Full Description
Recent methodological debates have shown that practice theory can either be developed by combining and slightly extending established theoretical concepts of inter-subjectivity, social normativity, collective behavior, interaction between agents and environment, habits, learning, collective intentionality, and human agency; or by following a strategy that promotes the quest for completely autonomous concepts. In the latter case, one defends a thesis of irreducibility.
Toward a Hermeneutic Theory of Social Practices advocates this thesis by approaching the interrelational dynamic of social practices in terms of existential analytic. Indeed, this insightful volume outlines a methodology of the double hermeneutics that allows the study of the entanglement of agential plans, beliefs, and intentions with configured practices; while also demonstrating how interrelated social practices with which agency is entangled articulate cultural forms of life.
Suggesting a framework for studying the cultural forms of life within the scope of practice theory, this book will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Social Theory, Philosophy of Social Science, and Research Methods for Social and Behavioral Sciences.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: THE IRREDUCIBILITY THESIS
Holism without Essentialism
Social Practices and the Human Body
The "Hand" and the Readiness-to-hand
Chapter Two: THE FACTICITY OF PRACTICES
Cultural Forms of Life Disclosed and Articulated Within Interrelated Practices
Facticity, Ethnomethodology, and Radical Reflexivity
Chapter Three: CONSTRUCTING PRACTICE THEORY THROUGH DOUBLE
HERMENEUTICS
Defending Irreducibility via Double Hermeneutics
Empirical Ontologies and the Double Hermeneutics
The Frames of Meaning and the Fusion of Horizons
The Integral Circle of Interpretation
Chapter Four: THE TRANS-SUBJECTIVITY OF SOCIAL PRACTICES
Exemplifying Trans-subjectivity
Chronotopes of Configured Practices
Entangled Agency with Configured Practices
The Interplay of Practices and Possibilities
Chapter Five: THE DIALOGICAL SELF AS THROWN PROJECTION IN
PRACTICES
The Dialogical Proliferation of I-positions
Narrating the Self and Positioning
I-Positions and Existential Possibilities
Integrity through Re-positioning
Epilogue
Index
