Local Reasoning

Local reasoning refers to the creative capacity of individuals to change their beliefs. The concept of local reasoning maintains that individuals, by making decisions or reacting to experiences, may adopt, reject, or modify their beliefs in novel ways. This reasoning process is localized because it always takes place within the context of an individual's set of held beliefs. These inherited or already held beliefs situate an individual within a particular tradition.

Local reasoning denies that an individual's beliefs are merely functions of social structures, norms, or rules. Although traditions and prior theories influence the reasoning process, they do not necessarily determine the content of an individual's beliefs. Moreover, beliefs are not simple products of completely autonomous reasoning. Local reasoning claims that individuals adopt, reject, or modify beliefs as a reaction to a decision or experience and always as an agent situated within a particular tradition.

An interpretive, bottom-up study of governance will examine the local reasoning of individuals because explaining the changing beliefs of individuals affects the norms, practices, and systems of governance within a community. Analyzing the local reasoning of individuals highlights the interplay between inherited traditions, dilemmas, and the resultant beliefs and practices.

Local reasoning differs from other forms of reasoning. Local reasoning contends that beliefs arise out of a process where situated agents reason, make decisions, or react to experiences and then decide whether to adopt new beliefs or reject or modify already-held beliefs. Rational choice theory rejects situated agency and local reasoning by preferring to grant individuals complete rational autonomy. Individuals hold or change beliefs, according to this theory, by reasoning through a process of utility maximization. Thus, an individual can hold any belief whatsoever as long as it satisfies some variant of utility. Another school of thought, institutionalism, asserts that social norms or roles can best explain individual beliefs and practices. This denies the creative capacity of individuals to modify their beliefs. Changes in belief are constrained by objectified social norms or roles. Changes in practices and governance, then, are explained at the level of norms, rules, and external social forces rather than on the level of the individual.

Even within an interpretivist approach to governance, the concept of local reasoning distinguishes between a more strongly decentered approach and a quasi-structuralist perspective that sees beliefs as creatures of reified ideologies, discourses, or epistemes. Much like institutionalism, this approach appears to constrain the agency of individuals to change their beliefs by explaining beliefs and actions as an ideology or discourse. Local reasoning, then, distinguishes itself from these other views of rationality by rejecting the pure autonomy of the rational choice school while explaining changes in beliefs locally, within an individual's web of beliefs.