Practical Sense and Social Action

Author:

Brownstein, Michael Saul

Graduate Program:

Philosophy

Degree:

Doctor of Philosophy

Document Type:

Dissertation

Date of Defense:

December 15, 2008

Committee Members:

John Philip Christman, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
John Philip Christman, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Leonard Richard Lawlor, Committee Member
Shannon Wimberley Sullivan, Committee Member
Nancy S Love, Committee Member

Keywords:

phenomenology
social practice
social action
practical understanding
intelligent coping
Pierre Bourdieu
internet

Abstract:

My dissertation concerns limitations endemic to those accounts of social action that do not sufficiently distinguish intelligent individual action from actions caused by or defined in terms of second-order mental intentionality. My claim is that accounts of social action can be greatly improved if they recognize that where there is intelligent action, there is not necessarily action driven by reflection, second-order states or higher-order mental content. I develop this claim with respect to three specific kinds of social theorizing: explanations, normative prescriptions and applied accounts of social action. In all cases, I argue, failures to achieve these ends – explanatory, normative and applied – may stem from failures to recognize the practical understanding or “practical sense” of social actors. Practical understanding refers to the skillful know-how that enables individuals to act intelligently in the world. By intelligently, I mean with adept sensitivity and social skill to a background of largely opaque norms that determine how one is to “go on” in practical situations. The central claim I derive from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu and others is that there is a more basic level of intentionality at work in human action than higher-order mental intentionality. My dissertation argues that the study of this basic level of non-mentalistic intentionality helps to solve some of the central problems plaguing explanatory, normative and applied social theories. The dissertation has six chapters which can be grouped into three thematic sections. In the first section of the dissertation, I address explanatory models of action in the philosophy of social science, principally the individualist account developed by Jon Elster and others. I show that a model of social action based on the practical understanding of social actors, such as Bourdieu’s, solves problems which are insurmountable for individualist psychological models of action. In the second section, I address normative social theories. Through a critique of Charles Taylor’s Verstehen thesis, I argue that working to make the meaning of social practices explicit sometimes may have deleterious effects upon the experiences of social actors. Because of the “positive indeterminacy” of practical understanding, normative social theories must attend to the gains and losses of theoretical activity itself. I go on to address models of normative social theory which I consider to be more successful than Taylor’s: I discuss the arguments of the “legal realists” with respect to practices of adjudication, John Dewey’s claims about the reformulation of the operative concepts of social theories and, finally, Bourdieu’s proposals for “self-reflexivity” in social science. In the final section of the dissertation, I show that the study of newly emerging social practices benefits from an account of the practical understanding of social actors. I use the internet as a case study and consider several instances where online social practices raise challenging questions for accounts of social action. I discuss three related issues: the relationship of online information retrieval to intelligent social networks; the nature of disembodied communities; and the changing legal meaning of propriety due to online practices.