CONCEPT
Tradition (MacIntyre)
A historically extended, socially embodied argument about the goods that constitute a practice and the standards of excellence that govern it — the structure within which virtues are developed and internal goods are preserved across generations.
Tradition, in MacIntyre's technical sense, is not nostalgia or conservatism. It is the structure of any living practice — the ongoing historical argument through which practitioners across generations extend, revise, and carry forward the understanding of what the practice is for and what excellence within it requires. A tradition is healthy when the argument continues; it is dead when the argument has stopped. The AI moment tests the traditions of knowledge work at their foundations by introducing a force — machine capability — that disrupts the conditions under which the arguments have been conducted. Whether the traditions survive depends on whether communities of practitioners can continue the argument under new conditions.
In The You On AI Field Guide
MacIntyre's concept of tradition is developed most fully in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988). The key claim is that there is no tradition-independent standpoint from which competing claims about justice and rationality can be adjudicated. Every conception of what is rational or just
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