Pragmatisme og "practice turn"

Abstract

Practices are of central relevance both to philosophical pragmatism and to the recent ‘Practice Turn’ in social sciences and philosophy. However, what counts as practices and how practices and knowledge are combined or intertwine varies in the different approaches of pragmatism and those theories that are covered by the umbrella term ‘Practice Turn’. The paper tries to show that the pragmatism of John Dewey is able to offer both a more precise and a more radical understanding of practices than the recent ‘Practice Turn’ allows for. The paper on the one hand highlights what pragmatism has to offer to the practice turn in order to clarify the notion of practice. On the other hand the paper claims that a pragmatism inspired by Dewey actually interprets ‘practices’ more radically than most of the other approaches and furthermore promotes an understanding of science that combines nonrepresentationalism and anti-foundationalism with an involvement of the philosopher or the social scientist in the production of knowledge, things and technologies.