Why Practice Does Not Make Perfect: Some Additional Support for Turner‘s Social Theory of Practices

Abstract

Stephen Turner (1994) is certainly correct to say that ‘practice’ has become a mantra in post-positivist social science. The mantra is typically invoked when a philosopher or sociologist continues to ask how do members of a society justify doing things in a certain way. If the philosopher or sociologist remains unsatisfied with the society’s own modes of self-justification, all one can say is ‘that’s just how things are done here.’ Thus, the appeal to ‘practice’ (or ‘habit,’ or ‘tradition’) is where the justificatory buck stops. The later Wittgenstein is largely responsible for this rhetorical appeal to practice in social science argument, though, as Turner adeptly shows, precedents for the notion go deep into the roots of nineteenth century social thought, especially as theorists were trying to determine whether they had grounds to criticize (or more actively intervene in) the customs of people who behaved quite differently from them. Given Turner’s reputation as a trenchant critic of scientism in sociology, I am especially glad to see that beyond the first five critical chapters, this book includes a final chapter that discusses what the role of practices in social theory should be. 1 I shall set out the book’s argument in its most provocative form, with which I am entirely in agreement, and then proceed to situate it in a broader, but hopefully congenial, intellectual context. Turner makes two major critical points about practices which should hit the ‘practice-mongers’ in social theory very hard. First, although talk of practices is supposed to invite hermeneutic inquiry and eschew any links to positivist social science, nevertheless practices are portrayed as causing people to do things, often over large expanses of space and time (as in the case of a ‘tradition’) and sometimes with a quasi-biological rootedness (as in the case of a ‘habit’). If one of the conceptual reasons for invoking practices was supposed to be that it avoided the complications associated with establishing causation in the social sciences, then clearly ‘practices’ has merely disguised the problem in new verbiage.