The theory of practices

 What would it take for an action to be intelligible?

That’s a question from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.

How would you know whether someone is praying, filling out a tax return or proposing marriage?

Human beings live in communities that have practices, ways of life, and our actions are or aren’t intelligible based on whether they fit into those practices. This is not a simple theory and there are obvious difficulties: Practices change, and things that make sense in one culture don’t in another. Consider the range of thinking about arranged marriages.

When we are in a philosophical mood, we sometimes muse that we can never really understand what is going on in someone else’s mind.

Wittgenstein says we understand what’s going on in other people’s minds all the time. Understanding another person’s intentions makes an action intelligible. If you were an anthropologist from Mars and knew nothing of humans and their ways, a game of chess would baffle you.

But the more you understand about the game — the practice of playing chess — the more the intentions of the players become clear to you. The more you understand the practice of the game, the more the players’ actions become intelligible. The actions make sense to you in the context of the practice of a game.

A couple of notes:

• One thing that might make this simple concept seem difficult: We might be fooled by the grammar into thinking that an intelligible action is a species of action. The adjective modifies the more general noun. But it’s the other way around. The intelligible action comes first logically. You have to come to grips with the actions that make sense before you can get to the actions that are simply bewildering.

• I’m less interested in the theory of practices than in the idea that some practices can lead to a good life while others can be disastrous. Even in a culture that can agree on little, you could get a consensus that the practice of learning from good books is better for you than the practice of taking opiates.