Practices and Practicing

Abstract

This paper concerns the question of what it is that philosophers have been talking about, or ought to have been talking about, when they talk about ‘a practice’. This issue is complicated by the fact that, in English at least, there are several rather distinct senses of the word ‘practice’, in two of which ‘practice’ is used as a noun, and another two senses in which ‘practice’ is used as a verb. And all of these uses, both nominal and verbal, are actually quite distinct from, but clearly related to, what philosophers have been interested in when they discuss ‘a practice’.

In Two Concepts of Rules John Rawls offered a definition of ‘practice’ that has been influential on later philosophical discussions of what it is to be a practice: «I use the word ‘practice’ throughout as a sort of technical term meaning any form of activity specified by a system of rules which defines offices, roles, moves, penalties, defenses, and so on, and which gives the activity its structure. As examples one may think of games and rituals, trials and parliaments».  It is a central thesis of Two Concepts of Rules that consequentialist and deontic rules, (or norms), are both essentially involved in the institution and evaluation of practices. It is the thesis of this present paper, however, that if one focuses on the process of practicing a practice in order to develop and maintain the ability to successfully occupy an office in a Rawlsian practice, one can see that Rawls both misidentified the character of those norms and mislocated their targets