The Pragmatist Reappraisal of Habit in Contemporary Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory

In this essay we sketch the role that the notion of habit has played in the work of pragmatist authors such as James, Peirce, and Dewey, and give an account of its ambivalent role in the development of psychology and of cognitive sciences from James’s introspectionism, through behaviorism and computationalism, up to 4E cognition and its rediscovery of a pragmatist action-oriented stance to cognition. We then investigate in the second section how the abandonment of the notion of habit in cognitive sciences in the second half of the twentieth century was paralleled by the adoption of a dualism between automatic routine and intelligent action and by an approach to cognition based on the notion of mental representation. This notion was subsequently put under pressure by the emerging paradigm of 4E cognition, whose push toward an antirepresentationalist turn is leading to a reassessment of the notion of habit. In the third section we explore how habit formation has been investigated within contemporary neuroscience in a dynamic perspective based on the interplay between automatism and goal-oriented behavior. This section highlights the role that the pragmatist ideomotor principle plays in autoptic and pragmatic coding approaches to cortical motor systems, and how recent research on mirror neurons pragmatically links action with social cognition and cultural practices. In the fourth section we see how the adoption of the dualism between rational action and mechanical routines also influenced the development of twentieth-century sociological thought, and is nowadays being reconsidered by social theory