Two concepts of practices

Abstract

Practice talk has been rampant within late twentieth-century philosophy, social theory, and science studies. I have myself been among the perpetrators. Yet familiar discussions of practices as the unarticulated (but interpretable) background that would halt regresses of explicit interpretation have recently been subjected to withering criticism by Stephen Turner (1994) and by Steve Fuller (1989, 1992). Turner has argued that appealing to practices to explain regularities, continuities, and commonalities in social life is pseudoexplanatory. According to Turner, the inference from common behavior to its supposedly underlying source in shared presuppositions or practices cannot be justified, the causal powers of practices are inevitably mysterious, and the transmission or reproduction of practices over time and from one practitioner to another cannot be accounted for. Fuller’s criticism echoes Turner’s objections to practice talk as pseudoexplanatory, and adds a political dimension: he argues that recourse to the geisteswissenschaftliche interpretation of tacit understanding is deeply conservative and antidemocratic, an argument buttressed at least ad hominem by reflection upon the political commitments of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, philosophical precursors of the practice industry.1