Different sorts of practices
Additionally, as Wainwright points out, “Practices are alike in so far as they meet
MacIntyre’s definition, but differ with respect to their content, their goals or purposes
and their traditions ... To try to subdivide practices into different categories would ...
weaken the concept...” (Wainwright 2000 p. 35). While it might be tempting to
categorise practices in different ways, for example, Miller (1994) divides practices into
those that are ‘purposive’ and those that are ‘self-contained’ and Sellman (2000)
identifies some practices as ‘professional practices’, this may ultimately be self-
defeating. And this seems correct if we accept that MacIntyre uses chess as illustrative
rather than definitive, for elsewhere he provides examples of other activities that fit with
his definition of a practice, he says, for example:
Tic-tac-toe is not an example of a practice ... nor is throwing a football with
skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice;
architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice: farming is. So are the enquiries
of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are
painting and music
(MacIntyre 1985 p. 187).
And further he states: “... the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics
in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the
concept” (ibid p. 188). Hence contra Miller (1994) and my own earlier view (Sellman
2000) it is the similarities in terms of the potential for internal goods that contribute to
human flourishing within practices that is important rather than any attempt to
categorise practices on the basis of dissimilarities. MacIntyre’s reluctance to provide
anything like a definitive list of activities that are, or might be, practices is to be seen as
a recognition that the production of such a list would be to focus on the wrong things.
As it is students OfMacIntyre continue to argue about the grounds for the exclusion of,
for example, bricklaying (some say there are examples Ofbricklaying which would
seem to suggest that as an activity it has, at least in some cases, a legitimate claim to be
a practice) and there is a lively debate in philosophy of education about MacIntyre’s
denial of teaching as a practice (see, for example, MacIntyre and Dunne 2002, and
Dunne 2003). IfI understand MacIntyre correctly it is not that we should endeavour to
work out which activities should be classed as practices, let alone expend effort on
devising a taxonomy, because this would be to miss the point. To undertake such
classification activity would be to fall into the trap set for us by late modernity that
leads us to experience fragmentation. Rather we should be involved in the attempt to
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