wittgenstein and the priority of practice

Ok, I think I have a better handle on this Bloor now, though it's taken me like a week. 

Bloor sets out to win back rule-following for the conservative? tradition? Let me check on that. In any case, it's a question of whether you put theory before practice or vice versa. Which one has the priority? It looks like it's conservative. 

How did Wittgenstein win it back? and what was the problem? The problem was mathematics, rule following in a seemingly extra-social sense. It looks like he did that by making rule-following a practice, just something that you do blindly. There's that quote where he uses the phrase matter of factly I think.

The instances of the rule only seem to exist in advance if we are following it in a mechanical, routine and matter-of-course way. These misleading, theoretical pictures are therefore the result of practice, not insights into its cause.(104) 

The "mechanical, routine and matter-of-course way" reminds me of writing, like you can't teach someone how to write by giving them recipes because genre knowledge includes not genres a knowledge of how the rules can be bent or even when to jettison them altogether (Freadman). 

But the problem, as Bloor says, is if you go with Wittgenstein on this point, and if you think that rule-following is blind, then you can't explain the difference between rule following and merely conforming. This gets us to practice and the importance of Mind. Mind is super important in a lot of these accounts--CHAT, Schatzki, and probably others too. 

To solve this problem, Bloor has to "dilute" what's meant by thinking. 

Two strategies immediately present themselves: both designed, in their different ways, to close the gap which seems to exist between the selfconsciousness of ‘following,’ with its awareness of the rule, and the ‘blindness’ of habit. The first strategy is to diminish the ‘blindness’ of blind rulefollowing, and inject some thought or propositional content into it. The second is to diminish the ‘thinking’ needed to make the action the action it is. The less contentful and specified this becomes, the closer it gets to blind rulefollowing. It will be evident that these two strategies are themselves expres sions of divergent commitments on the priority relations between theory and practice. To dilute the blindness of rule-

106 DAVID BLOOR

following expresses sympathy to the priority of theory; to dilute the thought that goes into action expresses sympathy to the priority of practice. So one strategy is rationalist, the other conservative. The aim, then, is to see if a sustainably minimal interpretation of thinking can be found which simultaneously allows us to say that rulefollowing is ultimately blind, and that following a rule is not the same as merely conforming to it. To do this, I shall discuss one of Anscombe’ s own examples, and give her own solution, which is, I think, both the right answer, and the Wittgensteinian answer. 

Earlier, I was thinking about this in terms of ideology, especially in light of phrases like these: "Our problem may now be expressed sharply as follows: can you do something and simultaneously do it blindly and thinkingly? Does the metaphor of blindness not imply that the behavior is unthinking?" (105). 

I was also thinking about this in terms of Nadel from the CPT volume:

Going with the last bit, the Foucault bit, practices of surveillance are something that we probably do both blindly and thinkingly. 

But I don't think Bloor is getting at either power or ideology. He's getting at math and science. 

Later, I made the connection with truth tests (Boltanski). A truth test is a tautology and as such can only be explained circularly. For example, if someone were to say "That's so Allen!" (the implication being that Allen=Allen), or "Love is love," that would be a truth test. But Boltanski also leaves us room to think of truth tests more capaciously, like somewhere he gives the example of a military march, which made of think of a conference. A conference is a repetition wherein the value and meaning of the institution is confirmed, which is not to say that everyone agrees in the way the field is going, but I think at some level the point of going to a conference is just to sustain the field and its relational infrastructure. 

Also, a tautology is a gloss. 

Just while we're here too, I was thinking of Thevenot:

Verbal glossing practices, on their own, equally fall short. Detached from dispositions to act, they have no real substance. In themselves, they provide no basis for routine rule-following, such as underlies the important phenomenon of noncollusive coordination. We can give six people the task of following the rule ‘+2,’ starting with 0, send them away to work on their own, and when they come back together, they will, for the most part, have produced the same sequence— and be able to agree about its sameness. We cannot understand rule-following as an arrangement which depends on everyone perpetually looking over everyone else’s shoulder. It has phases of this character, but it also depends on dispositions, which drive individuals along between face-toface encounters. 

Planning is a mode of engagement with the world. Planning, familiarity, justification, exploration. I think that's it. And planning is technically rule following. 

§9 We can now connect what has been said to Wittgenstein’s frequently

misunderstood claim...that rule following is an institution 

Wittgenstein never told us what he understood an institution to be, but it is not

difficult to construct an account to carry forward the thrust of his argument. My

claim will be that, in the case of rule-following, its institutional character

depends on exactly those practices of glossing whose role has just been

identified. Our habitual responses become instances of rules in virtue of the

verbal accounts [Allen is Allen] with which we accompany them as we collectively coordinate

our behavior. In general terms, and once again using Anscombe’s formula, to

think you are M-ing is to be able to account your actions in terms of the

institution of M-ing, where that institution itself is constituted by those very

accounting practices along with, of course, the accountable patterns of behavior 

themselves

A tautology is also an account. See Bazerman too vis-a-vis the account. 

Also don't forget the connection to Swidler. There was the socialization problem. 

§7 Have we now resolved the tension between awareness and blindness

threatening Wittgenstein’s antirationalist account of rule-following? The answer

is yes, provided each of Anscombe’s constituents of ‘thinking’ could be enacted

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‘blindly,’ that is, routinely and mechanically. I think they do pass this test. Let us start with being acquainted with the game, and having an appropriate background. Clearly, at some stage, e.g., when we were socialized into game- playing in childhood, games will have been registered in a causal and direct way, where ‘direct’ means: not mediated discursively by propositional knowledge or interpretive steps. To begin with everything must have depended on what Wittgenstein called ‘ostensive teaching’ or ‘training’ (§5–6). We just had to learn by joining in and being told ‘do this!’ (cf. §143–5). Similar points can be made about the next items on the list concerning background abilities and expectations and calculations. Arguably they are all founded in innate abilities and the routine operation of our normal and inherited cognitive propensities. They are, or depend on, things we simply find within ourselves, or which, as far as we are concerned, simply occur.

Nevertheless, there is still a residual problem: ostensive training is just a form of socialization, and so presupposes an institution into which the learner is being initiated. Where did that institution come from? If we explain it by a prior process of socialization, we are only pushing the problem back rather than solving it. To sustain the priority of practice over theory it must be possible to tell a plausible story about the origin of institutions and practices (such as playing a game). This story must not depend on some prior intention, decision, choice, desire, or belief with a determinate propositional or theoretical content. It must be possible to show how a practice can grow up without depending on some prior ‘theory’ about it. If that is possible (and if, e.g., Haugeland [1990] is right, it is possible) then ostensive training will take care of the transmission of the institution or practice in an appropriately nondiscursive way. Some attention to hypothetical models of the emergence of practices and institutions is needed if a final decision is to be reached on the relative merits of rationalism and conservatism. 

You were thinking about the "origin of institutions" part insofar as, in Swidler, she was talking about how the LGBT community in SF changed its identity seemingly overnight. All of a sudden, they were all about maxim diversity--like the more wild and diverse they were, the more unified they were. Something like that. But the important part is, this had to have been blind. No prior theory could have been there so as to socialize people into it. I don't know necessarily what "ostensive training" has to do with this, but maybe people just kind of went with the flow. Who was there though to be like, do this! Do it this way!

"the interpretation now put on the notion of ‘thinking’—in terms of the ability to give a verbal gloss of nonverbal behavior"--it's hard not thinking of giddens in this, and the distinction between discursive and practical consciousness, but also the tautology would be a gloss

"Coins only exist because we treat certain things as coins. (Notice the circularity lingering around such formulations. It is a version of the circularity that made M-ing, as a class, formerly inexplicable.) If everyone were to cease to think of coins, then bits of metal would continue to exist, but coins would vanish into thin air. We can think of all statuses and institutions in this way, i.e., by analogy with currency."--this gets back to the Mind thing again. 

"Applying these ideas to the case of rules, the claim is that the rule R exists as an institution in virtue of being referred to for the purposes of glossing those actions which are identified as, or in terms of, instances of following R. The rule R, as an institution, exists only in and through references to R, citing R, describing actions as instances of R, or as not being instances of R, or as attempts to follow R, or as failures to follow R, and so forth through the entire gamut of possible glosses. The institution of the rule is the currency in which the accounting takes place, and its existence is existence as that currency. The self- understanding of rule-followers, their ‘thinking’ they are following R, is an understanding which invokes the institution of R and, in invoking it, plays its part in constituting the institution as a social reality." instituting a rule, the rule as institution

§

Coming back to this after a day. Still thinking about it. Three ideas. 

1. The problem. I think the problem of this piece can be summed up as follows. We intuit that it's practice all of the way down, but that poses a problem for logic, which seems to be purely theoretical, having nothing to do with the human. That is, humans just have to know the theory and learn how to apply it. Thus, how do we get around this problem? How do we reason such that practice is prioritized over theory?
2. Gesture. This gets back to "ostensive training", but what is ostensive training but the folding in of gesture into theory? or perhaps better, into glossing? I'm thinking right now of Polanyi and his example of bike riding. At the beginning, first of all you have help, that's important; but second of all, the helper just gets you some momentum and then pushes you and you figure it out. I just think this same idea connects to that research on gesture from ed psych. At some level, or at some point, you just have to point, pointing is the ground, it's like this, which gets at the idea (Anscombe’s circle?) that "M-ing cannot be explained" (108); pointing is the bridge, kind of like how dating in high school is the bridge to or better yet practice for marriage. I don't know exactly per se how this relates back to logic and mathematics, but there is a part of Collins that's helpful. 
1. "

   In the last section I laid out a route to the idea of tacit knowledge which started with

   Polanyi’s bike-riding example and which, therefore, took motor skills as the

   paradigm. The sociology of scientific knowledge has also used another paradigm

   to get to the same place, but this time cognitive abilities are clearly

   encompassed. This is the Wittgensteinian ‘rules do not contain the rules for the

   9

   their own application’ route.

   One example that has been used frequently is to do

   with the difficulty of supplying a full set of rules for the continuation of a series.

   First, there is no mathematical inevitability about the right way to continue a

   series and therefore what counts as the correct way to carry it on is conventional.

   Second, it is easy to show that there is no set of rules for continuing a series that

   cannot be ‘followed’ in such a way as to break the usual convention for what counts as a proper continuation

   10 
   Third, a series may have more than one conventional continuation: for example, in the English-speaking world the series 2, 4, 6, 8, can take the continuations ‘10’ or ‘Who do we appreciate?’ depending on circumstances. The problem of the regress of rules shows up in our inability to describe exactly what are the circumstances under which one convention 
   applies rather than another. 

   One can equally well use this idea as a metaphor for experimental skills;

   experimental skills require that one experimenter ‘goes on in the same way’ as another. The conclusion is, once more, that experimental skills are impossible to transmit in formulaic terms. The same consequences follow for experimental method, skills, and replication, as followed from the motor-skills metaphor."

1. Machines and neural nets. I don't have a lot to say about this one, but Collins was saying how neural nets have promise (I think? I was jogging when I was listening to this) because they might show us how it's practice all the way down, how there's nothing mysterious. Because that's the problem at the end of the day. I know this is the problem with Latour too, with the idea of tacit knowledge, which Collins takes up as well...
1. "For example, we may get the feeling that if there is a rule for generating sequences of numbers the sequence is, in some way, already there, waiting for us to trace it out in speech or writing. Wittgenstein insisted there is nothing there. There is no mysteriously preexisting hand-rail to guide us. Second, he explained these pictures and feelings as byproducts of our socialization. The instances of the rule only seem to exist in advance if we are following it in a mechanical, routine and matter-of-course way. These misleading, theoretical pictures are therefore the result of practice, not insights into its cause. Third, he insisted that the only resources we should use for understanding rule-following are naturalistic ones"
2. "

   Our habitual responses become instances of rules in virtue of the

   verbal accounts [i.e., glosses] with which we accompany them as we collectively coordinate

   our behavior [like trying to do assessment differently?]. In general terms, and once again using Anscombe’s formula, to

   think you are M-ing is to be able to account your actions in terms of the

   institution of M-ing, where that institution itself is constituted by those very

   accounting practices along with, of course, the accountable patterns of behavior" I wonder if the formula could be rewritten to say something like
1. To think you are writing is to be able to account for your actions in terms of the institution of writing, where that institution itself is constituted by those very accounting practices along with, of course, the accountable pattens of behavior. It just sounds like teaching. Like a WAW pedagogy. Learn to talk about writing like this. So isn't this just a metalanguage argument? Sure, there is no metalanguage...but like a meta-language as heuristic?
2. "M-ing implies the capacity to gloss or account what is being done as M- ing" so you don't know how to write unless you can talk about writing? so what's the difference between talking about writing and talking about writing in institutionally sanctioned terms?
3. That's not the one I was thinking of though. The one I was thinking of had the word contain in it. "The Anscombe requirement of ‘thinking you are getting married’ does not, and cannot, properly mean anything like ‘knowing the laws of the land.’ The requisite thinking does not mean being cognizant of some fitting legal, moral, sociological, or philosophical analysis of the institution. It can only mean something like: knowing that there is such an institution. The thinking involved is the minimal thinking needed to be accepted as a participant in the institution, where such participation ranges from being an expert to being little more than a user of a few relevant words and phrases. Anscombe expresses this by saying that it is a mistake to suppose, ‘that the explanation of the thought of M-ing must include an account (of M-ing) as something contained in the thought’ (1981a: 17). Whatever thinking you are getting married, or thinking you are playing a game, or thinking you are following a rule, consists in, it does not involve a mental state whose propositional content contains an account of the marriage, the game, or the rule-following. But if it does not contain these things, what does it contain? It must have some content if it is to mark a distinction between following and merely conforming. The answer appears to be that it contains an awareness of the existence of the relevant institutions, and an awareness of the actor as currently participating in them."
   

Still thinking about this. Like take this passage. "So you are playing, and thinking you are playing, the game, if (i) you are acquainted with the game, (ii) have an appropriate background, i.e., an appropriate degree and depth of acquaintance, (iii) you show the right signs of involvement by forming relevant expectations, and (iv) you are currently responding to a game that is being played. Satisfying conditions (i) to (iv) means you are ‘thinking you are playing the game,’ even if you cannot give a discursive account of the game, e.g., by formulating its rules." This sounds like something BH Davidson would say about peer review. So is our task as teachers to be able to get student to transition from merely conforming to thinking they are playing the game?

This also shouldn't be a surprise because BH Davidson is like the guru of practice. He says that word all of the time. 

But that changes the game of teaching entirely. You're not trying to get students to make things necessarily, which you knew, and neither are you trying to get students to produce something that sets off a schema of what good writing looks like, which you also knew too, but I guess it makes me look at teaching differently if the point is to get them to stand in line differently. Like in the example in Bloor of people standing on the right side of the escalator. Maybe students are already standing on the right side, yet the point is to get them to stand on the right side in the right way. That's super dangerous though from an institutional point of view because then how do you justify your existence? especially when people can already technically maybe do what you want them to do?

It gets to improvisation though. Because it people merely conform, then they won't be able to improvise in the future. So this is about transfer too in a big way.