This book presents the first analysis and critique of the idea of
practice as it has developed in the various theoretical traditions
of the social sciences and the humanities. The concept of a
practice, understood broadly as a tacit possession that is ‘shared’
by and the same for different people, has a fatal difficulty, the
author argues. This object must in some way be transmitted,
‘reproduced’, in Bourdieu’s famous phrase, in different persons.
But there is no plausible mechanism by which such a process occurs.
The historical uses of the concept, from Durkheim to Kripke’s
version of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions that
thinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show the
ultimate implausibility of the idea of the interpersonal
transmission of these supposed objects. Without the notion of
‘sameness’ the concept of practice collapses into the concept of
habit.
The conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we do
without the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears on
social theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannot
get beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why the
standard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem of
relativism depend upon this defective notion.
Table of Content
1. Practices and their Conceptual Kin.
2. Practices as Causes.
3. Practices as Presuppositions.
4. Transmission.
5. Change and History.
6. The Opacity of Practice.
Notes.
Index.
About the author
Stephen Turner is the author of several previous books including The Search for a Methodology of Social Science and Sociological Analysis as Translation.
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