TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Sociocultural Animals - Joseph Rouse
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226827964.003.0001
[naturecultural;practices;evolutionary theory;cognitive sciences;embodiment;human development;normativity;discursive practices;power;conceptual finitude]
This chapter introduces the naturecultural integration of human biology with our social and cultural complexity and diversity by challenging familiar rationales for separating natural and social “worlds.” These rationales appeal to differences between human and other animals’ capacities, the supposed anormativity of nature, influence from the modern evolutionary synthesis and the cognitive sciences, and failures of past efforts to “naturalize” human social life. Recent evolutionary biology, the social theory of practices, and embodied and enactive cognitive sciences each contribute differently to these challenges. The chapter then highlights basic insights guiding its re-conception of practices as evolved differentiation of human developmental environments. People’s bodily-postured development incorporates closely coupled interdependence with other people’s situated performances and discursive expressions, and complex involvement in multiple practices. It then sketches important consequences of this naturalcultural re-conception of social practices. These include understanding the normative complexity of human ways of life as evolved differentiations of the temporality and one-dimensionality of biological normativity; recognizing language and other expressive repertoires as practical-perceptual responsiveness to discursively articulated environments; differences in power resulting from practice-differentiated development and interdependence; and finite dependence of conceptual capacities on extant discursive practices and social-ecological interdependence with other organisms. (pages 1 - 24)
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1: The Social Theory of Practices - Joseph Rouse
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226827964.003.0002
[practice theories;social practices;rules;normativity;Ludwig Wittgenstein;Martin Heidegger;individualism;social wholes;social-natural dualism;human biology]
This chapter reviews and assesses conceptions of practices as the basic makeup of human ways of life, which are prominent in many social or humanistic disciplines. It endorses three concerns central to most theories of social practices. First, practice theorists follow Wittgenstein and Heidegger in seeking a normative ordering expressed in what people do that is more basic than explicit interpretations of those doings via rules or norms. Second, they reject both behaviorism and cognitivism by understanding practices as meaningful configurations of people’s situated public activities. Third, practice talk circumvents both individualist and social-wholist conceptions of the social world. The chapter then discusses conceptual difficulties in practice theories. One issue concerns whether “social” practices incorporate the material settings of participants’ performances. A second concerns how performances belong to practices and how practices are held together and interrelated, both synchronically and over time. A third issue concerns how people understand and respond to practices, with appeals to bodily skill or language as alternative strategies that have difficulty accommodating one another’s examples. The chapter then argues that these familiar attempts to fulfill the motivating concerns of practice theories fall into debilitating dualisms, rooted in efforts to distinguish social practices from human biology. (pages 25 - 56)
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2: Ecological-Developmental Niche Construction - Joseph Rouse
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226827964.003.0003
[evolution;biological normativity;niche construction;ecological-developmental biology;life processes;organism-environment relations;intra-action;development as construction;hominin evolution;language evolution]
Important developments in evolutionary theory enable an integrated naturecultural understanding of human ways of life. This chapter begins with the constitutive normativity of biological organisms as processes evaluable for their success or failure in sustaining and reproducing those processes. Ecological-developmental biology shows that organisms are goal-directed not as self-contained entities but processes of constitutive intra-action with environments that incorporate other organisms as crucial components, including conspecifics. Biological environments, including behavioral components that facilitate descendant behaviors in later generations, are in turn only specifiable in relation to the organismic life processes they support. Organisms are developmentally constructed and reproduced through these environmentally mediated processes, challenging a long tradition that sought stable continuity underlying changing biological patterns. Organisms and environments co-evolve through this bi-directional causal intra-action. Not only does natural selection change biological populations to adapt to environments; organisms are niche constructive, altering environments and changing selection pressures on theirs and other lineages. Recent work on early hominin evolution builds on these developments to understand how early hominins evolved a cooperatively interdependent way of life in rapidly changing environments, and underwrites new accounts of language evolution. Early hominins’ cooperative, discursive way of life then allowed for the evolved interdependence of diverse practices. (pages 57 - 83)
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3: Postures - Joseph Rouse
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226827964.003.0004
[postures;organism-environment;practices;human development;perception;niche construction;conceptual articulation;roles;temporality;human cognition]
This chapter initiates the book’s constructive account by examining people’s bodily engagement with practice-differentiated environments. It begins with bodily processes and performances as both responsive to and partially constitutive of their developmental environments. The dynamic bodily postures from which organisms encounter and respond to circumstances are strategies for sustaining their own processes. These bodily postures are world-involving: grounded, extending to incorporate tools, and practically-perceptually directed. They thereby constitute their surroundings as meaningful situations. Human bodily postures are distinctive: in responding to circumstances extensively reconstructed to accommodate their needs and activities; migrating among niche-constructed, practice-differentiated settings; responding to conceptually articulated performances; and actively teaching others. People’s mutual directedness toward other bodies as also directedly postured includes response to ostension and linguistic expressions. Organisms are processes of environmentally-mediated development from birth to death, but humans develop in iteratively reconstructed, practice-differentiated, discursively articulated environments. These different environments engaged by human bodily postures are spatially dispersed and temporally extended, and overlapping, through people’s responsiveness to their mutually interdependent activities. They also situate persons within those environments as undertaking diverse roles and styles that are mutually supportive or oppositional. The social and cognitive complexity of human lives is an evolved, developmentally constructive and reconstructive phenomenon. (pages 84 - 106)
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4: Practices
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226827964.003.0005
[practices;rules;games;norms;regularities;interdependence;close coupling;nearly decomposable systems;social;human biology]
This chapter develops a constructive account of practices as structuring human ways of life. This conception replaces earlier accounts of practices as defined by performative regularities, shared presuppositions, or governing norms, by understanding practices as held together by the closely coupled interdependence of their constituent performances. This conception is initially illustrated by two extended examples of teaching and learning in college classrooms and the play of a competitive sport (volleyball). The latter shows how a practice is not determined by rules or norms, but instead institutes rules in response to more complex patterns of interdependence among performances and other practices. The chapter then draws on Herbert Simon’s and John Haugeland’s accounts of hierarchically organized, nearly decomposable systems to understand the differences between the close coupling among performances of a practice and the more limited interdependence among practices, at multiple levels. This understanding of “systems” of practices is illustrated by the dynamically interrelated practices of recruiting, training, sustaining, commanding, and deploying organized military forces. The chapter then uses this conception to show why “social” practices and biological functioning are not autonomously intelligible components within people’s practice-differentiated ways of life. Practices are the basic shape of organism-environment relations in the human lineage.
5: Normativity - Joseph Rouse
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226827964.003.0006
[normativity;organisms;temporality;lineages;goals;prediction;norms;issues and stakes;discursive articulation;assessment]
Normativity concerns appropriate openness to non-arbitrary assessment. Most organisms are only assessable for success or failure in sustaining life and producing descendants. A second dimension of assessment arises from a practice-differentiated way of life. Organisms and practices are internally goal-directed processes, but practices answer both to their own ends and their encompassing way of life. Sustaining practices through multiple generations highlights a constitutive ambiguity of normativity, between a predictive sense of normal performance and an authoritative sense of how practices ought to continue. The complex multiplicity of human normative concerns arises from temporally extended interplay between these two aspects. Misalignments among closely coupled performances or interdependent practices require adjustments to sustain their coupled interdependence, which can then be misaligned in turn. Accountability of performances and practices is to one another rather than to already-determinate norms, expressible anaphorically as issues and stakes in how practices and lineage continue. Efforts to articulate issues and stakes discursively belong to the practices and can in turn be misaligned with its other performances. The constitutive goal-directedness of the human lineage is then no longer confined to whether it continues, but also to how it responds to concerns internal to practices or integrative among practices. (pages 131 - 168)
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6: Language - Joseph Rouse
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226827964.003.0007
[language;communication;niche construction;discursive practices;pragmatism;inferentialism;Robert Brandom;semantics;ostension;conceptual articulation]
Languages are biological phenomena. Humans coevolved and codevelop with linguistic expressions in communicative use, as lineal patterns of behavioral and material niche construction salient in human developmental environments. This chapter argues that prominent pragmatist conceptions of language that begin with discursive practices are insufficiently pragmatist. They take perception and action as interfaces between natural causality and normatively ordered social-discursive practices, with no constructive role for human biology. Robert Brandom’s social-rationalist inferentialism is illustrative in thereby failing to account for the objective accountability of discursive performances. The chapter nevertheless preserves Brandom’s technical semantic apparatus by turning his account inside out. It shows how language use is embedded in the world through people’s practical-perceptual involvement in discursively articulated developmental environments and vocative and recognitive engagement in concrete bodily interactions with others. Discursive practices also ostensively articulate people’s overlapping practical-perceptual environments into objects, properties, and relations as conceptual abstractions from world-involving bodily postures: other animals’ cognitively sophisticated holistic responsiveness to environmental affordances form evolutionary barriers to conceptual articulation. Discursive practices both have their own constitutive ends—ways of making sense—and their performances are integral to other practices, as materially salient components, performative contributions as speech acts, and expressions of their practice-constitutive ends. (pages 169 - 196)
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7: Discourse - Joseph Rouse
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226827964.003.0008
[language;niche construction;discursive practices;representation;sense-making;words;ostension;anaphora;inference;conceptual articulation]
Understanding language natureculturally as niche-constructive replaces representational relations between intralinguistic word uses and worldly entities with the discursive articulation and spatial, temporal, conceptual, andimaginative extension of human developmental environments. Linguistic practices make sense of other practices, situations, and their interdependence by making discursive sense. This chapter surveys three interdependent ways that uses of words are situated to sustain that discursive articulation. First, linguistic utterances and expressions are integral to people’s bodily postured immersion in and negotiation of proximate, practically configured settings. This practical-perceptual embedding of linguistic expressions obviates any need to “connect” language to the world. Second, locally embedded expressions also belong to patterns of discursive practice, whose ostensive, anaphoric, combinatory, and inferential patterns confer more complex significance on their uses. Third, the rich, locally context-specific roles of linguistic expressions are inflected by inferential connections to more limited roles elsewhere, enabling coordination and assessment across contexts. These extended patterns—including material-discursive constructions such as counting, measuring, timing, and scientific experimentation; intralinguistic narratives, metaphoric complexes, or theories; writing and reading—allow new relations of similarity and difference to emerge across settings. They also engage other conceptually articulative practices: images, music, bodily expression and impersonation, games, rituals, and equipmental complexes. (pages 197 - 228)
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8: Power - Joseph Rouse
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226827964.003.0009
[power;resistance;freedom;difference;vulnerability;domination;normativity;temporality;criticism;expressivism]
Differences in people’s capacities, constraints, and vulnerabilities arising from their positioning in practice-differentiated environments are often discussed as relations of social power. This chapter develops a naturecultural conception of power through constructive critical response to theories of power as social. Differences in humans’ capacities and constraints are grounded in people’s biological neediness, vulnerability, and lack of self-sufficiency, with more complex forms in practice-differentiated ways of life. A naturecultural conception emphasizes the roles of material niche construction, the diffusion of power through complex patterns of practice, the discursive practices that both enable and constrain criticism of domination, and the dynamic temporality of power, freedom, and resistance. It also requires conjoining power-over others with power-to accomplish ends. A naturecultural conception of power shares the critical, normative aspirations of social theories of power, but also complicates them by emphasizing how human development, normative concerns, and their discursive articulation depend on the ongoing temporal dynamics of practices. This conception thereby replaces substantive conceptions of power with an expressivist conception of attributions of power as concerned with the normative significance of causal capacities and effects. This role shows that ascriptions of power are normatively committal, but the concept itself has an independent, noncommittal meta-level role. (pages 229 - 261)
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9: Finitude - Joseph Rouse
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226827964.003.0010
[finitude;reason;conceptual capacities;naturecultural;discursive practices;objectivity;normative sovereignty;social-ecological environment;non-human organisms;transcendence]
This chapter addresses two forms of finite dependence of people’s situated capacities for discursive articulation, critical assessment, and transformation of practice-differentiated lives. Immanuel Kant insisted on human conceptual capacities as finitely dependent on and answerable to receptively given sensuous intuition, and also as a prospective commitment (rather than a known capacity) to make judgments from rather than merely according to reason. A naturecultural account of discursive practices revises this understanding of human finitude to involve discursive practices and their social-ecological environmental dependence rather than individual cognition. One issue concerns how human conceptual and critical capacities retain their objective accountability and normative transcendence of parochial interests. The chapter shows how the finite dependence of human capacities on biological evolution and the contingently interdependent outcomes of multiple, practice-differentiated normative concerns still provide for a situated normative transcendence of those contingencies, without requiring a sovereign normative standpoint apart from people’s contingent positions. The second issue, previously set aside strategically, concerns human interdependence with other organisms with whom we cannot reason discursively. The chapter shows why our rational critical capacities are not autonomous social phenomena, but inseparable from how we negotiate our social-ecological involvement with the agency of myriad non-human organisms. (pages 262 - 296)
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