Social Ontology, Evolution, and the Foundations of Practice Theory

By treating linguistic representation as arising from social interaction, practice-theoretic approaches to language presuppose a capacity for joint action, and this presupposition exposes it to a potential circularity. The presupposition seems to arise when communities are said to endorse or accept rules. Practice theory takes mental representation, including the intentionality of thought and action, to be a consequence or product of linguistic representation, and the intentionality of action is a species of mental representation. Several decades of intensive work on joint action, however, has yielded a range of theories, all of which require sophisticated mental representations, such as propositional attitudes, mind-reading, mutual knowledge, and so on. From the perspective of contemporary social ontology, there is simply no way that practices sufficiently sophisticated to support practice-theoretic accounts of representation could arise without the prior existence of human-like representational capacities. Social accounts of representation in the vein of Wittgenstein, Sellars, or Brandom, one might argue, are simply non-starters. Call this the “social ontology objection” to practice-theoretic accounts of language. The object of this essay is to rebut the social ontology objection by providing a minimalist account of joint action and thereby putting practice theory on a firm social-ontological foundation.