Questions of Practice in Philosophy and Social Theory

Anders Buch, Theodore Schatzki, Anders Buch, Theodore Schatzki

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351184830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Humanistic theory for more than the past 100 years is marked by extensive attention to practice and practices. Two prominent streams of thought sharing this focus are pragmatism and theories of practice. This volume brings together internationally prominent theorists to explore key dimensions of practice and practices on the background of parallels and points of contact between these two traditions. The contributors all are steeped in one or both of these streams and well-known for their work on practice. The collected essays explore three important themes: what practice and practices are, normativity, and transformation. The volume deepens understanding of these three practice themes while strengthening appreciation of the parallels between and complementariness of pragmatism and practice theory.

Part I
Practices and the Practical Dimension

1
Bodily Postures and the Normativity of Niche Constructive Practices¹

Joseph Rouse

Uses of the concept of a practice in social theory, philosophy of social science, philosophy of language, and interdisciplinary studies of the sciences invoke divergent conceptions of what practices are and their roles in making sense of human life and capacities.² Articulating the World (Rouse 2015) develops a novel, evolutionary-biological conception of practices as forms of niche construction in the human lineage. This paper explores connections between two central features of a niche constructive account of practices: treating individual performances within a practice as taking up bodily postures that are both responsive to and partially constitutive of a meaningful environment, and treating conceptual, epistemic, and moral/political normativity as constituted within practices. The paper has three parts, beginning with an initial presentation of a niche constructive conception. The second part shows how this conception enables fine-grained accounts of practical performances as patterns of interaction and interdependence among these bodily postures and the environmental affordances and occlusions that they both enable and respond to. The final part shows how discursive niche construction accounts for distinctive forms of normativity as a biological phenomenon within the human lineage.

Practices as Biological Niche Construction

Recent developments in evolutionary biology substantially revise conceptions of human evolution long familiar from the neo-Darwinian synthesis.³ These developments also allow a constructive reconception of practices and their philosophical significance. Performances of practices are typically understood as bodily activities that are both responsive to and partially constitutive of a socially meaningful situation. Most accounts of practices treat them as a relatively autonomous domain of social life uneasily situated “between” causal or law-governed natural phenomena and a cognitive domain of mental representations.⁴ A niche constructive account of practices instead offers a more unified conception of practices as integral to how human organisms respond to their biological environments.

This reconception requires revising familiar ways of thinking about organisms and their environments. The biological environment of an organism is not the totality of its surrounding circumstances, but only those aspects that matter to its physiology, development, reproduction, and evolution. Population geneticist Richard Lewontin notes that:

Every element of the environment [of a bird species] is a description of activities of the bird. As a consequence of the properties of an animal’s sense organs, nervous system, metabolism, and shape, there is a spatial and temporal juxtaposition of bits and pieces of the world that is relevant to it.

(Lewontin 2000, 52–53)

An organism’s environment is a pattern of affordances and occlusions to its way of life. A reverse dependence also holds for organisms themselves. The “properties” of an organism and its way of life (its sense organs and sensory capacities, bodily shape and mobility, metabolism, nervous system, behavioral repertoire, and patterns of development) are capacities for response to correlated aspects of its environment. An organism’s body is not a self-contained object, but a pattern of active exchange with its environment that constitutes its way of life. In death, it gradually merges with its surroundings and ceases to be an object at all, and those surroundings no longer make up an environment. In the meantime, its integrity depends upon active exchange of resources and waste products with its environment.

Evolutionary biology has emphasized how environments act upon organisms and their lineages through natural selection, with some recognition of the phenotypic plasticity exhibited by norms of reaction to environmental variations. Niche construction theory (Odling-Smee et al. 2003) challenges this unidirectional focus on environmental influence by recognizing that organisms also transform their environments in evolutionarily significant ways. Niche construction takes three characteristic forms. One is mobility: organisms change their environments and selection pressures by changing their spatial locations.⁵ A second is physical transformations of the environment that affect the selection pressures on its lineage. Organisms inherit not only cell structures and genes, but also transformed environments. Beavers build dams, worms discompact the soil, humans pass on cities, farms, and much more. Social organisms engage in a third form of niche construction, since the behavior of conspecifics is a salient aspect of their developmental and selective environment that can produce selection pressures to reproduce and transform that behavior in subsequent generations. The interactions among natural selection, phenotypic plasticity, and niche construction make evolution a non-linear process of co-evolution between organisms and their environments, whose life-relevant circumstances include their conspecifics and companion species.⁶

Human beings are social animals for whom others’ performances, expressions, and responses are salient and influential aspects of our environment. Language is a striking example of simultaneously material and behavioral niche construction. Humans normally develop and only develop normally in discursively articulated environments. Spoken and written words are familiar and pervasive features of our environments, whose public presence reliably reproduces itself in subsequent generations, via developmental scaffolding and selection pressures for their effective uptake.⁷ Languages in turn only exist in forms that can be and are readily learned by subsequent generations, and that change through transmission to and uptake by new speakers. Equipmental complexes and the practices and roles they encompass are also prominent forms of niche construction, inherited along with their articulation in words, images, and ostension. The prospects for a naturalistic account of human capacities for conceptual understanding dramatically improve by recognizing language, other persistent patterns of practice, and our reconstructed material environment as the outcome of generations of iterated niche construction and adaptation to transformed environments.⁸

Bodily Postures and Environmental Affordances as Micro-Niche Constructive

Discussions of practices try to steer between methodological individualist accounts of action that appeal to psychological contents or genetic-environmental interactions of individual agents, and social wholist reifications of cultures, social structures, or mentalit̀és to explain individual performances. “Practices” are composed of situated performances and capacities of individual human agents,⁹ but those performances and capacities are shaped by a larger pattern of synchronic and diachronic relations among those very performances. Individual performances and capacities are intelligible as enabled, constrained, and shaped by their dynamic, temporally extended interactions. Philosophical accounts of practices show how these patterns are constitutive of the intelligibility of the individual performances composing them.¹⁰ In this section, I turn to the performances themselves, as both responsive to and partially constitutive of their environments.

Practices are composed of embodied performances in publicly accessible settings. Such performances involve a bodily “set” or posture that lets some aspects of their environment become salient, occludes others, and enables or constrains responses to and actions upon and within that environment. Bodily postures are not fixed, but interact dynamically with their circumstances. They adjust in response to how they open a meaningfully configured situation and allow action within and upon that situation. Postures toward a situation can also show themselves as limiting in what they make manifest and the responses they enable, which motivates further adjustments to subsequent performances and their circumstances.

Understanding practical performances as niche constructive requires recognizing the indissoluble unity of perception and action. Philosophy and psychology mostly treat perception and action as discrete processes that are mediated cognitively. Perception is a receptive uptake of sensory input, even if the resulting “appearances” incorporate cognitive processing. Further cognition leads to action conjoining cognitive “instructions” with bodily habits and skills to act “spontaneously” within the circumstances manifested perceptually.¹¹ This conceptual separation misconstrues and distorts both perception and action. Perception is an active exploration of the world, in which a visual field emerges from appropriate movements of the eyes, head, and body, auditory discrimination involves setting oneself to listen and hear,¹² and tactile, olfactory, and gustatory encounters respond to relevant exploratory interactions.¹³ Action in turn is perceptually responsive to the surroundings that both enable and are engaged by that activity. Effective action requires maintenance of balance through proprioceptive and perceptual orientation, while engagement with objects requires ongoing adjustment to their perceptual presence. Grasping an object or moving toward or away from it is a simultaneously perceptual and active response. We should therefore not speak of perception or action separately, but only of practical-perceptual interaction with circumstances.

Participation in social practices always involves skilled practical-perceptual responsiveness. We can distinguish but cannot separate active and receptive components of our performances, whether in using equipment, looking for things or looking out for them, moving through partially occupied spaces, engaging in conversation, or settling into a relaxed posture in familiar circumstances. Emphasizing the unified practical-perceptual character of worldly involvement does not deny a role for cognitive processing or explicit interpretation, but reconstrues that role as integral to bodily comportment within the world rather than as intermediary between perception and action. Self-consciously reflective thought and conceptual explication also involve bodily postures that selectively engage a meaningfully configured environment, partially occluding responsiveness to immediate circumstances. Natural languages and other conceptual repertoires (images, gestures, signs, or equipmental complexes) are environmental configurations that we take up with bodily postures, enabling their effective recognition and deployment.

All living bodies take up postures that allow them to encounter some aspects of their surroundings, partially occlude others, and prepare or block various responses. In this respect, our bodies and those of other organisms do not differ fundamentally apart from details. Human bodily postures nevertheless do differ significantly from those of other organisms in that our environments are almost entirely the product of massively iterated niche construction: replete with words and other signs, equipment, purposively reconstructed spaces (e.g., rooms, streetscapes, yards, “playing fields” or reserved and mapped “wilderness”), and the bodily postures of others both geared toward and partially constitutive of those varied settings.¹⁴ In adopting and adjusting a posture, we reconfigure those constructed environments as patterns of affordances and occlusions. We also do not merely move to new locations, but move among highly varied and iteratively reconstructed settings, while adjusting equipment and reconfiguring spaces. In doing so, we take up distinctive postures towards one another, as ostensive, imitative, directive, and normative.¹⁵ Other organisms are niche constructive (including forms of behavioral niche construction¹⁶), and often respond flexibly to conflicting indications of how their surroundings solicit responses. In many cases, they are attuned to the affective and practical-perceptual postures of conspecifics or companion species. The iterative complexity, multiplicity, articulation, purposiveness, social interdependence, and spatiotemporal and modal displacement of human environments and postured responses still make-up a distinctively different way of life, despite the underlying continuity in bodily attunement to life-relevant circumstances.¹⁷

Situated practices thus constitute a biologically distinctive feature of human ways of life. Humans have dramatically reconstructed and differentiated our lived environments by calling others and holding them accountable for their performances and responses, ostensively indicating aspects of partially shared circumstances and thereby making them jointly salient, developing, and sustaining iterative expressive repertoires that enable indefinitely many articulations of those circumstances and responsive-expressive postures, and constituting synchronic and diachronic patterns that their constituent performances are responsive to as patterns. Continuing interaction with these reconstructed environments selectively transformed our bodies in ongoing patterns of co-evolution.¹⁸ These iterated forms of material and behavioral niche construction thereby establish new kinds of interdependence among our performances and circumstances. Many organisms engage in strategically coordinated behavior, from group hunting to differential contributions to parenting. As Tomasello (2008, 173–185) concluded from his and other studies of primate behavior, however, even other highly social primates are strategically responsive to one another’s performances and capacities rather than cooperatively engaged in common projects or practices. Such coordination is occasion-specific, as the performances and capacities of a social group and relevant others are salient components of the environment to which each individual organism is responsive. Iterative, cooperative niche construction differs from such strategic coordination in its temporally extended patterns of interdependent performance. Strategically coordinated behavior mostly allows more effective achievement of outcomes that could be intelligibly pursued by individual organisms, if not as effectively. Iterated vocative-recognitive-ostensive behavioral niche construction instead allows for interactions whose individual performances are more closely interdependent in whether and how they are performed, and in what circumstances. Whether people buy and sell goods and services, teach and take classes, play multi-person games, speak a language, or conduct a criminal trial, any one participant’s performances would be unintelligible without appropriate alignment with others’ performances, in conducive circumstances.

Maintaining such alignments requires ongoing adjustment of postures, performances, and circumstances. Postures are especially clear examples. Postures not only open us to specific forms of perceptual manifestation and effective action, but also to their own limitations. We...