A Critique of an Epistemic Intellectual Culture: Cartesianism, Normativism and Modern Crises

Introduction

Modern philosophy, it is commonly said, begins with Descartes and one of its hallmarks, according to Richard Rorty, was the so-called “epistemological turn” (Rorty 2009, p. 139). Exemplified in the now familiar kind of scepticism that Descartes formulated and attempted to refute, in the epistemological turn the chief philosophical problem can be said to have become that of the epistemic relationship of representations in an ‘inner space’ of an individual to what these representations should ideally be about, the world, reality, facts, states of affairs. True, there is a fundamental difference between the Lockean empiricist position in which, in the words of the classic philosophers themselves, “the materials of reason and knowledge” derive fundamentally “from experience” and the later Kantian idea “that the objects must conform to our cognition” (Locke, 1690, II.1.1; Kant, 1999, Preface to the Second Edition [1787]). Rorty argued, however, that Kant's views presupposed “a general assent to Lockean notions of mental processes and Cartesian notions of mental substance” and that we may, therefore, effectively speak of a “Descartes-Locke-Kant tradition” (Rorty, 2009, pp. 6, 8–9).

Relating in various more or less intimate ways to the Cartesian mind/body dualism, one of the key characteristics of many influential strands of the 20th and the 21st century human scientific theory has been their marked suspicion of dualisms per se: the structure/agency, subject/object, thought/action and the nature/society dualisms, to name a few. Whether always explicitly traced back to these philosophical roots or not, working out the dimensions, implications, strengths and weaknesses of the Cartesian epistemic heritage has arguably constituted a major intellectual exercise of the 20th and the 21st centuries across the range of human sciences.

Now, continuing with Rorty however, we note that the issue he ultimately takes with the Descartes-Locke-Kant tradition concerns its idea of philosophy as the fundamental study of the grounds or constraints to knowledge, that is, of “frameworks beyond which one must not stray, objects which impose themselves, representations which cannot be gainsaid”, as he puts it (Rorty, 2009, p. 315), regardless of whether these are conceived in a Lockean or Kantian manner. Emerging somewhere in the turn of the 19th and the 20th century, a certain “anti-Cartesian and anti-Kantian revolution”, Rorty says (2009, p. 7), began to take place, the leaders of which in Rorty's view were Wittgenstein, Dewey and Heidegger, and that fundamentally challenged the idea of foundations and constraints.

It is the claim of this essay that, despite these challenges, our intellectual culture remains fundamentally epistemic even if, to be sure, the notion of a private inner space has been disputed, as has that of mental processes and, finally, that of representations1. Consider the chief idea of Rorty's hermeneutics that he derives from the leaders of the anti-Cartesian and anti-Kantian revolution. Here, Rorty says, knowledge is to be thought of as discourse “conducted within an agreed-upon set of conventions about what counts as a relevant contribution” (Rorty 2009, p. 320). For convenience, let us give a view like this the label ‘normativism’ on account of the central use made in these theories of some version of the idea of ‘agreed-upon set of conventions’ as the foundation of, not only human knowledge, but of human action and sociality more generally.

Yet, to me at least, there remains a nagging doubt about normativism which this essay is at pains to articulate (see also Arponen, 2013a, 2013c, 2014b). Does not the normativist picture of human action remain nonetheless, as it were, a functionally Cartesian one, for discourses appear as processes driven by the understanding of conventions by competent contributors (regardless of how these understandings are construed naturalistically or ontologically)? To approach the same worry from a different angle, the world of the Cartesian picture consisted essentially, as Daniel Dennett has been calling it, of the personal Cartesian theatre of experiences played out on the mind's big screen. Even if essentially bigger than the Cartesian privacy of individuals, normativism sees us maintain focus on the relatively small worlds of normatively regulated conceptual spaces of mutual access and listening as the arena in which human action and sociality are taken to play out. This feature of normativism turns out to be problematic in cases involving forms of human action and sociality involving essentially broader bounds. I will discuss two examples below (see also Arponen, 2014a, 2013b).

This nagging doubt takes us to an important facet of the lasting impact of the Cartesian epistemological turn, something one might term the epistemologisation of human action and sociality. Here one tends to view human action and sociality through the lens of some form of knowledgeability, conceptual possessions and abilities—regardless of whether these are conceived as know-that or know-how, or as as tacit, embodied or explicit knowledge, and whether conceived as concerning the physical or social reality. Due to this epistemologising tendency, our intellectual culture remains faithful to the Cartesian heritage, or so this paper argues. The issue here is not that of falling into another dualism, but into a singularism of the epistemic, so to speak. While other spectres, say that of relativism, can and have been raised against normativism, this essay is concerned with the singularity of the epistemic.

Now, this tendency might not be so interesting if it did not have fundamental connections to questions outside theoretical debates. Hence, below I shall suggest that taking a normativist position on human action and sociality entails an epistemic view of the emerging environmental crisis and the on-going economic crisis. It is, of course, not the case that normativist theorists have much theorised about these crises2. Yet, certain dominant accounts of these crises can be seen to be normativist in character, which I argue illustrates the enduring epistemic character of our intellectual culture with implications far beyond theoretical contexts in which the Cartesian heritage has been debated. As will be discussed more fully below, the dominant accounts have certain blind spots which are a product of normativism's fundamental character and cannot, it seems to me, to be eliminated that easily. At the same time, despite its blind spots, some form of normativism remains a chief historical response of the “counter-Enlightenment” to the Enlightenment heritage (Berlin 1981) enjoying a virtually paradigmatic status in wide areas of human scientific debate. It is worth emphasising that I am not going to provide an intellectual history of how normativist thinkers and ideas have influenced those who now formulate theories of the aforementioned crises. My aim is to describe the blind spots of an epistemic intellectual culture with respect to the aforementioned our crises, which I hope to show provides an original angle to the enduring Cartesian influence in philosophy, social theory and far beyond.

In this paper I shall engage with two quite separate strands of the broad family of what I have called normativism. In the next two sections, I will first discuss practice theory followed by Robert Brandom's pragmatism. I shall illustrate how both philosophies involve a normativist position (not a particularly contentious undertaking, I believe) as well as exemplify the so-called epistemologising tendency. After that, we shall take a practical field excursion and critically discuss the epistemologised, normativist conceptions of our aforementioned crises. I will close with a forward looking section discussing the lessons learned and attempting an outline of a different kind of an intellectual culture.

Practices and Shared Understandings

A set of important anti-Cartesian ideas come together in the relative new-comer into the theoretical scene, so-called practice theory often identified as having emerged in the 1970s in Europe in the writings of Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu. Due to its strong anti-Cartesian tendencies, practice theory serves as a suitable starting point into the present discussion.

By the self-admission of leading practitioners, practice theory comprises a rather diverse set of ideas and thinkers (Schatzki et al., 2001, p. 2; see also Shove et al., 2012, chapter 1, and Reckwitz, 2002). Nonetheless, a certain core set of ideas can perhaps be identified. A fundamental starting point is the idea of practices as “the ‘smallest unit’ of social analysis” (Reckwitz, 2002, p. 249). Or as Anthony Giddens put it: “[t]he basic domain of study of the social sciences, according to the theory of structuration, is … social practices ordered across space and time” (Giddens, 1984, p. 2). Practices have been, in turn, described as “temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings” (Schatzki 1996, p. 89). One notable aspect of this description is the emphasis on doings and sayings as opposed to the Cartesian representations. In such formulations we can hear the echoes of Wittgenstein's meaning is use (Wittgenstein, 1958, §43), Heidegger's Dasein (Heidegger, 2000), and perhaps even Marx's “[a]ll social life is essentially practical” (the 8th thesis on Feuerbach, reprinted in Marx & Engels 2007 [1845]).

So far, there is of course nothing obviously epistemic about this picture. However, I am not the only one to have thought (see Arponen, 2013a) that the old Cartesian ghost threatens to climb back on board when, as in Giddens, some ideas of “memory traces … of ‘how things are to be done’ ” (Giddens, 1979, p. 64), or of “standardized elements of stocks of knowledge” that are “applied by actors in the production of interaction” and that “form the core of the mutual knowledge whereby an accountable universe of meaning is sustained through and in processes of interaction” are brought in (Giddens, 1979, p. 83). Many years ago in this journal, Nigel Pleasants argued that Giddens's theory “merely shifts … from the conscious (discursive) to the non-conscious (tacit) cognitive powers of individuals” as the engine of agents' practical activities being thereby arguably philosophically “closer to Descartes and Kant than to Wittgenstein”, the latter being of central, self-confessed influence on Giddens (Pleasants, 1999, pp. 241, 239; see also Pleasants, 1999). Stephen Turner's The Social Theory of Practices (1994) remains an indispensable source of a number of very perceptive lines of criticism of the practice theory framework posing difficult questions about the epistemic engine of collective, practical activities (see also Turner, 2010; King, 2000a; Schatzki, 1997; Button & Sharrock, 1993).

I cannot go into this question here in detail, but it seems that one might entertain similar doubts about the status of Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. Bourdieu, being often identified as a founding father of practice theory alongside Giddens, evidently took habitus as something possessed by agents and characterised it as “a system of dispositions” (see Bourdieu, 1977, pp. 72–73 and Chapter 2, footnote 1) by which we seemingly are in the realm of the psychological, mental or cognitive. At the same time, alongside this rather Cartesian element, Bourdieu's view is also supposed to be a form of practice theory which, it has been argued, is incompatible with the notion of habitus (King, 2000b; see also Chandler, 2013 recently in this journal).

I cannot help but reading such passages as teetering on the fence between the Cartesian representations on the one hand (‘mental patterns’), and doings and sayings on the other, as the bread and butter of practices. In any case, the claim arising from such passages would be that there is no distinguishing between agency and structure—for agency is instantiated in the recursive reproduction of structured activities, i.e. in practices—which entails, further, that it is wrong to suggest that the Cartesian ghost has got back into the machine. Now, first of all, however, looking at the words used above by Giddens and others—say, memory traces, mutual knowledge, reasons and intentions, mental patterns, and that one takes over these—it seems clear that there is at the very least a tension in using these words and saying at the same time that they do not denote presences in, or possessions of, an individual, or of a collectivity, for that matter.

More importantly for the present purposes, however, the practice-theoretical picture remains a functionally Cartesian one in this sense: practices are conceived, not solely but fundamentally, as engagements of particularly epistemically equipped agents. The epistemic equipment here can be characterised differently as comprising a range of types of knowledgeability—as tacit know-how and skill, for example. Some form of mutual knowledge, however, work as the clue holding human associations together. In this sense, practice theorists tend to consider “symbolic meanings, ideas and aspirations” (Shove et al., 2012, p. 14) or “shared understandings” (Schatzki, 1996, in passim) as one of the building blocks of practices. Practice theory does genuinely challenge the singularity of the epistemic in certain important ways, for one, by the observation that practices always involve particular material settings or sites and artefacts as essential to their constitution (Schatzki, 2002; Latour, 2005), an idea to which I will return below. Fundamental is, however, that in the epistemic perspective practices emerge as these relatively small worlds built upon shared epistemic equipment that therefore function as the locus of human action and sociality. That is to say, some notion of shared epistemic equipment (shared norms, for example) remains the organising principle of practices that (self-referentially, performatively) give rise to a small-world of human action and sociality accessible, comprehensible and operable only to similarly epistemically equipped actors. For the time being, my concern is simply to identify this Cartesian remainder in practice theory. I shall give examples of the blind spots of such a remainder later on.

The observation that practice theory is a form of normativism is essential in such an identification. Normativism is echoed in phrases quoted above—such as “memory traces … of ‘how things are to be done’ ” (Giddens, 1979, p. 64) or an “accountable universe of meaning” (Giddens, 1979, p. 83)—in that the word ‘accountability’ and the phrase ‘how things are to be done’ evoke normativity. And indeed, as the contemporary practice theorist Theodore Schatzki wrote, “the entirety of a practice's organization is normative” having to do with prescriptions of “oughtness and rightness” as well as “acceptability” (Schatzki, 1996, pp. 101–102). True, some have glanced at the history of social theory as involving a distinction between “[t]he model of the homo sociologicus [which] explains action by pointing to collective norms and values” and in which “social order is then guaranteed by a normative consensus”, and ‘cultural theories, such as practice theory, “explaining and understanding actions by reconstructing the symbolic structures of knowledge which enable and constrain the agents to interpret the world according to certain forms and to behave in corresponding ways” (Reckwitz, 2002, pp. 245–6). However, apart from the argument that symbolic structures, too, must be seen as subject to the normative force of what it is to use symbols correctly (see e.g. Brandom below), in the present argument, however, normative and symbolic structures can both be taken as part of the epistemic equipment involved in the execution of practices.

Looking at some of the case studies with which the practice theorists have engaged, the claim that in normativism we tend to have to do with relatively small worlds is, I think, corroborated. Hence, Schatzki took the medical herb business in New Lebanon, New York, in the 1850s as well as modern Nasdaq day trading as his examples. While the first example, Schatzki himself wrote, deals with happenings in “the Shakers’ small, semi-closed, and separate communities”, on the face of it, the Nasdaq trading is a thing of a wholly different magnitude involving thousands of individuals in various physical locations (Schatzki, 2002, p. xxi). Yet, the Nasdaq example is ultimately about a manageable set of the traders' doings, saying and practical understandings which Schatzki does a good job at enumerating (Schatzki, 2002, p. 164 ff; see also Knorr Cetina & Bruegger, 2002). Further examples given by other practice theorists include showering (Hand et al., 2005), car driving and skateboarding (Shove et al., 2012). These are all well-executed case studies and can be argued to corroborate the accompanying theoretical frameworks—that is not the aspect of these studies that I am challenging. Rather, my worry is that the frameworks are best suited to the analysis of certain relatively small worlds making us blind to phenomena that transcend such small worlds. A very similar worry was echoed in another applied context by a commentator who argued that practice theory struggles to uncover phenomena “beyond a micro-level focus on doing” and to shed light on the larger scale of “systemic change” (Watson, 2012, p. 488). Towards the end of the essay I shall suggest that the small-world focus of practice theory could be, and has in some instances been, mitigated by explicitly distinguishing between the study of networks of practices, as opposed to a practice.

Negotiating the Normative Force

Where practice theory occupies a position in the field of sociological theory and philosophy of the social sciences, I want to turn now to an example from Anglo-American theoretical philosophy (something one might once have called analytic philosophy) and look at Robert Brandom's pragmatism. Here we find another position that both sets out from a critique of the Cartesian heritage and quite clearly belongs to the family of normativism.

Brandom's pragmatics is a modern, influential position very much carrying the type of a torch lit by Rorty's revolutionaries. The essence of Brandom's pragmatism resides in the idea of the normative force. To begin with, humans are sapient beings, says Brandom, “distinguished by capacities that are broadly cognitive”: our interactions with things and beings “mean something to us, they have a conceptual content for us, we understand them in one way rather than another” (Brandom, 1994, p. 4). Essential to us as sapient beings, Brandom adds, is that meanings, contents and understandings are subject to a normative force: “[t]o have such a content is to be liable to assessment of correctness of representation, which is a special way of being answerable or responsible to what is represented” (Brandom, 1994, p. 6).

Brandom's story of normativity takes us back to Kant: “[o]ne of his cardinal innovations is his introduction of the idea that conceptually structured activity is distinguished by its normative character”, Brandom argues (1994, p. 8). It is here that the focus upon mental processes in an inner space are said to be transcended, for in the Cartesian conception of the human cognitive capacities the focus is upon “a special sort of mental substance that must be manipulated in applying concepts, but in the Kantian way the focus resides in “investigating the special sort of authority one becomes subject to in applying concepts”, Brandom argues (1994, p. 9). The perspective to ‘conceptually structured activity’ described here is, as it is often said in Wittgensteinian discussions, not empirical, but conceptual. And, thus, some pages later in a discussion of Wittgenstein's views, which Brandom takes to be essentially Kantian in their elevation to independence of the normative, Brandom makes the point: to make a statement is “… to settle what ought to be done, what must be done … What actually does or would happen is another matter” (Brandom, 1994, p. 14). One might note that for Brandom, unlike for Rorty above, Kant's views did not presuppose “a general assent to Lockean notions of mental processes and Cartesian notions of mental substance” (Rorty 2009, p. 6) but involved a fundamental break with an empirical in favour of a conceptual investigation.

The notion of normativity is obviously central to Brandom's pragmatism. For him human action and sociality are essentially characterised by practices of giving and asking for reasons. These practices are about attributing and acknowledging normative statuses. As such the practices echo inferential relations between such things as intentional states, speech acts and performances of various kinds. Normative attitudes, dispositions and the like will be involved in the practices of giving and asking for reasons, but these relations are still fundamentally of a normative kind and performances commit and/or entitle performers to various further things. In Brandom, normativity becomes a force on its own—in quite a real sense, our concepts, norms and the like have “a grip on us” (Brandom, 1994, p. 9) as opposed to us necessarily having a full grip on them: “objective, shared concepts can be understood as projecting beyond the dispositions to apply them of those whose concepts they are”, Brandom argues (1994, p. 646).

Brandom, of course, as we saw above, wants to keep the normative and the nonnormative apart. One of Brandom's ideas how to do that is to hold that “the conceptual norms implicit in the practices … outrun the nonnormatively specifiable behavioural discriminations members of that community are disposed to make” (Brandom, 1994, p. 631) and so, too, they “outrun their capacity to recognise commitments” (Brandom, 1994, p. 331). Hence, the claim seems to be, conventions and systems of norms do not reduce to peoples' knowledgeability or the epistemic equipment because people are not to this extent knowledgeable (systems outrun knowledgeability). The human grasp is, as it were, limited: “But what we grasp by our practice extends beyond the part we have immediate contact with …; that is why what we grasp is not transparent to us, why we can be wrong about even about its individuation” (Brandom, 1994, p. 632)3.

Brandom might, then, have managed to provide us a robust sense in which the normative is distinct from the nonnormative. He might have shown that we thereby transcend the Cartesian concern with the mental processes in favour of a view of the grip of concepts on us related to a whole pragmatic realm of the games of giving and asking for reasons.

However, in Brandom's picture, human action and sociality still fundamentally involve agents as epistemic beings observing, understanding and reacting to each others words and performances, even if such processes are cast as on-going games of giving and asking for reasons, and not as already there in the participants' Cartesian representations or other epistemic equipment. In other words, there remains a sense in which Brandom has disputed the Cartesian ontology but remains a functional Cartesian in that human action and sociality are conceived as matters of sapience, that is, as conceptual matters of how people understand—or should understand—each other, our mutual relationships and our physical and social surroundings. While the questions of representationalism, normative and nonnormative might have been by-passed, the Cartesian epistemologising tendency to view human action and sociality as matters of shared concepts and forms of knowledgeability is retained.

Now, one danger of functional Cartesianism is that we become blind to forms of human action and sociality that do not boil down to some form of sapient knowledgeability. The venues of human action and sociality, in Brandom's picture, appear as these relatively small mutual conceptual spaces in which people as it were see and hear (and listen) each other, and within which the commitments and entitlements are then able to play out. This is a problematic aspect of normativism more generally that we ended up with also in the discussion of practice theory above.

Some Blind Spots

To concretise these claims, let us switch from theoretical to distinctly applied or practical examples. I want to now turn to considering the consequences of the enduring epistemic character of our intellectual culture to our conceptualisation of two contemporary crises.

Towards a Different Intellectual Culture

Notable in the foregoing examples is the epistemic character of the dominant accounts of what arguably are much broader non-epistemic phenomena. The dominant views are normativist views in the applied sense that they posit the existence of some form of shared epistemic equipment—say, values, attitudes and perceptions of nature—that sanction, even demand, certain kind of actions towards nature, be it in the frame of larger industrial, technological and political entities or in private lives and lifestyles.

But such epistemic normativist views have crucial weaknesses. Let us be clear: it is not that the mentalities or mindsets identified in these applied forms of normativism might not, to some extent, be real. This is not my claim. Rather, the problem is they are not the whole story and make us overlook deeper, non-epistemic, phenomena. It is as if where we have a piece of human action—in this case, the human induced environmental and economic crises—we feel like we must find the beliefs, values, attitudes and the like that drive that action. Quite like in theoretical normativism, we end up studying the rather small worlds of those we think are responsible for our crises, in our cases the financial and the technocratic elites—who certainly play a role in some aspects of these crises, but their actions do not account for all that make these crises so threatening and difficult to address for us. For this our intellectual culture remains fundamentally epistemic and predisposed to view any human induced change to have arisen from some form of epistemic equipment, a set of beliefs, values, norms, attitudes and the like.

In an epistemic intellectual culture, Cartesian epistemic plot lines, in which a mentality (from that of an age, culture, nation, to a group) is employed to understand and explain the happenings, have a distinct intuitive appeal (the epistemologising tendency). Such explanations have a prominent history, for instance, in Max Weber's thesis from the spirit of capitalism and the protestant ethic, mentalities that allegedly decisively shaped the course of the world history. Turner (1994) critically charts a whole host of similar notions (such as tradition and world-view) from a broad range of authors. I am not saying that some such notion as that of a mentality might not be just the right approach to take, for example, in the analysis of gender relations (for a powerful articulation of such a view, see King, 2000a). I am saying there are at least the above not insignificant cases in which an essentially broader perspective seems to be needed6.

How might an alternative perspective look like? Let us begin by returning to the minority glosses of the aforementioned crises. One distinctive point arising here is the need to think non-epistemically, that is, not in terms of what norms, values, beliefs and the like govern and drive human action, but how do human relate to each other in terms of their diverse activities. Even with all the hoopla about practices and pragmatism, we still are not particularly good at looking at how diverse activities and actors relate to each other.

Think first of the emerging environmental crisis. From the perspective of a theory of social behaviour, attention to the phenomenon of division of labour of geographically and culturally dispersed, but interconnected actors in global industrial market society, seems essential. The human environmental burden arises from the recursive, interconnected actions of the masses in global division of labour. Central is also to heed the difference in positions that the diverse agents hold, which in the case of global industrial market society means also heeding the massive inequalities that pertain to global division of labour (Held & Kaya 2007). Division of labour seems to build, not upon people being similar, but that people play different roles in an interactive system or systems. Importantly, the notion of division of labour denotes patterns of reciprocal and complementary interactions, processes that, due to the heterogeneity and inequality of actors, are not easily analysable (or reducible, or supervenient to something else) in terms of bundles of shared epistemic equipment. Here the Cartesian epistemic lens itself stands at the root of the problem: we need a different category of a concept here than that of the epistemic equipment. (cp. Arponen, 2013a, p. 14)

Environmental problems is an issue in which normativism appears particularly weak as the environmental burden is not understandable solely as an epistemic matter of shared norms that sanction certain types of conduct, or as involving a shared sphere of life in which to negotiate norms, commitments and so on. Not only are the globally dispersed actors remarkably unequal, and therefore not sharing aspirations or even mutual spaces of negotiation, but also clearly people are to a variable extent immersed in the workings of the social systems in which they act occupying in any case very variable roles7. So diverse and unequal are here the positions of the immense range of actors that human environmentally consequential action can hardly be grasped by way of some epistemic notion of mutual understandings and recognition, that, however, have been the chief tools offered by the normativist perspective. Positing epistemic homogeneity as the necessary glue holding human associations together, normativism seems unable to deal with cases in which we find epistemic heterogeneity and inequality.

A different point of criticism facing normativism arises from the case of the on-going economic crisis. The crisis is a product of the discrepancy of mass-consumption and mass-production created to a not insignificant extent by a fundamental shift in the socio-economic make-up of modern developed societies (the decline of the middle classes). Our epistemic intellectual culture remains fundamentally wedded to the view that where there is human action there are—must be—the beliefs, values, attitudes and the like that drive that action. The problem with this is that for anything to be human induced, such as an economic crisis, it can only be viewed as arising from some form of knowledgeability, some form of epistemic equipment. In such an intellectual climate, phenomena that extend in time and space are not easily understood—such as the gradually growing discrepancy in a society's capacity to produce and to consume—and do not easily catch the investigative eye. Giddens duly noted the pervasiveness of the “[u]nacknowledged conditions of action” as well as of “[u]nintended consequences of action” in human action (Giddens, 1979, p. 56)8. As saw above, Brandom, too, recognised the limitations of agents' epistemic equipment in his insistence that commitments and the like outrun dispositions. Yet, both do not seem to see the difficult implication of such limitations of normativism that the notions of shared understandings and knowledgeability will fall short of explaining human action and sociality as soon as the epistemic limitations are admitted to exist.

Also the problem for normativism arising from the tendency to treat as homogenic what is in reality an incredibly complex, developing and temporally stretched out phenomenon is with us in the case of the economic crisis. Speculation by the elites and the amassing of debt by private citizens—both allegedly occurring because Westerners are in generic thrall of financial and material gain—appear as the leading vices of our times and the key engines of the crisis. Capitalism, in particular the spirit of capitalism as geared towards amassing evermore profit and well-being (Weber, 1930), takes a centre state in such a view. While I won't go into his work here in detail, the geographer and theorist Nigel Thrift's 2005 book Knowing Capitalism offers a more sobering perspective to capitalism. He asks us to look at capitalism “as a historian from the future might, looking back at our present time and seeing vast numbers of unresolved issues, differences of interpretation and general confusions” (Thrift, 2005, p. 2). Capitalism, says Thrift, has “a good deal of contingency” built into it, and hence, instead of seeing capitalism as a system of power relations built and continually exploited by the super rich one percent, “I am not at all convinced”, said Thrift, “that the managers of capitalist firms—jointly or severally—know what they are doing for quite a lot of the time” (Thrift, 2005, pp. 2, 3). One might think here of the claim of the psychologist and 2002 economics Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman (2011) that in the complex, rapidly shifting world of investment, even educated recommendations given by experienced investment advisers appear to produce no consistent results as, Kahneman argued, could be gathered from the relevant statistics pertaining to the work done in an investment firm over an eight year period. And indeed, “[i]t is always worth remembering”, Thrift observed, “just how few capitalist firms survive over the long term” (Thrift, 2005, p. 3). Thrift goes against the current identifying and questioning a whole host of notions in terms of which we customarily looks at capitalism. In this paper I have wanted to do something analogous: to expose what to me appears as a normativist epistemic hegemony on understanding human action and sociality and illustrate its blind spots.

One might object that the human collective performance of global industrial market society, for example, splits into countless more particular practices, say from shopping to work practices, and that these normativism can explain, for they involve the suitable kind of small worlds of mutual access and listening. In other words, looked at, as it were, from a high enough altitude, human action and sociality might have this epistemically heterogeneous make-up, but really it is all about the small worlds of practices, it might be said. There must be, the objection might continue, these moments at which the heterogeneous actors come to interaction, and at these points of interaction nothing but the grasp of something like shared norms and understandings can provide the clue that holds their associations together. In response I would first stress that I do not claim norms, shared understandings and other such epistemic equipment to be illusions that people do not in fact posses. I am saying that to ground human action and sociality in human epistemic equipment, and shared epistemic equipment in particular, effectively ignores whether people are in the requisite sense knowledgeable and homogeneous. Secondly, even if people were epistemically knowledgeable and homogeneous, it is not obvious that these phenomena capture the essence of human associations, for the notion of division of labour, for instance, builds essentially upon people's differences in occupation, skills, position and so on rather than their similarity. Why should epistemic sharing instead of divisions, differences and outright inequality be the paradigmatic frame of reference in which we look at human action and sociality? It seems to me it is the Cartesian heritage that sees us to work within this frame.

Furthermore, given such differences in position, is it not in fact likely that people are also epistemically dissimilar? Brandom has nicely described the “delicate position” that Wittgenstein allegedly held on human activities and the shared dispositions and forms of knowledgeability possibly underlying them saying, on the one hand, that a particular process of human action “presupposes a variety of regularities of performance and disposition” but that when we speak of such processes of human action “that those regularities obtain is not part of what is asserted” (Brandom, 1994, p. 46; see also Anscombe, 1981). I would agree in that to speak of global industrial market society, for example, does not assert or presuppose anything about the epistemic equipment of the agents involved. I would, however, disagree that the possibility of a phenomena of division of labour, so central to the modern way of life, presupposes homogeneous dispositions. If anything, it presupposes heterogeneity, dissimilarity, and massive inequality, with the possibility of dividing labour arising from them. I want to throw this question up in the air: might the focus on epistemic homogeneity just be another “form of account which is very convincing to us” (Wittgenstein, 1958, §158)?

Arguably, then, normativism has done us no great favours in comprehending two great crises of our times in the epistemic manner that it does. Going back, however, to the above discussions of practice theory as well as Brandom's pragmatism, the emphasis instituted there on human doings (as opposed to the Cartesian representations), as well as that on skill and materiality of the sites and artefacts of human action, can be useful. These should, however, I would propose, be viewed explicitly relationally, as it were: how are my and our skills and materialities related to other people's different skills and materialities and how do we thereby relate to the sometimes distant others? Perhaps a line of thought like this could be developed from Brandom's view quoted above that “our practice extends beyond the part we have immediate contact with” (Brandom, 1994, p. 632) in so far as this seems to express sensitivity to the fact that people are variously placed and knowledgeable of the institutions they co-perform. Similarly, going back to the aforementioned practice theorists, developing the notions of networks of practices, the linking of practices (Shove et al., 2012) or the mesh of practices (Schatzki, 2002), might prove fruitful here. Here it is not practices as such, but how disparate practices form interlinkages, that is of central importance. In my view, the strength of the practice theoretical work of Elizabeth Shove and colleagues on our environmental dilemmas draws precisely from going beyond single practices to interlinked practices in thinking about ways of alleviating their environmental burden (see Shove et al., 2012 and in particular Shove, 2010). Yet, a lot of the theoretical equipment developed by practice theorists—say, the notions of meanings and shared understandings (Shove et al., 2012; Schatzki, 1996)—concern the elements of a practice, and not a network of practices. In practice theory, there appears to be a theoretical lacuna here.

These and other resources can and are being exploited in contemporary human scientific theory. I have argued, however, that there is an on-going coming to terms with the Cartesian heritage in a range of human sciences and in some highly consequential ways, for instance regarding our widely accepted perspectives to our crises, our intellectual culture remains fundamentally epistemic in character.