Turner The Social Theory of Practices

Tradition, Tacit Knowledge and Presuppositions
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7456-6892-5
Verlag: John Wiley & Sons
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten, E-Book

This book presents the first analysis and critique of the idea ofpractice as it has developed in the various theoretical traditionsof the social sciences and the humanities. The concept of apractice, understood broadly as a tacit possession that is 'shared'by and the same for different people, has a fatal difficulty, theauthor 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'sversion of Wittgenstein, provide examples of the contortions thatthinkers have been forced into by this problem, and show theultimate implausibility of the idea of the interpersonaltransmission of these supposed objects. Without the notion of'sameness' the concept of practice collapses into the concept ofhabit.
The conclusion sketches a picture of what happens when we dowithout the notion of a shared practice, and how this bears onsocial theory and philosophy. It explains why social theory cannotget beyond the stage of constructing fuzzy analogies, and why thestandard constructions of the contemporary philosophical problem ofrelativism depend upon this defective notion.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Turner, Stephen P.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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.

Über Autor(innen)

Stephen Turner is the author of several previous books including The Search for a Methodology of Social Science and Sociological Analysis as Translation.