Rules and Details

Abstract

This paper first recalls the way the distinction John Rawls introduced between ‘summary’ and ‘practice’ conceptions of rules was presented and taken up in French thought in the 1990s. Then, expanding on Rawls’ characterization of Wittgenstein’s considerations on rule following and discussing several criticisms it aroused, it comes to the conclusion that ‘rule’ is a notion that is inadequate to explain either social action or the way people justify what they have done. It thus argues that to account for the emergence of the mutual intelligibility enabling action in common to emerge and develop, one should dispense with the notion of rule and substitute the notion of detail of ordinary action for it. To support this claim, the paper takes on a question: what does a detail do? The answer it offers suggests that each detail of an ongoing action — when empirically identified in actual circumstances of interaction — should be conceived of as a building block of practical reasoning allowing for a sociological inquiry of a phenomenon: coordination of action, that is, the sequential activity which makes an action the kind of action it is.