INTRODUCTION

The aim of this chapter is to study social practices and the dynamics of their maintenance in precise mathematical and logical terms, relying on the theoretical developments of the earlier chapters. While the present chapter does not much advance the philosophical arguments presented earlier in this book except for the dynamic account it offers, it shows that the views espoused in the book are practical in the sense of being implementable in formal mathematical terms. This also serves the interests of research in distributed artificial intelligence (DAI), and the system can, furthermore, be used for computer simulations of social processes. While chapter 6 was concerned with social institutions in a synchronic sense, the present chapter creates a mathematical account of the diachronic case, which in principle applies to all (core) social practices, including all the institutional ones discussed in chapter 6.

The chapter will concentrate on the function of collective attitudes in this dynamics, and on the macroscopic level. Social practices will be regarded as core social practices, viz., recurrent collective activities based on collective attitudes, more precisely shared we-attitudes. They are maintained (upheld, renewed, and changed) on the basis of their (believed) success. The success of an action within a social practice depends on the content of the collective attitude (especially intention) that causes the action. This content may concern not only the mere performance of a collective action but also its performance in a certain manner or as meeting certain normative standards.