Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-15T04:46:37.376Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

What is a Social Practice?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 July 2018

Sally Haslanger
Sally Haslanger*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
*
shaslang@mit.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper provides an account of social practices that reveals how they are constitutive of social agency, enable coordination around things of value, and are a site for social intervention. The social world, on this account, does not begin when psychologically sophisticated individuals interact to share knowledge or make plans. Instead, culture shapes agents to interpret and respond both to each other and the physical world around us. Practices shape us as we shape them. This provides resources for understanding why social practices tend to be stable, but also reveals sites and opportunities for change. (Challenge social meanings! Intervene in the material conditions!)

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 82: Metaphysics , July 2018 , pp. 231 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Shelby, Tommie, ‘Racism, Moralism, and Social Criticism’, DuBois Review 11 (2014), 63Google Scholar.

2 In some cases, the term ‘coordination’ is used as a success term when we have achieved a solution to a coordination problem, defined in the game-theoretic sense (e.g., where the outcome of an action depends on others, there is uncertainty about the other's course of action, and more than one equilibrium). I am not assuming in my use of the term that coordination is always a solution to such a problem.

3 Rawls, John, ‘Two Concepts of Rules’, Philosophical Review 64 (1955), 3–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Rawls, ‘Two Concepts of Rules’, 25.

5 Kukla, Rebecca and Lance, Mark, ‘Intersubjectivity and Receptive Experience’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 (2014), 22–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958)Google Scholar; Kripke, Saul, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar. For useful discussion see Rouse, Joseph, ‘Practice Theory’, Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, Volume 15: Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, (eds) Turner, S. and Risjord, M. (Oxford: Elsevier, 2007), 499–540Google Scholar.

7 McGeer, Victoria, ‘The Regulative Dimension of Folk Psychology’, in Folk Psychology Re-Assessed, (ed.) Hutto, D. and Ratcliff, M. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007)Google Scholar; Zawidzki, Tadeusz, Mindshaping, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

8 Martin, John Levy, Social Structures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also Haslanger, Sally, ‘Social Meaning and Philosophical Method’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 88 (2014), 16–37Google Scholar.

9 Martin, Social Structures, 7.

10 This debate goes back to Weber, and is discussed in virtually every text in philosophy of social science through the 1990s. For a clear and classic characterization of the issues, see Little, Daniel, Varieties of Social Explanation (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

11 Martin, Social Structures, 6.

12 Frye, Marilyn, The Politics of Reality (Trumansburg, New York: Crossing Press, 1983)Google Scholar, Ch. 2.

13 Haslanger, Sally, ‘What Is a (Social) Structural Explanation?’ Philosophical Studies 173 (2016), 113–130CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and ‘Theorizing with a Purpose: The Many Kinds of Sex’, in Kendig, Catherine (ed.), Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice (New York: Routledge, 2006) 129–144)Google Scholar.

14 Garfinkel, Alan, Forms of Explanation: Rethinking the Questions in Social Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. Risjord, Mark W., Woodcutters and Witchcraft (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

15 Zawidzki, Tadeusz, ‘The Function of Folk Psychology: Mind Reading or Mind Shaping?’ Philosophical Explorations 11 (2008), 198CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Sterelny, Kim, The Evolved Apprentice, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), xiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Sterelny, The Evolved Apprentice, Ch. 2–3.

18 Coordination may be a fundamental role of culture, but as J. M. Balkin suggests ‘… [cultural] tools are not always mere adjuncts of instrumental rationality. They are used in many different ways… The first is to get about the world, to understand and make use of it. The second is to interact with other people, and the third is to express and articulate human values’. (Balkin, Cultural Software, 25).

19 Zawidzki, Mindshaping, 41.

20 Sewell, William Jr. ‘The Concept(s) of Culture’, in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn, (ed.) Spiegel, Gabrielle M., (New York: Routledge, 2005), 49Google Scholar.

21 Sewell, ‘The Concept(s) of Culture’, 49.

22 Lessig, Lawrence, ‘The Regulation of Social Meaning’, University of Chicago Law Review 62 (1995), 943–1045CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Stalnaker, Robert, ‘What Might Nonconceptual Content Be?’ Philosophical Issues 9 (1998), 339–352CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 This remains very vague and needs development. I want to avoid saying, however, that the members of the community ‘follow’ a rule or ‘draw’ the inferences. The kind of information processing in question should be available also to non-human animals. Dogs, for example, are capable of communicating and coordinating with humans by processing learned signals and signs in ways that reflect inferential patterns. One way of spelling this out is in terms of an enhanced intentional stance (Zawidzki, Mindshaping, 14–15, 38). See also Brandom, Robert B., Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Williamson, Timothy, ‘Blind Reasoning’, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 77 (2003): 249–293CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Sewell, ‘The Concept(s) of Culture’, 44.

26 Zawidzki, ‘The Function of Folk Psychology’, 204–5.

27 Rouse, ‘Practice Theory’, 530.

28 Zawidski convincingly argues that sociocognitive competence ‘falls short of high-level mindreading because it requires no attribution of concrete, unobservable mental states with content represented via individually variable modes of presentation and holistically constrained causal influence on behavior’ (Zawidzki, Mindshaping, 15).

29 Sewell, William Jr., ‘A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation’, The American Journal of Sociology 98 (1992), 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Swidler, Ann, ‘Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies’, American Sociological Review 51(1986), 273CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Balkin, J. M., Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 19Google Scholar.

32 Balkin, Cultural Software, Ch. 2.

33 Ibid., 25.

34 Richardson, Sarah, Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 221Google Scholar.

35 Sewell, ‘The Concept(s) of Culture’, 51.

36 Kukla and Lance, ‘Intersubjectivity and Receptive Experience’.

37 Ibid., 26.

38 Kukla and Lance, ‘Intersubjectivity and Receptive Experience’, 36.

39 Caroline Winter, ‘Nestlé Makes Billions Bottling Water It Pays Nearly Nothing For’, Bloomberg Businessweek, September 21st 2017. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-21/nestl-makes-billions-bottling-water-it-pays-nearly-nothing-for

40 Anderson, Elizabeth, Value in Ethics and Economics (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Satz, Debra, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Sewell, ‘A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency and Transformation’, 13 (my italics). The quoted part from Sewell is his definition of structure, that I have previously employed in an effort to analyze the practices that make up the structures. It seemed to me plausible not only that practices are self-sustaining, but that once we have this notion of practice, structures can be easily understood in terms of networks of practices.

42 This point was raised in a discussion of this paper at Stanford University in May 2017. Unfortunately, I cannot recall who raised the question. Nevertheless, thanks to the questioner!

43 Sterelny, The Evolved Apprentice, 174–177; Zawidzki, Mindshaping, 17–18

44 Hacking, Ian, ‘The Looping Effects of Human Kinds’, in Sperber, Dan, Premack, David, and Premack, Ann James (eds), Causal Cognition: A Multi-Disciplinary Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 351–383CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mallon, Ron, The Construction of Human Kinds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 For helpful input and discussion, special thanks to Amalia Amaya, Lanier Anderson, Axel Barceló, Michael Bratman, Ruth Chang, Angeles Eraña, Maite Ezcurdia, Kit Fine, Fernando Rudy Hiller, David Hills, Rachel McKinney, Anthony O'Hear, Carlos Pareda, Faviola Rivera, Miguel Ángel Sebastían, Kenneth Taylor, Moisés Vaca, and many others, including audiences where material in this paper was presented at the Royal Institute of Philosophy, Stanford University, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) Institute of Philosophy. Thanks also to Adam Ferner for his help and patience.