Collective Intentions and the Maintenance of Social Practices

This paper studies social practices and the dynamics of their maintenance in precise mathematical and logical terms. Roughly, social practices (such shaking hands, going regularly to sauna, eating a certain kind of food at Easter, etc.) are recurrent collective activities based on collective attitudes (shared we-attitudes), and the central kind of social practice under study here, is one based on collective intention. Social practices are the building blocks of human societies, and also of artificial ones. In this paper, we present a mathematical model representing the dynamics of social practices, and some properties of the process are subjected to detailed mathematical study.