Abstract

Exploring the relationship between culture and understanding, this project focuses upon practices. It develops this account further by examining how we initially learn practices. ;For a philosophical examination of the relationship between culture and understanding, the most promising approach appears to be practice theory. To explain this approach, the project presents the description given by the anthropologist Sheri Ortner. For purpose of exploring understanding, it is best to conceive culture as an interconnected weave of various situated social practices. The account is developed further, drawing upon the resources of post-Wittgensteinian theories of social practices, especially the approaches of Alasdair MacIntyre and Pierre Bourdieu. They present two views of how humans interpret and act within a framework of social practices. Neither of their accounts, nor Wittgenstein's language-game account which influenced them, describe understanding within practice with an eye to how we as individuals come to understand our practices, and how we acquire the dispositions that make us practitioners---in short, how we are acculturated. To explore this, the project draws upon the work of Jean Lave and other educational theorists. Her work suggests that practical understanding does not precede practice, nor is it a product that follows practice; it emerges within practice as the learner participates. The relationship is dialectical; practices presume understanding, but understanding also emerges within practices. Applying this account of learning to the social practices of earliest childhood, the project shows how our understanding of the world emerges from these games. ;The project concludes by drawing together these accounts in order to explore culturally specific patterns of understanding, and propose a view of understanding as situated within culturally specific practices, as both subtending and emerging from those practices. Because of the parallels and analogies found in human practices, as well as our ability to learn new practices, there is always a possibility of coming to cross-cultural understanding, or of sharing understanding across cultures