Abstract

This paper presents an alternative model to the rule-following model of social practices and draws implications for the possibility of integrating robots into the social realm. We differentiate between “maximally loose” and “maximally rigid” forms of social practices and show that especially the latter pose a problem for social robotics. Not only is it a technical challenge to enable robots to function like human agents in loose practices, but it can also lead to normative problems. Namely, on the one hand, social robots may cause loose social practices to become too rigid; on the other hand, they present us with the problem that we would have to recognize robots as co-authors of our social practices or even as persons.