[OS] Practice Is Theory: A Copula
In which I take a first, halting, treacherous step towards becoming a Substack reply guy
I apologize for the indiscretion, the semi-facetious purply persona, and most of all the intrusion into a discussion not my own which this post represents. But a republic must have its interlocutors, and unfortunately, a locution of mine has been interred. Please make nothing of the plaintive tone beyond its use as a bit of flair, a masquerade for a publication harkening back to a time when perhaps such indiscreet flamboyance as I exhibit here would not be taken as mocking, which indeed I do not mean it to be.
Oh,
! A new love! And so very in love. What an idea! An earnest return to debate in print, the essay contest restored for a new age of distributed media! I still hold my hope for you, my admiration, my love, but as with all young loves, the time must come for a rebuke. We are told to rebuke our fellows, and so rebuke I must!How wonderfully this debate began, with “Two Cheers for Theory?” A modest and most considerate discussion of the role and uses of Theory in art. It recognized, at least implicitly, the truth I aim to expose here, and which we will get to in a moment.
How much I enjoyed the follow-up, “Practice v. Theory: A Smackdown.” Or how much I was enjoying it! A heartfelt paean to the limits of theory and the power of practice. But lo! What mine eyes see, but an invidious distinction snaking its way into my garden:
Fish’s goal in his article is to contrast theory with practice [yes] and to argue that practice is not subordinate to theory [yes!]; in fact, he writes, they are two different activities [okay. . .] with very little relation to one another [no! no! no!].
And how much more terrible this division becomes!
Fish uses this anecdote to provocatively claim that judges, rather than referring to legal theory upon which to base their judgments, actually use theory as a form of rhetoric to explain and justify their decisions after the fact. The process of judgement itself does not rely on theory but is a natural consequence of what can be understood as an “enriched notion of practice,” with the judge being “a link in a chain,” meaning a member of a tradition, or culture, or community, who then acts as a “repository of the purposes, goals, forms of reasoning, modes of justification, etc. that the chain at once displays and enacts.”
[T]o do any activity well one must have internalized everything that makes up that activity to such an extent that performing the activity becomes second nature. Referring to theory then becomes unnecessary, even counterproductive, because the “theory,” or the understanding of how to do an activity, is inside oneself, in one’s bones, in a way that can’t be fully articulated in language without changing it in some fundamental way.
I love practice—I admire, as we all do, the practiced hand and the nimble body. But oh! how it pains me to see this son of a professor not understand his own father’s gift! Since all I have here are words (as, indeed, all
had were words as well), I must reach him through theory (intermixed, as we will see, with practice). But let us see why that is not so much of a problem.I will begin with a small claim of Derek Neal’s:
[O]ne learns to play baseball by playing baseball, not by talking about it.
Do you believe this? Truly, do you? Have you ever taught a child baseball? Watched a practice of young stumbling toddling things bouncing their way almost-but-not-quite aimlessly from white bump to white bump (and not always the correct one)? There is certainly a lot of talking that goes on in such a practice. “To first base! First base! There! To your right!” “Squat down, mitt to the ground. Press it into the ground, make sure to feel it on the bottom of your glove.” “Square your hips, lean onto your back foot, steady, steady, and then explode forward!” “Arm extended backwards, exteeeeehhhnded back. And then slingshot!”
What would it mean to learn baseball just by playing it? What would the rules be? How would you know? This “link in the chain” you refer to: what are these links made out of? Certainly, in many cases, language! The chain is words, thought, theory.
Fish wants us to understand that an effective baseball player, or judge, or, I might add, fire starter or pro wrestler, is not an independent, rational human being who consults a theory or a formula to then complete an activity; instead, to do any activity well one must have internalized everything that makes up that activity to such an extent that performing the activity becomes second nature.
Oh! But how does one internalize? Through practice, yes, but practicing what? “Referring to theory then becomes unnecessary, even counterproductive, because the ‘theory,’ or the understanding of how to do an activity, is inside oneself, in one’s bones[.]” But how did it get there?
A teacher! We are all taught, mouths agape and wandering, by teachers. Sometimes they know they are teaching us, and give us Theory, other times the teaching is implicit, not quite rising to the level of abstract rules and understanding which I will allow (for the purposes of this piece) to define Theory.
How did Derek Neal discover the beauty of practice? His father, a professor—a teacher—would tell him stories of his practical grandfather, full of earthly, practical wisdom. I cry Theory! This understanding, this linguistic learning and imagining, is a far cry from getting out there and trying to be practically wise. But why would Derek Neal feel such a call to be practically wise without these stories? Without understanding the importance of such practical wisdom? Without getting an abstract sense of what practical wisdom is?
Perhaps I am expanding the remit of Theory—if so, I would like someone to defend a narrower definition. For I will defend my grander one by destroying it: if anything is Theory, surely it is mathematics, that most abstract and formulaic of practices (oops!). But how do we learn mathematics? We are taught what addition is, sure, a simple formula. But to understand the formula we must have examples. Yet, as Wittgenstein rightly pointed out, you never get enough examples to define the formula.
“2+2=4” “5+7=12” “8+1=9” “1+1=2” “23+5=28.” Ah, okay, I understand: “2+2=4” “3+5=8” “8+2=10” “25+17=28”—what! No, that’s not right. But I thought that you take each number and count up from one by the amount of the other, unless you get to 28, in which case you leave it at 28? No! Obviously not! Here is another example: “25+25=50.” Ah, so when both numbers are odd, you can go above 28. No! Of course not!
Mathematics relies on an underlying, intuitive practice—a practical sense of what we mean when we give these examples and how we would extend them. The mathematician has a practice, much like the judge: see an economist with his datasets, fiddling around and looking for a pattern. Is that theory? There certainly are a lot of formulas in his statistics. But how did he get to that dataset? Why is he sorting it by those qualities? Why is he testing for a logarithmic increase here and a linear one there? Sometimes, he may tell you it was because of a clear rule, and other times an intuition.
But if even these hallowed halls of Theory are but practices in the wind, what is left of Theory? What is this debate about if there is no such thing as Theory? We would have proven far too much.
The fault is not in us, but in our stars assumptions. The problem is that we are searching for a Theory with no practice, and a practice with no Theory. John Dewey understood a century ago that theory and practice are not activities with very little to do with one another, but a coin split in two. It is very useful to call one side of a coin heads and another tails, but strange things happen if you try to pay with just the one or the other. Similarly, Theory without practice is empty, and practice without Theory is blind.
I’d like to turn to Grandpa Joe, that font of practice unbothered by theory.
In one story, my dad’s mother is starting a fire on a cold winter night and using newspaper as kindling. Dad tells her not to use newspaper as he is afraid it might get blown up the chimney, setting the roof on fire, to which his mother replies by asking him how many fires he’s built, suggesting, although she wouldn’t have put it like this, that there’s a difference between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge, and that the latter trumps the former. At this point Grandpa Joe chimes in, pushing the point further with caustic irony: “Don’t you criticize him,” he says, “he probably read that in a book!” [Theory bolded by me]
One day my dad walks into the living room and, seeing wrestling on the television, tells Joe that it’s “fake.” Grandpa Joe responds that if it’s fake, Dad could “just go ahead and fix himself a match.” Similar to my grandmother’s remark about the fire, Joe’s statement contains a wisdom unavailable to my father —wrestling is only “fake” if you insist upon an arbitrary distinction between what’s real and what’s not. Scripted wrestling may seem fake when one insists on comparing it to unscripted sport, but what about when compared to other scripted events, such as theater? Or when a chair is cracked over your head, or your body is slammed into the mat, and you feel pain? Grandpa Joe, while not making recourse to a philosophical argument, understands wrestling in a way my father doesn’t because, as a fan, he is part of the wrestling community, and he implicitly accepts the rules of the wrestling match and all they entail. [Philosophical argument bolded by me]
I listen to the stories and recognize that Joe was the possessor of a sort of knowledge that I don’t have, a knowledge that comes from growing up in a certain time and place — in this case, early 20th century Appalachia, which I can only learn about secondhand. This sort of knowledge arises when one is, as literary theorist Stanley Fish puts it, “an agent embedded in practice” or a “fully situated member of a community.” My dad, being a good storyteller, casts himself in the role of “the outsider who assumes the posture of an analyst,” and in this way allows me and my siblings to experience the contrast between two ways of knowing: practice and theory. [Practice bolded by me]
The trick is that distance creates illegibility. This illegibility allows for a distinction between Theorists (us, thinking, choosing, unsure) and practitioners (them, unthinking, “embedded,” “situated”). The things you, Derek Neal, do naturally and well—write engagingly, form an argument, find an illustrative example from history, bring together a post—are just as much practice as your grandfather’s Appalachian love of wrestling. Your grandfather’s wry wit is not a lack of Theory, but intelligence and thought itself.
If Theory doesn’t matter, why did all the ancient peoples create such grand ones to explain their worlds? It practice trumps Theory, why has our world become so much more Theoretical?
Alienation is not the entrance of Theory into the mind of the worker, invading on a senescent practice-oriented way of thinking, but the cutting-away of Theory from the worker’s natural union of doing and believing: now, the line worker just does what he is told—not why, and he would go mad if he attempted to understand it. We have always thought, always considered, always made choices. But the world is big, big, big. Some are called Theorists and others laborers: but every laborer knows the ins and outs of their department store, and every Theorist has a practiced hand at dealing with their data.
Fish uses this anecdote to provocatively claim that judges, rather than referring to legal theory upon which to base their judgments, actually use theory as a form of rhetoric to explain and justify their decisions after the fact. The process of judgement itself does not rely on theory but is a natural consequence of what can be understood as an “enriched notion of practice,” with the judge being “a link in a chain,” meaning a member of a tradition, or culture, or community, who then acts as a “repository of the purposes, goals, forms of reasoning, modes of justification, etc. that the chain at once displays and enacts.”
I will end with the law, because it is a soft spot of mine and because this particular vision of legal thinking has a pertinent history.
Stanley Fish was a Legal Realist, the precursors to our more modern Critical Theorists, who argued that the indeterminate and ex post facto nature of the law means we should understand judges as basically engaging in policy and judges should understand themselves as doing that too.
The movement has its roots in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who famously began his magisterial The Common Law with the proclamation “[i]t is the merit of the common law that it decides the cases first and determines the principles afterwards.” Against the formalists before him, he said “the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience” and “general propositions do not decide concrete cases.” But note that the common law does decide the principles.
Law, for the last hundred years or so, has been largely taught in America by the case study method, whereby students emulate the common law’s bubbling-up of standards from the ferment of individual judges deciding individual cases by reading specific applications of the principles. I would argue that this is a perfect synecdoche for the marriage of Theory and practice: we read the cases, extract the rules, see how they are applied, and then receive a pattern of facts upon which to apply the rules and their previous applications. This is a practice, this is a situated community of norms of thinking and modes of justification. But is it not also clearly Theory?
An actor is subject to liability to another for battery if he or she acts intending to cause a harmful or offensive contact with the person of the other or a third person, or an imminent apprehension of such a contact, and a harmful or offensive contact with the person of the other directly or indirectly results.
What is action? I’m so glad you asked:
Volitional movement not including its consequences.
What is intent?
Purpose, desire, certainty, or near certainty
Majority rule: battery requires (1) a person intend to make contact with another, (2) that person intend that contact to be harmful or offensive, and (3) that contact actually be harmful or offensive.
Minority rule: battery requires (1) a person intend to make contact with another and (2) that contact actually be harmful or offensive.
I will not bore you, but while you can of course point to difficult cases which seem indeterminate, I can point to easy cases which look a lot like checking boxes in a Theoretical list.
Law is iterative, reacting to the situations it is placed within and bubbling with “but-this” and “also-that,” but the rules do not mean nothing. Otherwise, what would be directing practice? What would the “repository” be? How would one become practiced? Guesswork? Don’t let the exceptions swallow the rule.
Holmes, of course, was a member of The Metaphysical Club, a social club out of which the great philosophical tradition of American Pragmatism sprung, and which culminated in the impressive career of one John Dewey.