It is acknowledged in philosophical and theoretical writings concerning the basic nature of the social world that social practices are central elements of “forms of life” and, consequently, of social life. Nevertheless, very little serious analytical work concerning social practices and, for that matter, social institutions exists in philosophy or elsewhere. The present work aims at remedying this situation. The novel approach taken in this book is called the “Collective Acceptance” account, and it is heavily based on “shared we-attitudes,” which represent a weak form of collective intentionality (or “social representations,” in social psychology terminology). As a slogan, “we-attitudes drive human life.”

There are several good reasons for embarking on a conceptual and philosophical study of social practices. The deepest sense is that they form the conceptual basis of thinking and other conceptual activities, viz., thinking and acting on the basis of concepts. They can be regarded as conceptually crucial in that they – or rather some fundamental kinds of them – can in themselves be meaningful, “rock-bottom” activities. Furthermore, it can be argued that the concept of correctness of such activities as rule following and in general rational conceptual activities crucially depend on the social practices of the community in question and that basic social practices are a kind of irreducible and noncircular conceptual fundamentum of conceptual activities.