Pointing to Practices

While we can 'point' to practices which underpin our thought and talk, we should be careful about how we use this in our explanations.  In empirical or anthropological explanations, this pointing is possibly helpful and probably harmless.

If we are looking for a justification for the kind of thinking and talking we are doing, then this pointing may not be helpful.

We can be deceived by something here:  often we do point to an unquestioned practice in order to 'justify' something, in ordinary talk.  I think this is often just to remind an interlocutor of a shared committment, however, so it really only counts as a hypothetical justification:  "Remember that X implies Y" is OK if someone has temporarily forgotten the relevance of X and its status as a fundamental.  So the form of the argument is: if we are having the conversation I think we are then you must see that Y is unavoidable.

But, of course, it may exactly be X or its relevance that are in play; and there may exactly be confusion over the nature of the conversation.  Regress beckons ...

Some might argue, from here, that we should review what we mean by 'justify', to bring it more into line with pointing at shared committments.  This move is exposed to an open question objection unless the shared commitments are unavoidable - if they must be shared by anyone having what could count as 'a conversation' at all.  In this case, confusion stops the conversation; we have no tools for exploring or explaining it.