Understanding International Practices from the Internal Point of

View

Mervyn Frost (War Studies, King’s College, London)

Silviya Lechner (War Studies, King’s College, London)

Introduction

This article aims to provide a conceptual analysis of practices from what we term the internal

point of view. Even though in what follows international practices within the field of

International Relations (IR) will receive special attention, our principal aim is to elucidate the

more basic, philosophical problem of practices. David Stern articulates this problem aptly:

What is a practice? No short answer will do here. At the very least, a practice is

something people do, not just once, but on a regular basis. But it is more than just a

disposition to behave in a certain way: the identity of a practice depends not only on

what people do, but also on the significance of those actions and the surroundings in

which they occur. This is only to begin to answer the question how we are to

understand “what people do” when they are engaged in a practice, or just what a

practice amounts to (Stern, 2003: 186).

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What complicates matters is that different IR scholars have drawn on different disciplines and

vocabularies in developing their positions within the currently burgeoning debate on

international practice theory also known as the ‘practice turn’ in IR (Neumann, 2002; Jackson,

2008; Pouliot, 2008, 2010; Adler and Pouliot, 2011a, 2011b; Kratochwil, 2006, 2011; Brown,

2012; Bueger, 2012; Kessler and Guillaume, 2012; Ringmar, 2014; Bueger and Gadinger,

2014).1 For example, Pouliot (2010) has based his international practices approach on Pierre

Bourdieu’s theory of practice (1977, 1990), Kratochwil (2011) has connected his view of

international practices to the tradition of American pragmatism (James, 1995 [1907]; Dewey,

1981; Peirce, 1932-1935), and Bueger and Gadiner (2014) have identified the importation into

IR of five strands of practice theory originating in sociology—Bourdieu’s praxeology, actor

network theory, community of practice, narrativism, and Luc Boltanski’s pragmatism. Such

disparate articulations of practices leave us wondering what, if anything, makes a practice-

based approach coherent.

To restore coherence we propose a return to the internal point of view. Our central

thesis is that the proper understanding of practices requires the internal point of view

(internalism). To understand something is to recognise or make sense of it as a this or a that.

Internalism, as presented here, is a fundamental standpoint for making sense of any social

practices whatsoever, be they local or global, domestic or international, cooperative or

conflictual. Practices, as a first approximation, are distinctive action domains inside which

multiple individuals participate by being guided by common standards of action such as rules

or norms. These rules and the attendant usages requisite for following the rules are

‘intelligibles’ that have meaning (Oakeshott, 1975). The premise is that we cannot qualify as

participants in a practice unless we are able to understand what its constitutive rules and

usages mean. We may seek to understand a practice for two principal reasons: either because

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we wish to understand what other agents, who are practice participants, do or have done in

the past, or because we aspire to become participants ourselves. Either way, a proper

understanding of any practice demands an internalist perspective.

To support our case we differentiate between two basic standpoints for making sense

of practices—the external and the internal one. Upon explication, they will be shown to be

incongruent and not merely different. Their opposition resembles that between Verstehen

(‘understanding’) and Erklären (‘explanation’), between hermeneutics and natural science, but

is not identical to it.2 Our starting assumption is that the primary object to be understood or

explained is a practice—a domain of intelligent activity that is already understood by its

participants. Irrespective of whether we are engaged in the explanation of practices (practice

externalism) or in the understanding of practices (practice internalism) such practices belong

to the intelligent world of Verstehen.

The problem of how we are able to make sense of practices is akin to the problem of

understanding and translating languages. The core distinction between practice internalism

and practice externalism (‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’ for short), as we shall see, is closely

linked to this conception of practices as language analogues.3 Analytically, the distinction turns

on the relation between the identity of the practice observed, on the one hand, and the

language of observation used to describe it, on the other.4 In the present context

‘observation’ is a technical term broader than ‘scientific observation’ (Harman, 1977: 3-11).

An act of observation has two aspects: (1) identity conditions specifying what type of object is

being observed; and (2) a language of observation (which may affect the identity of the

object). In this discussion, we ask how an observer is able to make sense of a practice. To

avoid confusion, we shall use the expression ‘language of action’ for the common

understandings espoused by the participants in a practice, and ‘language of observation’ for

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the terms of the procedure employed by an observer who studies their practice. Our

internalist thesis suggests that to be able to establish that a putative identity, a practice P,

exists the observer must use terms which the practice participants themselves use in

understanding their own practice, P. Internalism, in brief, holds that the language of

observation must match the language of action used inside the domain of a practice;

externalism denies this.

It is not feasible to examine the whole spectrum of internalist or externalist positions

available. Thus we have picked views representative of each position. For practice internalism

we have chosen to focus on the ideas of Peter Winch (1958, 1972a [1964], 1972b [1959-

1960], 1987 [1976]), a philosopher heavily influenced by the later Wittgenstein (1953, 1978).

Similar internalist arguments have been developed by John Rawls (1955), HLA Hart (1961) and

Michael Oakeshott (1975).5 Winch characteristically departs from the orthodox view that

social science is natural science applied to the study of society. In The Idea of a Social Science

and Its Relation to Philosophy (1958), he portrays social science as a practice in its own right

(Gunnell, 2009), constituted by the commitment of its practitioners to the external point of

view. As a prime form of externalism, social science relies on a uniform observational

language that makes it unsuitable for capturing the puzzling diversity of ordinary human

practices.6 The task of philosophy is to recover the internal point of view and to reclaim the

proper understanding of ordinary human practices that acknowledges their differentia. It is

this Winchean insight that we wish to bring to bear on the discourse of practices in IR, as a

sombre reminder that the status of IR as a social science might need re-evaluation.7

Practice externalism is represented here by the writings of Adler and Pouliot (2011a,

2011b). For many, their ambitious and programmatic writings articulate the very ‘turn’ to

international practices. The practice turn in IR has been examined by Chris Brown (2012) in

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the context of an Aristotelian international political theory, and by Erik Ringmar (2014) via a

critique of the cumulative growth of science. Employing a distinct set of premises that

prioritise the externalism-internalism distinction, in Section One we set out to evaluate Adler

and Pouliot’s externalist position. As we proceed with outlining the landscape of internalism

and its difference from externalism, we raise basic questions about meaning, language and

practice-based action. Section Two is devoted to Winch’s internalist perspective on practices.

Although Winch was preoccupied with reworking a notion of rule-following derived from

Wittgenstein the emphasis throughout is on Winch’s argument.8 We conclude by canvassing

a few core implications of the proposed internalist approach for the study of the global

practices in international relations.

Externalism and international practices

We now turn to Adler and Pouliot’s account of international practices. They define practices

as ‘competent performances’ where the term performance is used interchangeably with ‘an

action’ (or ‘meaningful doing’) (2011a: 6-7, 2011b: 4-5). With respect to understanding

practices, they favour the procedure of direct observation. For Adler and Pouliot, making

sense of international practices demands looking at what top practitioners and decision-

makers in international relations do (2011a: 3, 2011b: 1-2, 28-30). For instance, to understand

the practice of post-Cold War diplomacy between NATO and Russia, we must study the

actions of NATO and Russian security practitioners in the post-1992 era (Pouliot, 2010). The

premise is that what top international relations practitioners do, the identity of their actions

(practices), is intelligible as it stands. ‘Defining what counts as an international practice and

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what does not,’ Adler and Pouliot write, ‘is best left with practitioners themselves in their

actual performance of world politics’ (2011a: 7; see also 2011b: 6). In a positivist vein, it is

assumed that the identity of action under investigation is transparent: it does not depend on

a description used by the analyst.

Adler and Pouliot refine this preliminary picture by specifying five key characteristics of

practices. They hold that a practice:

(1) ‘is a performance’

(2) ‘tends to be patterned, in that it generally exhibits certain regularities over time and space’

(3) ‘rests on background knowledge, which it embodies, enacts and reifies all at once’

(4) ‘weaves together the discursive and the material worlds.’

(5) ‘is more or less competent in a socially meaningful and recognizable way’

(2011a: 7-8, 2011b: 6-7, original emphasis)

This set of features is accompanied by an eclectic methodology that allows the researcher to

pick and choose the object of inquiry at different levels of analysis (Adler and Pouliot, 2011a:

9, 2011b: 8). Thus certain practices can be defined either widely or narrowly, as ‘general

practices’ or as ‘specific practices,’ and they can be seen as components of other, more

complex practices or ‘constellation of practices’ (2011a: 9, 20). Practices can be examined in

terms of their ‘lifecycles’, as going through phases of generation, diffusion, institutionalisation

and fading (2011a: 17, 19, 23, 2011b: 24). What is more, practices can be recruited for various

explanatory purposes. They can be an object of explanation (explanandum) as well as

explanatory factors (explanans) (Adler and Pouliot, 2011a: 5, 18-19). One set of practices can

be invoked to explain the change over time in another set of practices (2011a: 19). Practices,

in the sense of explanans, are ‘bundles’ of ideas, material and ideational structures and

agency (2011 a: 13, 15, 2011b: 14, 16).

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Apart from explanatory categories, practices operate as ontological ones. ‘Practices

not only organize the world–they are also the raw materials that comprise it’ (Adler and

Pouliot, 2011a: 13, 2011b: 15). Practices are the basic ontological entities that cut across the

key theoretical paradigms of IR and allow for the emergence of a common language between

them (2011a: 10). Indeed, ‘the important reason why dialogue across paradigms via a focus

on practice is a real possibility is the concept’s broader ontology which blends material and

ideational factors, as well as structure and agency, into social doing’ (2011a: 12; see also

2011b: 16). Those familiar with IR theorising would recognise in these statements an

ambitious attempt to bridge two of its central meta-theoretical debates—ideas versus

material factors, and agents versus structures.9 These debates pertain to matters of ontology

or the ‘stuff’ composing the world of international relations.

The most perspicuous facet of Adler and Pouliot’s approach is that practices are taken

to be the ‘gluons’ (2011a: 10) of the universe of international affairs.10 Practices are atom-like

units. Ontologically each complex practice has a molecular structure: each can be aggregated

or disaggregated depending on the analyst’s methodological preferences. The twin premises

of methodological and ontological atomism enable a pick-and-mix approach to conducting

social science. For instance, the social scientist might disassemble a practice and then focus

exclusively on its material, or on its ideational, or on its structural components, and

conversely, a set of individual practices can be combined into a ‘constellation of practices’

(2011a: 9, 17, 2011b: 8, 16). Starting with a sociological account of the components of

individual practices, the researcher can build up to a sociology of the practice of practices. The

point is that a complex practice can be broken down and then put back together without loss

of identity. This is permissible because the identity of a complex practice is defined in

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atomistic terms; it is an aggregate—a sum of elementary practices. As we shall see, this

endorsement of atomism is typical for externalism.

Further, Adler and Pouliot embrace an intersubjective conception of practices.

Curiously, they cite Wittgenstein as one of its precursors (2011 a: 8n20, 12, 2011b: 7).

Practices (according to their fifth thesis above) are performances ‘that are more or less

competent in a socially recognizable way’. This invocation of Wittgenstein is insightful, for he

is usually read as a defender of an intersubjective or ‘public’ language (1953: I, §§198-199,

202, 240-242). However, at this juncture Adler and Pouliot’s attempt to ground their analysis

on insights derived from Wittgenstein encounters a major problem. What is at stake is the

question of internalism versus externalism or the relationship that can be assumed to hold

between the object of observation and the language of observation used to describe it. Adler

and Pouliot assume that one and the same procedure of observation can provide us with

observational access to an array of different practices (2011a: 9-10). This is an externalist

premise. It states that the language of observation (the investigator employs in the

procedure) is neutral: it does not affect the identity of what is being observed—and the

language that best fits the requirement for neutrality is a scientific one. In sharp contrast,

Wittgenstein and Winch insist that any valid procedure of observation is bound to the

concrete practice being observed: this is the message of internalism.

What Wittgenstein suggests, and is taken up by Winch, is that the observer must

occupy a position inside a practice in order to understand what its own participants do.

Internalism effectively collapses the distinction between observer and participant, between

the language of observation and the language of action. The rationale obliging us to reason

from within the practice is that practices are not reducible to one another. As Wittgenstein

remarks in a well-known passage (1953: I, §66) no invariant set of properties is common to all

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practices, at most some practices share loose ‘family resemblances’ (1953: I, §67). It is

therefore futile to search for an invariant observational language (science) that can reflect the

foundation of practices. There is no such foundation. The avenue left open to an investigator

is to study each practice on its own terms: as a concrete domain of action constituted by

concrete rules and usages. This brings us to the master notion of rule-following which

Wittgenstein (1953: I, §§145-155, 179-192, 195-219, 1978: VI) deploys to show that each

practice is constituted, as a whole, by its own (domain-specific) standards of action (rules)

that cannot be reduced—without loss of identity—to the standards of another practice.

Rule-following is an intricate notion that needs some elaboration. In paragraph 237

of his Philosophical Investigations (1953) Wittgenstein writes:

Imagine someone using a line as a rule in the following way: he holds a pair of

compasses, and carries one of its points along the line that is the ‘rule’, while the other

one draws the line that follows the rule. And while he moves along the ruling line

he alters the opening of the compasses, apparently with great precision, looking at

the rule the whole time as if it determined what he did. And watching him we see

no regularity in this opening and shutting of the compasses. We cannot learn his

way of following the line from it. Here perhaps one really would say: “The original

seems to intimate to him which way he is to go. But it is not a rule.”

What Wittgenstein means is that by the mere act of looking, we cannot tell whether the

person who uses a pair of compasses, moving them along a line, follows a rule or not. Yet as it

stands Wittgenstein’s idea remains fuzzy. Winch’s major contribution is to have extended,

refined and clarified this idea. To follow a rule, Winch says, is to know that there is a correct,

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as opposed to an incorrect, way of performing a given action: ‘If it is possible to say of

someone that he is following a rule that means that one can ask whether he is doing what he

does correctly or not’ (Winch, 1958: 32). Action, so construed, is based on rules that

constitute criteria for its correct performance.

We must now consider the link between rule-following and social practice. The

concept of rule-following does not by itself reveal what kind of audience is supposed to

understand and accept the rule(s) in question. Wittgenstein pondered the scenario of a single

person who is being taught to follow a rule (1953: I, §143). Imagine that this is a ‘+2’ rule of

addition generating a series... 0...2...4.... The rule offers a public constraint: there is a correct

way of applying the rule, even though it serves to constrain the inner thoughts of a single

thinker. A private rule-following has a public aspect absent from a private language (1953: I,

§256)—a language of inner sensations which its originator, and no one else, could

understand. A rule, ex hypothesi, is a non-psychological entity (it does not refer to inner

sensations): it is a public device. Suppose further that the solitary rule-follower continues the

previous series by writing:...1000...1004...1008.... Is this a new rule (a ‘+4’ rule) or a

misapplication of the old (‘+2’) rule? (1953: I, §185). To be able to tell, we have to know what

it means to succeed in following a rule. This success requires the agent to be able to

extrapolate the same instruction and apply it to future instances of the same type. ‘The use of

the word “rule” and the use of the word “same” are interwoven’, Wittgenstein writes (1953: I,

§225). Responding to this Winch interjects: how do we know what counts as the same? To

define the same we would need another rule (1958: 61, 83), and this would lead to a vicious

regress. To eschew the regress, a practice, an entire domain of interconnected rules must be

presupposed as a background. This insight marked a major change in Wittgenstein’s outlook

that took place in the mid 1930s (Stern, 1991; see also Ben-Mehanem, 1998: 119). On this

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view, the rules and their applications are internally connected within a social practice. The

practice is a social—or common—domain of activity because a community of participants

jointly accepts its rules (this is the so-called ‘community view’; Bloor, 1997: 71; Canfield,

1996). The rules to be followed, then, are not ‘public’ in the sense of standards of reasoning

external to the individual’s mind but ‘public’ in the sense of common standards of action

internal to an entire practice. We say entire because a practice attains intelligibility at the

level of the whole, as a ‘form of life’ (Wittgenstein, 1953: I, § 241). Our conception of

practices, ‘language-games’ in Wittgenstein’s phrase,11 refers to complex social wholes

constituted by rules, a view known as practice holism (Stern, 1991, 2003: 185).

Examples of language-games include board games such as chess, sports games such as

boxing and football; conferences; ceremonies; rituals; moral, political and juridical

institutions; international practices such as war, diplomacy, and balances of power. Each

language-game is constituted by distinctive criteria that determine when an action falling

inside its domain has been correctly performed or not. The upshot is that while practice

internalists like Wittgenstein and Winch distinguish between an action (what one does) and a

practice (a rule-constituted framework) within which the action is performed, practice

externalists like Adler and Pouliot use these two terms—practice and action—

interchangeably. This disagreement over the root conception of action has two important

corollaries.

First, Adler and Pouliot adopt an externalist view of practices. To adopt such a view is

to deny that action is inscribed in a specific framework of rules: a language-game. This

amounts to a denial that there are criteria for correct or incorrect action performance; these

criteria define the complex of rules constituting the practice (language-game) within which

the action takes place. There is a second corollary: if there are no criteria which allow an

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observer to distinguish between mistaken, as opposed to correct ways, of performing a

certain action—then the observer is free to impose a self-chosen description on the behaviour

under observation. The analyst in effect imports his or her own criteria for identifying the

actions observed. Since these criteria do not derive from the practice itself but are brought in

by the analyst, from the outside, they represent external criteria. The investigation of

practices from an externalist perspective may be very complex, subject to requirements such

as consistency, reliability, and parsimony. But the defining tenet of externalism is that it

permits the researcher to use a language of observation that does not match the language of

action used by the agents under observation. At the limit, in highly mathematical domains

such as game theory, 12 there is hardly any connection between these: the language of

observation here is of a different logical order when compared to the language of action. The

researcher cum externalist, therefore, is not constrained by an internalist requirement to

grasp what the actors themselves would take to be competent performances, and research

need not be conducted in a language intelligible to these actors. Whatever actions are thus

identified as objects of observation by social scientists are the product of an external,

scientific procedure. They are not a product of understandings achieved from the internal

point of view where the language of observation matches the language of action.

Winch illustrates this problem by discussing the African Azande whose actions are

being studied by an anthropologist. Where the internal point of view would enable us to

identify the Azande as performing the action ‘consultation with an oracle’, which presupposes

as its framework the practice of witchcraft and magic, the external point of view would take

them to be performing what may be described as ‘irrational action’ (Winch, 1972a [1964]: 16-

17, 22-23, 37-38). This irrationality might be explained by claiming that the Azande act out of

motives of uncertainty about economic production in the future (bad crops, etc).13 In IR we

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might illustrate the same point with reference to Islamic State. We outsiders (that is, we who

are not members of this Jihadi movement) might describe the actions of members of the

Islamic State in any number of ways referring to a holy war, or an insurgency, or clan based

war, or a response to Western imperialism, or a war of Sunni against Shia or in some other

way. But until such time as we have a thorough-going internal perspective, we shall not know

what they are doing.

Why favour an internalist account of action over an externalist one? The answer is that

internalism allows us a proper access to the inner space of meanings constituting a practice: it

allows us not just to see it from some standpoint, but from the standpoint which its own

participants invoke in making sense of their actions, even—and this is key—when to us this

sense might appear to border on nonsense. In the Azande example, to identify the action

consulting the oracle, unambiguously, as an irrational attempt by the Azande to deal with

uncertainty about future crops, is to commit what might be termed the externalist fallacy: to

assume that all action must be understood in terms of universal criteria, rationality in this

case.14 But for the Azande (and for many believers in pagan religions) consulting an oracle is

not an action properly understood in terms of instrumental reason. Until we comprehend the

standing and expectations that the Azande themselves confer on oracles, we shall not know

properly what they are doing in their consultative ceremonies. Just as someone not

acquainted with the meaning attached to sounding the last post at a memorial ceremony in

honour of those who fell in the First World War, would not know what the deed means in the

absence of knowledge about the meaning of war in the practice of states and in the absence

of knowledge about a complex set of beliefs regarding memorial ceremonies. It certainly

would be wrong to see this as a bit of irrational proto-science directed towards resurrecting

the dead.

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The externalist argument for practices is vulnerable on another count. Recall that

Adler and Pouliot claimed that all practices have five elementary traits—they are

performatives, patterned, competent, draw on background knowledge, and weave together

the discursive and material worlds. To see these traits as invariant across different practices is

to adopt the external point of view—its cardinal premise is that a uniform language of

observation can be employed to analyse different practices. We may now ask to what extent

these invariant traits advance our knowledge of practices that we do not yet understand from

an internalist view. Consider the practice of beheadings carried out by Islamic State. To be

informed that this practice, like all practices, will have the five features mentioned, does not

seem to further our grasp of this practice of beheading very much. What we want to know is,

is it a religious practice? Is it a practice of terrific drama? Is it a practice developed in

retaliation for the killing of innocent civilians in response to the bombing raids of Western air

forces? Many other possible accounts are available. We cannot decide which one of these is

the appropriate one until the actions observed are understood in the context of the practice

as the Jihadis themselves understand it. To express the point differently: the five components

of practices that Adler and Pouliot enumerate are too abstract to be informative. Suggesting

that a concrete practice one does not yet understand is patterned, material, ideational, and so

on, does not facilitate the understanding of that practice any more than being told that ‘all

languages contain words’ can help us understand Gaelic.

What stands in the way of abstract, social scientific analysis is the fact that practices

are irreducibly different. The differences are ‘irreducible’ since practices do not have a

common foundation, a base for reduction, as Wittgenstein warned us (1953: I, §66). To

differentiate between two or more practices, then, demands of us that we acknowledge that

they present mutually distinctive meaningful wholes—or to put it another way—that each

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practice is a distinctive unity, a ‘form of life’. This sort of difference cannot be expressed on

the model: a ‘base of invariant components’ (reflecting the invariance across practices) plus

an ‘overlay of changing components’ (reflecting the difference between practices). As Winch

notes, it would be pointless to ask a person familiar with both football and cricket which one

would be the ‘right’ game to play: they are not variants of the same game, and one must

simply choose between them (1987 [1976]: 201). But if each practice is a meaningful whole,

its examination requires a holist standpoint sensitive to meaning. The value of internalism is

that it offers us such a standpoint.

Understanding practices from the internal point of view

The internalism we put forward rests on meaning holism of a particular sort: practice holism.

On this view, the agent’s action has no meaning outside of the whole—the language game or

practice— which constitutes it. That a practice-dependent action is intelligible only within the

context of a practice implies that without knowing what that practice is we would not know

what action to observe. A practice, if you will, supplies the identity conditions for the actions

that belong to its remit: the knowledge of these conditions enables an observer to pick out an

object of observation (the action in question). More generally, whenever an action acquires

its meaning as part of a larger language-game, we must first understand the meaning of the

language-game, as a whole, or its defining rules, before we can consider the meaning of its

parts, that is, the meaning of the actions falling within its domain: this is the what internalism

demands.

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Once we subscribe to the holist logic of practices, we cannot, on pain of inconsistency,

disassemble a practice into discrete bits and pieces, any more than we can ask what the

action ‘scoring a goal’ means by considering it apart from the game of football. If we started

enquiring what the material bit of the action ‘scoring a goal’ is, and what the ideational bit is,

and what the structural forces are which enable players to score goals, we would simply

reveal that we had not understood the point of the game. For football is not an aggregate of

ideas, materials and structures. It is a meaningful whole: a game constituted by rules and by

participants who know how to follow the rules. In a like manner it would be improper to

decompose the action ‘negotiating an international treaty’ into ideational, material and

structural bits.

From the holist standpoint of internalism, it is misleading to present the international

realm in atomistic terms, as consisting of discrete practices that can be piled together into a

‘constellation of practices’. Rather, the core practices we inhabit in the international realm

have the character of macro-level social wholes—they are ‘global’ practices: notably, the

practice of human rights and the practice of sovereign states. These count as ‘global’ practices

not in the geographic sense, but in the normative sense of the term: no matter where on the

globe we happen to live, we cannot exempt ourselves from their authority.15 In so far as we

participate in the global public domain of moral and political life, we are subject to the

authority of the language of rights and that of sovereign states.

Moreover, no categorical distinction divides what might be called ordinary practices,

such as medical practices, local produce markets, and legal practices, from the global social

practices in international relations. By default, a practice is an action domain constituted by

rules, ‘constitutive rules’, which specify performative conditions enabling participants to

perform certain types of action (Rawls, 1955: 24; Oakeshott, 1975: 61, 79, 119-120,171).

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Constitutive rules define a type of action by stipulating that doing ‘x counts as y in a context C’

(Searle, 1969: 35). The rules of chess, for instance, define ‘check-mate’ as a type of action

within the context of a game of chess. Knowing the constitutive rules of the relevant practice

therefore is a condition for making sense of any practice-dependent action; it is not a mere

desideratum. For example, someone not acquainted with the constitutive rules of diplomacy

could not perform—or recognise that somebody else is performing —an action described as a

demarche.

It follows that when we speak of practice competences, we work from the premise

that most participants in a practice already know how to follow its defining rules. Practical

competence, so construed, cannot simply be a matter of acquiring an individual skill in the

absence of having the necessary knowledge of social rules. This is contra to what theorists

such as Adler and Pouliot suggest (2011 a: 8, 2011 b: 7).16 By saying that competences are

determined by antecedent rules we imply that an agent is enabled and at the same time

constrained to perform certain actions in virtue of injunctions (the rules in question) that have

a ‘social’ or ‘public’ character. Within a practice the activity of rule-following, as Wittgenstein

and Winch pointed out previously, cannot be a solipsist business: it presupposes criteria of

correct action that are publicly accessible to other participants in a practice and to those

seeking to investigate it. ‘It is of course possible,’ Winch writes, ‘...for an individual to adhere

to a private rule of conduct. What Wittgenstein insists on, however, is... that it must be in

principle possible for other people to grasp that rule and judge when it is being correctly

followed’ (1958: 32-33, original emphasis; see also 1958: 39). The agent who understands a

practice from the internal point of view is not a Cartesian subject whose private domain of

consciousness is sealed off from scrutiny by other observers. Internalism is an inter-subjective

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point of view that is open to those who do not yet understand the practice but who are

willing to learn how to understand or act within it.

At this point we need to consider the notion of intersubjectivity more closely, for

without further qualification it does not commit us to a particular standpoint (either external

or internal), to a particular theory of meaning, or to a particular conception of the units

engaged in intersubjective communication. The brand of intersubjectivity that Winch and

Wittgenstein recommend is tied to the standpoint of practice internalism. As such it must be

distinguished from famous intersubjective positions associated with Weber’s doctrine of

social action (1978) or Searle’s theory of institutional facts (1969, 1995). For Weber, ‘action is

“social” insofar as its subjective meaning takes into account the behaviour of others and is

thereby oriented in its course‘(1978: 4). In Weber’s memorable example, when two motorists

on a road collide inadvertently this is a natural fact. But when they try to avoid a collision by

deliberately adjusting their behaviour, this is ‘social action’ attuned by intersubjectively

shared meanings (1978: 23). Notice that his account does not refer to following the rules of

the road or to some social practice understood from the internal point of view. The focus of

Weber’s analysis is on the individual agent:

Interpretative sociology considers the individual [Einzelindividuum] and his action as

the basic unit, as its ‘atom’. . .In this approach, the individual is also the upper limit and

the sole carrier of meaningful conduct (Weber, 1922: 415 quoted in Gerth and Mills,

1958: 55).

Action in the sense of subjectively understandable orientation of behaviour exists only

as the behaviour of one or more individual human beings (Weber, 1978: 13).

18

As a result, meaning is by default a subjective notion: it is a motive a subject has inside the

head (1978: 11, 18). Weber’s category of intersubjective meaning marks an important

transition from inner thinking (motive) to outer acting (goal setting) and thereby allows the

researcher to overcome the perils of psychologist and empathy-based accounts of social

action (Weber, 1904: 68ff, Weber, 1978: 5, 19). Despite this, Weber treats intersubjective

meaning as a derivative notion—his argument that the individual formulates goals by ‘taking

into account the behaviour of others’ appeals to subjective meaning. For Winch and

Wittgenstein, in contrast, meaning ab initio is intersubjective, as the ‘community view’ that

underwrites a social practice illustrated. From such a perspective, Weber’s standpoint which

permits recourse to subjective meanings outside of a social world is an external one.

Searle’s position is curious not the least because it is an attempt to bridge the

internal with the external points of view. Searle differentiates brute facts (e.g., James has

brown hair) from institutional facts (e.g., James has five dollars) (1969: 50-52, 1995: 27-29).

Institutional facts exist by virtue of institutions such as money, the market, marriage—

conventions constituted by rules. So far this might seem to be an internalist, practice-based

account. However, for Searle institutions are held together by intersubjectively shared beliefs.

It is only because people in society S believe collectively in the institution of money that the

individual act of Richard giving James a five dollar banknote counts as an institutional fact in S.

This fact is external to the private beliefs of each individual. To ground institutional facts

Searle proposes a move from the ‘I think’ (subjective level) to the ‘we think’ (intersubjective

level) of collective intentionality (1995: 23-26). But a residue of the Cartesian cogito is lurking

behind the proposal since Searle’s unit of analysis is individual consciousness (as a source of

private beliefs and intentionality).17 Ultimately, Searle holds that human institutions (including

19

language) can be explained by a scientific theory of consciousness rooted in physicalism

(where consciousness is causally ‘realized’ in a macro-state of the brain) (Searle, 1983: 265-

266).18 This endorsement of physicalism reveals that Searle’s approach is, at base, an

externalist one.

The preceding remarks allow us to map out the demarcation line between internal

and external. In our discussion the line is demarcated relative to the baseline of an entire

practice (‘internal’ means ‘internal to a practice’), and not relative to alternative baselines

such as individual consciousness (Searle) or subjective meaning (Weber). Subsequently, the

units that take part in an intersubjective agreement within a practice are not per se

individuals or consciousnesses but participants. In light of these considerations, the

significance of Winch’s earlier point about public rule-following can be appreciated—it is that

in their public, intersubjective aspect of intelligibility practices present language analogues.

The metaphor of ‘language-games’ discloses that the analogy is bi-directional. Not only is the

speaking of a language a rule-governed activity (a practice or a game) but, correlatively,

language, as a meaningful whole (comprising a lexicon plus rules for making well-formed

expressions) provides a model for the notion of a practice.

For Winch, the limit of the external point of view is a direct consequence of the limit of

the possibility of translation between different types of languages. In ‘Understanding a

Primitive Society’ (1972a [1964]) he argues that the practices of witchcraft and magic of the

Azande tribes are not irrational, contrary to the contentions of proponents of modern

science.19 As Winch contends, what counts as rational belief and rational action is internal to

the domain of a practice—the practice of Azande witchcraft and magic (1972a [1964]: 30-31,

34). In ‘Belief, Language, and Relativism‘(1987 [1976]) he considers two problems pertinent to

translating one language into another. First, translation may be achieved relatively easily

20

where different societies use different words for similar practices. It is not hard for an English

speaker to translate the English word ‘bread’ into French as ‘le pain’ since in both societies

bread making is presumably a common practice. Second, translation across different orders

of language is more problematic. For example, the languages of science, of philosophy and of

mathematics—are much more self-contained when compared to natural languages (e.g.,

French, German, English, Russian). To illustrate the difficulty, imagine that we have no prior

knowledge of mathematics and that, having encountered a mathematics text for the first

time, we attempt to translate its specialist terms into our everyday English. As Winch

emphasises, in attempting to do this, what we would be seeking is not a new expression for

an activity that we already understand, but an understanding of a new activity (1987 [1976]:

198). In this case, we would need to establish what counts as mathematics to begin with, and

doing this would require us to learn its grammar (in Wittgenstein’s sense): the internal system

of meanings and rules, which, construed as a whole, constitutes the space of thinking and

acting that we refer to as ‘doing mathematics’.20 But although grammar (in this sense)

establishes what counts as proper representation, it is not itself a representation of external

reality.21

Winch concludes that the witchcraft and magic practices of the Azande form a

‘grammar’, and that it is within this grammar that we have to ask, and answer the question of

what counts as rational belief, if we wish properly to understand the Azande’s worldview. To

generalise, in order to make sense of actions located within a practice—or to understand

action from an internal point of view, in our terminology—we should be able to first identify

the background practice. The identity of a practice is contained in its grammar. Only its

concrete grammar will supply us with the relevant descriptions of the actions that fit into the

practice. To do something in a practice is to perform an action under some description of it.22

21

Within the practice of witchcraft, we may find actions describable as ‘consulting an oracle’,

‘reading omens’, ‘finding witches’ and so on. Inside a common practice, a set of descriptions

of actions must cohere with one another and be intelligible as a whole in the same way a set

of idioms cohere within a common vernacular.

Winch’s internalist conclusions lead to a radical critique of social science as an

aberrant, externalist practice. Science oversteps its legitimate boundaries when it seeks to

present its own criteria (scientific rationality, universality, neutrality, etc.) as criteria that

mirror reality, and on this basis, to legitimise such external criteria as a uniform language

suitable for the analysis of different human practices. But science has no privileged access to

the real. ‘For a form of the conception of reality must already be presupposed before we can

make any sense of the expression “what science reveals to be the case”’ (Winch, 1972a

[1964]: 27; see also 1958: 15). In more mundane terms, we may say that each practice

constitutes its own domain of social reality: there is no such thing as reality tout court. If

Winch is right in his assessment, as we think he is, then philosophers and social scientists err

in supposing that a uniform procedure can be discovered—a set of rules of scientific

investigation—which, when followed, would produce correct accounts of action across

different domains of action. In this case, instead of relying on differentiated criteria that are

domain-specific, social scientists recruit externalist, uniform criteria for action appraisal such

as the formula ‘action equals behaviour plus meaning’. Here behaviour is the uniform

component, factoring what the units under observation, even non-human ones, do in terms

of physical movements (e.g., observing the behaviour of rats in reward/punishment

experiments), and meaning is the add-on that accounts for the difference between units that

can grasp meaning and units that cannot (e.g., comparing the responses of rats with human

responses in reward /punishment models). This externalist formula is endorsed by Adler and

22

Pouliot who argue that we can move from the plane of behaviour, to action (meaningful

behaviour), and finally to practice (patterned action) (Adler and Pouliot, 2011a: 6, 2011b: 5).

But it is wrong to think of action as some sort of add-on to behaviour. As Wittgenstein

quipped: ‘What is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise

my arm?’ (1953: I, § 621). My raising my arm exemplifies an action: it discloses the intentions,

plans and decisions of an integrated actor, a choosing and thinking self, and is a benchmark of

an intelligent social world.23 Conversely, my arm going up exemplifies mere behaviour (since a

robotic mechanism may be pulling my limbs upwards without any conscious intention on my

part). This distinction between behaviour and action is not a pedantic joust. It points to the

background texture of the world to which we belong, and by siding with, inter alia, Winch,

Wittgenstein, and Oakeshott in treating the concept of action as basic, we are choosing to

understand the world from the standpoint of intelligent human conduct—from the internal

point of view, not from a uniform, external point of view.

In bringing this discussion to a close we may note that externalism is not coextensive

with behaviouralism or the positivist methodology of science, even though they are perhaps

its best known representatives. What we have said so far about the external point of view as a

fundamental standpoint of making sense of what people do, which gravitates towards

invariance, uniformity, and commensurability, applies to game theory and rational choice

theory,24 Althusser’s structural Marxism (2008), and the doctrine of ethical naturalism (Moore

1903). Indeed, it applies to any approach to analysing action in which the language of

observation is imputed from the outside: as when the actors observed are assumed to be

acting on as-if conditions rather than on conditions that (if brought to their attention) would

be intelligible to them. In sum, the externalist view cannot provide a proper or correct

23

account of what we do, as participants in different practices, since it denies that there are

different grammars of appropriateness that operate as orders of differentiation and meaning.

Conclusion

What are the key implications for the study of international relations and the role of the IR

scholar as a social scientist that flow from our internalist analysis of social practices? The first

thing to recognise is that we, as thinking and choosing human beings, are already competent

participants in global practices: we already posses a great deal of understanding of the core

standards constituting such practices. Of course not everybody has the same depth of

understanding: mistakes, confusions abound, and there may even be deliberate foul play.

From an internalist perspective, the social scientist can be seen as a participant in a practice

whose task is to clarify, find coherence, or detect incoherence, in the claims and

counterclaims participants make within that practice. Winch’s internalism in effect treats the

distinction between an analyst (scholar, scientist) and a practice participant as a matter of

degree. The social scientist is not Plato’s philosopher who alone can bring the light of

knowledge to the cave (Oakeshott, 1975: 27-31) but a participant in a practice who seeks

better to understand what is already imperfectly understood. In an ethical sense, the scholar

might assume the role of a social critic whose job is to expose hypocrisy and acts of injustice

occurring within one’s own society (Walzer, 1987).

The major global practices in international relations, the practice of human rights and

the practice of sovereign states, constitute us in a shared normative space. We cannot step

outside their authority. We know for instance that a practice of sovereign states exists

because its defining norms—peaceful settlement of disputes, non-intervention, observing

24

limits in the conduct of war, keeping of treaties—are intelligible to us (Frost, 1996:104-136).

These norms are internal to this practice. We can understand the claims and criticisms made

by other participants in the global practice of states, when they evaluate the actions of states

(including our own state) in the international domain made by reference to these norms. To

mention but a few of these: charges are made about unjustified intervention in the internal

affairs of other states (Holzgrefe, 2003; Nardin and Williams, 2006; Weiss, 2012), about

failures to respond to gross human rights abuses taking place in specific areas (Buchanan,

2010; Alston and Goodman, 2012; Donnelly, 2013), about duties to build up underdeveloped

states (Paris and Sisk, 2004; Chandler, 2006), about the rights and wrongs of acts of war

(Walzer, 2006; Rengger, 2013; Falk, 2014). A rich and ongoing set of claims and counter

claims, descriptions and counter descriptions, are being made about what is happening within

the global practice of states which can only be understood in terms of the internal point of

view as we have described it. That these are not merely evaluations from some external,

invariant point of view is evident from the way in which those criticised for their actions

respond in terms taken from the same language in which the initial evaluations were made.

The intelligibility of this common language to a group of agents reveals that they are

participants bound by a common practice.

To reiterate, what participants in a shared practice accept are certain common

conditions for action, which by setting standards of correct as opposed to incorrect action

define the bounds of a practice.25 This acceptance has the character of normative recognition.

It is reflected in Wittgenstein ‘agreement in form of life’ (1953: I, §241), in Oakeshott’s notion

of citizens’ recognition of the rules of respublica (a system of law) (1975: esp. 149-151), and in

Hart’s view that the rules defining a legal system must be accepted and internalised by its

members rather than merely complied with on fear of external sanctions (Hart, 1961: 55-56,

25

85-88, 197). But using the same language does not imply that interlocutors in a common

practice necessarily agree on a set of goals or ideals about the good life. Moreover, because

human agents participate in multiple practices at the same time, conflictual demands issuing

from each practice are likely to provoke strain. At the global level, at the moment there is a

palpable tension between the two core practices—the practice of sovereign states and that of

global rights (Frost, 2002; Beitz, 2009; Buchanan, 2010; Forsyth 2012). This tension has

become apparent in areas such as the infringement of human rights in the context of

terrorist threats (Luban, 2002; Coady, 2004; Alston and Goodman, 2012: 383-488), in the

debate over refugee rights (Barry and Goodin, 1992; Cohen and Deng, 1998; Betts and

Loescher, 2011) and in the normative shift from the right of non-intervention enjoyed by

states to a responsibility to protect doctrine which imposes a duty on states to protect

citizens’ lives across borders (Bellamy, 2009; Evans, 2009; Pattison, 2010).

Finally, and to return to the heart of the matter, the internalist standpoint requires

that anyone wishing to understand an action, any action, as a this rather than as a that, be it

in chess, music, dance, or international relations, has either to learn how to perform the

action him or herself, or to learn to recognise that it is being performed by somebody else

within the practice concerned. To learn the moves, strategies, and tactics of chess; the tunes

and rhythms of Indian music; the movements and gestures of classical ballet; or the

manoeuvres open to diplomats and others players in international relations, is to learn to

make sense of and to perform actions, taking place inside the contexts of distinctive practices.

There is no external, social scientific way of learning such practice-dependent performances.

Despite all this, it is unlikely that the debate between practice internalists and practice

externalists would come to a halt any time soon. In this discussion, we have supplied ample

reasons to pause and reconsider the current trend amongst practice turn scholars in IR who

26

treat the externalist route as the self-evident one. There is an alternative, internalist route

leading to more profitable destinations.

Notes

27

1 IR scholars have borrowed the label ‘practice turn’ from Cetina, Schatzki, and von Savigny’s, The Practice

Turn in Contemporary Theory (2001) which is a collection of essays on sociological theory.

2 The original distinction between Verstehen (understanding, typical of the human sciences) and Erklären

(explanation, typical of the natural sciences) is attributed to German historian Droysen (1858/1893). In IR

theory, see Hollis and Smith (1990).

3 By internalism and, respectively, externalism we mean an epistemological position of intelligibility, whose

object is a domain of action (constituted under criteria of practical reason): a practice. In philosophy,

‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’ are terms often used to designate the hiatus between motivation for action

and action performance (see e.g., Darwall, 1983: 28-31) but this is not our usage.

4 The contemporary debate between explanation and understanding is usually taken to pertain to questions

of naturalism (in the philosophy of social science sense) and particularly to the method for making sense of

human conduct. Our approach focuses on epistemological questions taking up the problem of the

intelligibility of practices as its starting point.

5 Hart (1961) and Oakeshott (1975) were interested in the practices that constitute the state as a system of

law, and Rawls (1955) analysed two alternative conceptions of rules: the utilitarian and the practice-based.

6 See also Oakeshott (1975: 23, 69).

7 See Hoffman (1977), Smith (1987), and more recently, Roundtable: International Relations as a Social

Science (2014) on Iver Neumann’s inaugural lecture (2014), together with a reply by Epstein (2015) which

resonates with our internalist position.

8 The core text is Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953). IR theorists have engaged

Wittgensteinian themes—key contributions include Hollis and Smith (1990), Onuf (1989), Fierke (2002),

Fierke (2010). Winch’s ideas remain underexplored in international relations. Martin Hollis, a philosopher

who wrote on IR (see Hollis and Smith, 1990) briefly recognises the importance of Winch’s work within the

hermeneutic tradition of understanding (Hollis, 1995: 155-157).

9 On the role of ideas and material factors in IR theory see Wendt (1999) and Keohane (2000). On the

agent-structure problem see Wendt (1987), Dessler (1989), Hollis and Smith (1991, 1994), Doty (1997),

Wight (1999).

10 See Ringmar (2014: 3).

11 On Wittgenstein’s ‘language-games’ see Philosophical Investigations (1953), esp. §§23, 65-86.

12 The language of game theory combines the premises of rational choice, decision theory, and set theory. A

specialist overview of game theory including its history is Aumann (1989). Classical discussion of the

foundations of game theory and rational choice are Heap et al. (1992) and Heap and Yaroufakis (1995).

13 Winch (1972a [1964]: 41) attributes this economic motives explanation of Azande conduct to Alasdair

MacIntryre (1964).

14 See note 19 below.

15 One way to understand the idea of global normativity of a practice is by reference to the concept of

authority and obligation found in moral or legal systems. A practice of this sort has a scope of membership

that is comprehensive relative to society, and it imposes obligations on its members that are non-voluntary

in the sense that members are born into a world already structured by authoritative obligations (Hart,

1961: 85-88; Oakeshott, 1975: 158-159). We extend this idea of global normativity from the municipal to

the international level.

16 Pouliot’s notion of skill is derived from Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, as developed in Bourdieu

(1977 [1972]) and Bourdieu (1990 [1980]). See also Pouliot (2008).

17 As Searle notes, ‘The main point of having the concept of consciousness is to capture the first-person,

subjective features of the phenomenon...’ (2004: 84).

18 Searle distinguishes eliminative reductionism from non-eliminative reductionism (2004: 85). Adopting the

latter, he argues that consciousness can be causally reduced to the brain but not ontologically reduced.

‘Consciousness is entirely causally explained by neuronal behaviour but it is not thereby shown to be

nothing but neuronal behaviour’ (2004: 83).

19 In ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ (1972a [1964]) Winch targets arguments for invariant modes of

rationality, as presented by E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1937) and MacIntyre (1964).

20 Wittgenstein writes in The Philosophical Investigations (1953: I, §373): ‘Grammar tells what kind of object

anything is.’ A poststructuralist reading of ethics in IR, indebted to Wittgenstein’s notion of grammar is Pin-

Fat (2009).

21 As Winch points out: ‘the grammar of a language is not a theory about the nature of reality‘ (1987 [1976]:

196). See also Winch (1972a [1964]: 30).

22 The idea that actions are only available under a description was popularised by GEM Anscombe in

Intention (1963).

23 A Wittgensteinian argument that action is irreducible to bodily movements is AI Melden (1961).

24 See note 12 above.

25 Such acceptance constitutes the ‘internal point of view’, in Hart’s own terminology (Hart, 1961: 82-83, 86-

87).

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