Practices and Intelligibility: Inadequacy of Rules and Beliefs
Although it continues to be acceptable to explain social order and meaning
as a matter of following rules, or being driven by institutionalized beliefs
and values, the problems with this approach, first raised by Wittgenstein and
C. Wright Mills in the 1930s, have not been resolved. In fact, it has become
increasingly clear that the rule/belief driven view of social order and mean-
ing is inadequate (Rawls 2002; 2003).^2 Rules cannot be followed and, there-
fore, a model of social order based on the idea of following rules, or conforming
to beliefs, results in a problematic degree of abstraction, interpretation and
contingency. The post modern abyss is one result of continuing to approach
the problem of order and meaning in this way. Order is represented as com-
prised of actors’ motives to use rules or conform to beliefs, or of institutions
imposing conceptual frames, rather than viewing the problem of achieving
recognizable orders of action (including rules and beliefs) in any particular
situation as a serious problem in its own right, that carries its own order
properties and, hence, motivation.
In spite of the seriousness of the debate over rules, most sociologists con-
tinue to proceed on the basis of the view that beliefs and conceptual
typifications, or rules, drive both action and meaning. Studies of social phe-
nomena then attempt to measure the effect of beliefs and values (variable
252 • Bonnie Wright and Anne Warfield Rawls
(^2) A note on this complicated issue of rules seems in order at the outset. Beliefs,
rules, concepts and institutions, or an institutionally driven view of social order, are
being equated in this analysis. What is meant is that such approaches assume that an
abstract conceptual formulae of some kind more or less guides action in some way.
Either people try to follow it as a rule or principle, or are guided by, or to, it as a
goal. In either case there is some conceptual type or category that the person is assumed
to be trying to achieve. We argue that this approach neglects the demonstrated inad-
equacy of conceptual types/rules to work in this way. It overlooks as well the impor-
tance of the hearable and witnessable interactional details that are constitutive of
whether or not something is recognized as a particular sort of something in any actual
case. In speaking of “hearable and witnessable details” we are building on Garfinkel’s
(1967, 2002) argument that it is the details of local orders that constitute both social
order and intelligibility (Rawls 2003). The argument is that the work of constituting
recognizable local orders cannot be done via rules or conceptual typifications, but
rather requires careful attention to empirical detail on the part of participants and
therefore also on the part of researchers. For the original discussion of this problem
readers should refer to Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations, Saul Kripkie On Rules,
C. Wright Mills “Situated Action and Vocabularies of Motive” 1940, and The Journal
of Classical Sociology(forthcoming) for a special issue on the problem of constitutive
rules in moral philosophy focusing on John Rawls’ (1953) paper “Two Concepts of
Rules,” and the impact of that debate on contemporary social theory and the devel-
opment of Ethnomethodology.