The Concept of “Practice” and Its Complications

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Abstract

The last few decades have witnessed a veritable upsurge in the use of the concept of “practice” in the social sciences broadly understood and, more importantly, the concept is being deployed to perform the work of a cornerstone concept, that is, the concept in terms of which research questions are articulated and results compared. Across disciplines and research areas, scholars engage in a “turn to practice”, and nothing less than a “practice theory” has been announced. At the same time, however, the word “practice” is used in distinctly different and even varying ways to the extent that it is questionable if the different schools of thought in this movement are in fact employing the same concept. What has led to this state of affairs is primarily the fact that the concept, in the course of its history, has undergone a series of “conceptual inversions”. The result is a concept with serious complications, which makes it quite easy for authors to lose their semantic bearing. This chapter examines how the concept was developed on the threshold of the Modern Era as a way to reflect on and debate the relationship between, on the one hand, technical knowledge as expressed and conveyed in authoritative texts (law, grammar, medical recipes and procedures, geometrical calculi and architectural plans, navigational charts, and so on), and on the other hand, the application of that knowledge under the conditions of those particular circumstances from which the authoritative texts necessarily abstracted, the inexorable variations and contingencies, the known and unknown unknowns. To express this relationship, scholars adopted the Greek terms “theoria” and “praxis”. The concept-pair “theory and practice” has since then been stabilized and institutionalized but has also, subsequently, been applied to a host of different purposes far beyond concerns with application of technical knowledge: the philosophy of ethics and rights, the philosophy of history and social change, the philosophy of scientific discovery, the philosophy of logic and mathematics, the philosophy of the foundations of social sciences, and so forth. The cumulative effect of the attempts to adapt the concept of “practice” to fit these different purposes is a concept with serious complications but also practical potentials. The aim of this chapter is to clarify the point of the concept – that is, the distinctions we use it for and the work they help us do – and, in doing so, retain its practical utility.
OriginalsprogEngelsk
TitelPractice Theory and Law : On Practices in Legal and Social Sciences
RedaktørerMaciej Dybowski, Weronika Dzięgielewska, Wojciech Rzepiński
UdgivelsesstedAbingdon
ForlagRoutledge
Publikationsdato2025
Udgave1
Sider23-70
Kapitel2
ISBN (Trykt)9781032550503, 9781032550558
ISBN (Elektronisk)9781003428794
DOI
StatusUdgivet - 2025
NavnDiscourses of Law

Bibliografisk note

Published online: 02 October 2024.

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