SSLT 2025: Rationalizing Practices

In the Roundtable “Rationalising Practices” held on 14th October, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Philosophy and Law Andrei Marmor of Cornell University addressed the concern that the direction of his three conclusions (summarily: epistemic grounding, artifactual constraint, and normative agreement) appears to suggest that any philosophical account of a social practice must rationalise that practice for its participants.This would require explaining to participants why they engage in the practice and what its point is for them, a requirement Marmor terms the “internal rationalisation constraint”.

Drawing upon Chapter 6, “Rationalising Practices” of his book Foundations of Institutional Reality (OUP 2022), Marmor argues that a reductive metaphysical explanation of a social practice is not subject to this constraint, which marks a key distinction between a metaphysical and a hermeneutical theory of social practices. The Roundtable discussion thus focused on whether this internal rationalisation constraint should be endorsed or resisted as a feature of philosophical inquiry into social practices.