finally, one could explain the stability of practices by reducing it to implicit understandings which are shared and explicable but open-ended, such as rules of practical reasoning. There would be no need to assert the reality of practices in this view, because practices are merely represented in the mind of individuals as regulatory concepts and categories.

The embodied, embedded and enacted individual subject seems to be the protagonist of PT. However, the same account of the subject is often used without reverting to a PT. What sets PT apart is not this account of the subject, but an accompanying perspective on how we can represent its world. Accordingly, as a first move towards a definition, consider ‘practice theories’ to be deserving of their name because they present ‘practices’ as fundamental, central or indispensable in their social ontology. Any next move would have to be made more carefully, because the question ‘What is Practice Theory?’ seems to have no definite answer. An introduction to PT typically commences with the admission that there is no established way of generalizing over examples of PT more informatively than by simply pointing out the fundamental or central role played by ‘practices’ (e.g., Schatzki 2001, Rouse 2006, Reckwitz 2002, Stern 2003, Turner 2007). This admission is often followed by some suggestions on how to make amends with PT’s seeming lack of general cohesion or direction.

In an attempt to present a somewhat richer account Joseph Rouse makes sense of PT by way of drawing out “principal concerns that have motivated theoretical attention to ‘practices’ in philosophy, social theory, and social science”15

He marks the combined influence of Wittgenstein’s

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comments on rule-following and Heidegger’s account of the primordiality of practical understanding as one of six recurring themes of PT. The other themes or rationales relate to these philosophical influences: overcoming the structure-agency debate16; an emphasis on the role of the body and bodily comportment; a diminished or relativized role of language; the relation between social science and social life; and an anti-reductionist social ontology. He argues that practice theorists, while they differ in their treatment of these individual concerns, have a general concern for these themes in common. This seems accurate. However, Rouse also introduces three conceptual issues that, if one concurs with the list of themes, he claims challenge practice theorists collectively. These challenges are closely related to the rule following-discussion. First, there is the question if the concept of practices actually improves on the problems with justification and normativity that motivates PT’s development. Secondly, there is the issue of the conception of meaning that supposedly underlies the distinction between that what is explicitly formulated (in rules and language) and the tacit background. For instance: can a PT supply a theory of meaning that reliably distinguishes discursive language from inarticulable meanings? And the final issue, according to Rouse, is the meaning of the predicate “social” in “social practices”. It is generally suggested that PT covers a domain of human interaction that can be abstracted from mere material conditions, but it can be challenging to see in what sense “the social” exists, and, in particular, how it can be distinguished from other realms. These conceptual issues will reappear during the course of the following chapters.

16 In a relatively early text about the rise of PT in anthropology (1984), Sherry Ortner noted that PT’s seek an alternative understanding of structure and agency: “The modern versions of practice theory appear unique in accepting all three sides of the triangle: that society is a system, that the system is powerfully constraining, and yet that the system can be made and unmade through human action and interaction.”. More recent examples of PT are also, in general, critical of traditional dichotomies adamant in modern philosophy, social sciences and cultural sciences (e.g., structure and agency, individual and totality, nature and culture, mind and body, thought and action). They do not rob these opposed elements – which help structure our analytical conception of the world – of all their meaning, but they decenter them by showing their dysfunctional ambiguities for descriptive purposes. Describing human life and society by employing them as causes or transcendental poles of factual orders will misrepresent the entanglement of social order and individual agency.

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3. Schatzki and Turner on Social Practices

The concept of practices has been challenged from many angles, and we can wonder why the concept of practices should be singled out in philosophy and social theory at all. What would make ‘practices’ such a central or fundamental concept bringing different levels of explanation together? And how should the concept of practices relate to a philosophical account of the social? The notion of a social practice as a constraining and enabling context of action might seem intuitive, but as a concept it developed against the backdrop of some harrowing philosophical debates.

In this chapter, I will present the Wittgensteinian (and Heideggerian) approach to PT developed by Theodore Schatzki. His account of how the individual is constitutively related to social practices explicitly refers to all the typical controversies that surround PT. As a challenge to this version of PT, we will consider Stephen Turner’s criticisms of the concept of social practices presented in his The Social Theory of Practices. He argues that PT fails to explain social practices because they presuppose but neglect a psychological reality of shared understanding (i.e., how shared understanding is distributed between and beyond individuals). Among others, Rouse and Schatzki have argued against the narrow picture of mentality that they claim figures in Turner’s criticisms. Therefore, in Explaining the Normative (2010), Turner extended his skeptical treatment of practices to the concept of normativity. Some of his earlier criticisms are specifically set up against social theories that invoke a picture of a collective object with causal powers, but, as will be explained, the main arguments of the book challenge theoretical uses of practice-concepts more in general.

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In Social Practices; A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social Theodor Schatzki focusses on practices as “the site where understanding is structured and intelligibility (…) articulated (…).”17

This formulation of the centrality of social practices also guides his exposition of a loosely related and relatively young family of ‘practice theories’.18 He describes tensions within and between these theories in light of their reliance or displacements of familiar dichotomies of social theory (e.g., structure-agency, individual-totality, and mind-body).

First, he has to reconcile structure and agency in order to avoid the extremes of either a socially isolated account of the rational autonomous actor, or a representation of human beings as unconsciously moulded subjects of social conditioning (i.e., the aforementioned ‘judgmental dopes’). His theory of mind, action and body as constitutively interrelated and enacted in clusters of social practices is mirrored in a social ontology that takes ‘the social’ to be a field of bodily expressed, teleologically ordered, spatiotemporally extended and interwoven practices. Secondly, dichotomies between individual and totality are relativized by focusing on nexuses of practices, which allow for theoretical generalizations without fixating social order in ways which underplay the open, dynamic and transient nature of social practices. In his view, a theory of individuality as constitutively integrated in social practices does not require an explanation stemming from a ‘totality’ (the state, society, etc.). Thirdly, his project is to elucidate how the individual is socially constituted in a way that bridges the divide between mind and body without reducing one to the other. The resulting account of the subject is one of ‘expressive bodies’ acting out behaviors which are configured in larger patterns of past doings and sayings. However, sets of behavioral regularities are only family-resembling, which means that they cannot be essentially meaningful as either physiological or mental, they instead have an irreducible meaning in each particular circumstance.19

Schatzki reconciles some harrowing dichotomies of social ontology, but his reconciliations seem to imply a more modest relation of theory to actual practice. In the least, it will not aim to provide any closed theories of mind/action and the social. Inspired by Heidegger’s reappraisal of the question of being, he is focused on how human activity is primordially intelligible in terms of being present and pragmatically involved in the world, and he intends to elucidate how this presence relates to the unfolding of lives in social practices. From an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later work, he approaches being in reference to ‘conditions of life’, designating the mental activity of the subject as follows: “Mind, consequently, is how things stand and are going for someone; and mental phenomena (…) are aspects or ways of this.”20

Most conditions of life have no ostensible biological source that determines its expression (as opposed to, for example, screaming when rupturing ones Achilles

17 Schatzki, T. (1996), p. 12

18 Schatzki prominently mentions Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Francois Lyotard and Charles Taylor (ibid., p. 11). 19 ibid., p. 61

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tendon). The relations between expressions and life conditions are “almost entirely socially constituted”. 21

PT’s often suggest that mentalist inner/outer dichotomies construct shared understanding too theoretically or intellectually, which would imply that shared possessions of a concept have to be inferred as public applications of private mental objects.22 This mentalist order of constitution is largely reversed by (Schatzki’s) Wittgenstein: expressions first make life conditions present in the world. The organization of a practice is divided into (practical) ‘understanding’, ‘rules’, and ‘teleoaffective structures’ (and general understandings).23

An understanding specifies what is already intelligible from knowing how to carry out, identify/attribute or respond to an action. The third component, the ability to respond to a dispersed practice, is absent in many cases, because there simply is no typical response for the performance or identification of a practice (i.e., following a rule: you do not have to respond in a particular way to a successfully performed subtraction across different contexts). An individual action-understanding presupposes that the contexts in which it is performed have a somewhat intelligible background in practices. This does not mean that we are not governed by causal processes, or that they can only be intelligible when they are the effect of an understanding, but, for example, when similar instances reoccur, they will most likely gain normative dimensions in our understanding of them in the context of practices. The concepts that allow us to articulate understandings are also socially constituted, but more on this in the discussion of the Wittgensteinian account of mind that figures in Schatzki’s PT.

Rules do not determine action for Schatzki, and practical knowledge/skill cannot be equated with strict rule-following, suggesting a strong interpretation of the rule-following problem. However rules are part of practices, particularly of integrative practices, e.g., as explicit rules, instructions or principles. As such, they can always leave open change and irregular behaviour in the complex ordering of events, understandings (e.g., of the dispersed practice of questioning), other rules and/or teleoaffective structures. Teleoaffective structures link doings and sayings in the form of expressing hierarchically ordered projects, actions, emotions and many other possible orders of intelligible ends, wants, desires or purposes. The orders of teleoaffectivity that compose a practice are those purposes and ends that are normative for participants

Schatzki finds it useful to make a distinction between dispersed and integrative practices. Both are defined as spatiotemporally extended practices, but they denote a difference in that many practices can appear in almost all situations (e.g., the dispersed practice of questioning expressed by certain characteristic or otherwise intelligible doings and sayings) while others constitute a more

21 ibid., p. 70

22 The modern tradition is accused of treating mental activity too theoretically or intellectually (as inferential and logically coherent), but some

Wittgensteinians/Heideggerians/PT’s are accused of making it appear overly practical: as reducible to contexts of action, or as subsuming doings under sayings (Caldwell, 2012), but we will return to this issue in the third chapter

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delimited set of actions-in-context (“particular domains of social life”24) or doings and sayings (e.g., the integrative practice of a pick-up game of basketball). Dispersed practices, as sets of doings and sayings, are “linked primarily by an understanding they express”.25 For example, explanation is a dispersed practice, as anyone who understands ‘how to explain’ can do it across many different contexts. However, transfigurations of understandings can be prompted by the attributes of an integrative practice, confining the space of intelligible actions and relevant understandings. Furthermore, explicit rules (or principles, instructions, guidelines) and hierarchies of teleologically and affectively weighed ends, emotions and moods also link doings and sayings such that they are ‘organized’ as a practice. For example, in the integrative practice of a pick-up game of basketball teleological and affective components are in play that make one consider it to be inappropriate or annoying to give lengthy explanations while playing. None of these further components have to determine or cause behaviors (while they can), but the organization of an integrative practice confines the course of action in a practice. For now we can say that it opens up a field of possible actions, as it circumscribes what makes sense for someone to do in the integral context of the practice. However, in actuality people are involved in what Schatzki calls ‘nexuses’, ‘bundles’, ‘sites’ or ‘arrangements’ of social practices.

His category of integrative practices counters the suggestion that social contexts simply consist of networks, with, for example, individuals (roles), actions (goals, motives) and objects (devices, materials, artefacts) as their elements. The organization of practices only appears as such when we disregard the constitutive role of social practices with regards to individual mind/body/action. In a representational theory of action mental states (e.g., believing, desiring) and their contents (e.g., the thing believed, desired) are the cause of an action. In his PT, the sense of having more and less correct or appropriate ends and purposes in a practice (‘teleoaffectivity’) suggests a picture in which the actor is not just causally moved by an implicit ‘rule’. Instead, the actor’s perspective on the possibilities of performing an action are shaped by different forms of socially informed learning and understanding.

Removing himself from a mentalist view on social practices, Schatzki avoids constructing an integrative practice as the effect of an individual’s implicit knowledge alone (e.g., implicitly shared symbolic systems in the unconscious mind). PT uses practices to show that shared understanding cannot be located in the head (mentality) alone. He follows Wittgenstein in his use of the term ‘pattern’ in order to counter the view that shared understanding is systematically the effect of either symbolic orders (e.g., carried in texts) or mental possessions. In each situation, behaviour is recognized and understood as a pattern that makes sense in light of a relevant practice. Patterns always have to relate to practices, because practices effect interconnections between all the different theoretical units that have been privileged by one social theory or other (e.g., mental representations,

24 Schatzki 1996 p. 98 25 ibid., p. 91

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mental states, embodied habits, textual signs). In learning, practices have a constitutive role in opening up what actions make sense for an individual to do based on linking their activities to certain tasks (e.g., hammering a nail into a board) – a capacity that does not require articulation beforehand –, but in the context of a practice these performances are linked to certain understandings, further practical knowledge and desires, which are connected to characteristics of a practice. A practice has to be enacted or maintained by the performances of embodied individuals, while the components of a social practice are not constituted or possessed by any individual alone. These components can also be partially articulated in the explicit rules, material setups and mores26 surrounding a practice.

These ‘practices’ show some semblance to Wittgenstein’s language-games, in the sense of them being “open-ended sets of behaviors into which the speaking and using of language are woven”.27

However, Schatzki explicitly aims to contribute to PT, and, while Wittgenstein’s examples address the limited nature of an individualist and representational/mentalist pictures of meaning and language use, they can hardly be said to add up to a social theory of practices. He does interpret Wittgenstein to mean that only explicit rules can be formulated and related to actions, implying that the practice has to “speak for itself” (OC, p. 193).

Going beyond the two mentioned philosophers of ‘the practical turn’ he works towards an empirically informed social ontology, but the skepticism towards essential rules implies that a PT will have to be based on – and checked by – studies of actual social sites. A PT is possible when people exhibit customary reactions to situational occurrences in ways that are normatively tied to social practices. However, echoing Wittgenstein’s presentation of language-games, Schatzki’s practices are emphatically open-ended; e.g., learning how to ride a bike does not determine your action radius, riding style or feelings towards bike-riding, and we will probably not find closure in an articulated understanding of the meaning of an individual’s riding by pointing to a structural feature of bike-riding as a learned behavior in a normative practice (i.e., we will not readily exhaust the possible meanings that could be attached to a specific act of bike-riding, nor will it be easy to apply the right meaning to the action).

In the least, there are many fine-shades of behavior which only gained sense in a particular situation, and Schatzki attests to this richness of possible meanings. This suggests that PT depends on the statistical availability of repetitions, interventions or constants. How does this relate to the suggested open-ness of practice-understanding? In most practices competence is a matter of degree, but even when there is a clear and decisive moment of mastery to be pointed out, it does not have to coincide with a clear cause and/or limited set of possible future actions. However, the indeterminacy of action does not pre-emptively eliminate our attempts at doing social theory. In The Site of the Social, Schatzki demonstrates how actual social sites can make it easier for the researcher to draw out

26 I use the term mores to illustrate an aspect of integrative practices referred to by Schatzki as “teleo-affective structures”, which refers to the affective responses and associations we have with actions in a moralizing sense (e.g., what is and what is not appropriate or desirable as a way of acting, as a means or as an end in the context of a practice)