“Practices, Normativity, and the Natural History of Human Biological Niche Construction”

Wittgenstein’s discussions of rule-following have often been taken up in practice-based social theories. Wittgenstein indicates a normative ordering and responsiveness expressed in what people do that is more fundamental than explicit interpretation of what they do. These social theories appeal to “practices” as constituting the background orientation, understanding, or competence that enables following rules, answering to norms, and articulating and grasping meanings. These capacities are concretely embedded in interrelations among a practice’s performances or enactments. Theories of social practice have been less attentive to Wittgenstein’s occasional remarks on such activities as belonging to the “natural history of human beings.” I argue for understanding the normative concerns constituted and sustained by ongoing practices as forms of biological niche construction, and thus as integral to the natural history of human ways of life in a stronger sense than Wittgenstein likely intended. Normativity is a biological phenomenon, and the diversity of normative concerns in people’s practice-differentiated ways of life reflects an evolved, “two-dimensional” form of the one-dimensional biological normativity of most organismic lineages. This recognition has important implications for how normative concerns arise and interact, how their content is embedded in practices, and how those concerns are expressed discursively.