On rules and human conduct

pp. 51-72

in: Jeff Coulter, Rethinking cognitive theory, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1983

Abstract

In contradistinction to a prevailing assumption in various cognitive studies, I shall argue here that propositional knowledge of "rules' (either "consciously" known or "unconsciously" known) is not entailed by concept-acquisition and concept-use. Having attempted to establish this point, I shall then try to specify some important properties of "rules' as these actually enter into domains of human conduct. Some of these properties stand in contrast to those tacitly taken to characterise "rules of conduct" in theoretical accounts of human behaviour. Since I believe that the entire issue of rules is immensely perplexing, and in some ways highly obscure, I am guided here by work in ethnomethodology and ordinary-language philosophy for whom the topic has been, for many years, a central concern. However, a failure adequately to connect these matters with broader theoretical concerns in the human sciences has resulted in a virtual chasm separating those with a major intellectual interest in the relationship of "rules' to "behaviour". The present essay is a bit of bridge-building, linking up some lines of thinking from several disciplines and noting the points of divergence where these may be amenable to correction.