What makes a claim (premise of an argument) plausible? Knowledge and metaknowledge. Believed/assumed relationship and perceived strength of the relationship between antecedent and consequent. Awareness of alternative causes or preventatives. Unawareness of counterexamples. Believed credibility and believed intention of source. Framing effects. Diversity of evidentiary support. Emotions, preferences, and other variables. Global fit. Plausibility theory.

Deductive, inductive, abductive and conductive arguments. Polya on induction. Postulational and empirical reasoning. Demonstrative and plausible reasoning. Probative logic. Analogical arguments.

Belief bias. “Truth” bias. Desirability bias/wishful thinking. Citation bias. Attribution bias. Retrospective biases. “False consensus” effect. Hindsight bias. Confirmation bias. My-side bias. Bases of biases. The functionality and dysfunctionality of biases. The ubiquity of biases.

Evaluating formal and informal arguments. The roles of form and content. Judgments of relevance and weight. Judgments of truth or falsity. Aggregation or synthesis. Enthymemes. Models of argument evaluation.

How do cultural artifacts influence the ways we experience and act? In this chapter I propose that cognition is cultural tout court and that habits provide a central link between human organisms and the sociocultural environment. I will defend an enactive account of habits that sees them as expansive in the temporal (they relate us to a history of sociocultural interactions) and spatial sense (they are co-constituted by our brains, bodies, and cultural artifacts). This account is based on Dewey's pragmatist–organicist concept of habits that rigorously anchors experience in culture. I will trace cultural factors in Dewey's philosophy and 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognitive science with a focus on pervasive artifacts – such as architecture, pictures, and moving images. Such artifacts have become part of our habits of perceiving. I finally situate artifactual habits within recent predictive processing theories that claim to provide the corresponding neuroscientific theory to our cultural minds.

This chapter examines habit across the human lifespan to develop a Deweyan account of aging and old age. After explaining Dewey's notion of habit in terms of growth and plasticity in youth, I extend Dewey's account of habit to old age. A Deweyan understanding of aging contests lay person understandings of old age that equate it with decline and an end to growth, and it offers an alternative to the implicit biology–culture dualism that can be found in the contemporary field of gerontology. As I develop this account, I challenge Dewey's racially problematic association of “civilized” habits with mature adulthood and “savage” habituation with immature children. The result is a useful Deweyan appreciation of habit in old age that neither glosses over the difficulties of being elderly nor condemns elderliness to inevitable decline.

In the first part of the chapter, I review evidence showing that the same centers controlling laughter are also involved in generating the affective aspect accompanying laughter, in line with pragmatists’ theories of emotion. Subsequently, I discuss new data showing that these centers can be activated by the passive observation of others’ laughter, hence a “mirror mechanism” for laughter. Inspired by James’ assumption that “the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of habits of action”, I argue that this mechanism boosts two distinct sets of “habits of actions”, at different timescales. First, laughter mirroring underpins behavioral phenomena such as facial mimicry and laughter contagion that, in turn, play a crucial social function in boosting social bonding. Second, the consequences of laughter mirroring impact on social customs, traditions, and habits which, in turn, impacts on individual brains and emotions – in line with theories on the social genesis of self, advanced by all classic pragmatists.

If cognitive neuroscience is meant to investigate what makes us human, cultural artifacts and artistic expressions should be at the top of the list of its explananda. Cognitive neuroscience, in tight cooperation and dialogue with the humanities, can shed new light on several theoretical issues related to aesthetics, traditionally dealt with exclusively within the camp of the humanities. A succinct description of embodied simulation theory in relation to aesthetic experience is proposed, and some accomplishments of this bottom-up approach to the experience of visual art and film are illustrated. The notion of “habit” is introduced, it is connected to its potential underlying neural mechanisms, and to the production and reception of human cultural artifacts. Capitalizing upon pragmatism, Pierre Bourdieu, and practice theory, the relationship between body, habit, practice, and rituals and its bearing on the creation of symbolic objects and cultural artifacts is analyzed from a neuropragmatist approach, which emphasizes the procedural and implicit forms of human cognition. The suggested gradual transition from tool-making to symbol-making grants the following: (a) It shows that utilitarian and symbolic behavior are both chapters of the same cognitive technology trajectory; (b) it does not require one to assume that symbol-making is the late externalization of a previously existing inner symbolic thought, because symbolic thought and symbol-making are the co-constructive outcome of the development of shared performative practices and habits; (c) it is fully compatible with the neurobiological characterization of human relational potentialities as instantiated by embodied simulation. It is proposed that through the repetition, combination, and memorization of particular shared behaviors and actions, and their mimetic ritualization, the social group infuses new cultural meanings into reused bodily performances.

The chapter will describe a pragmatist view of habit formation and of learning or inquiry. Indeed, one essential function of the brain is the formation of habits to suit contexts. Another major function of cephalic (mind, brain, body, world) sensibility is maintaining them. Habit formation in our species is tied to learning and inquiry; habit stability is mediated across the brain and continuous with the ecological/social milieu we are living in. There is a continuous thread between what is in the brain/body and what is not, in the neural organization of habits. The thread is quite permeable. Habits are sustained, or not, by the niche they are sculpted in, and evolve in or not.

This chapter aims to set the record straight about a special sort of intelligence exhibited by habitual doings. It defends an enactivist account of habitual doings which, at its core, depicts habits as flexible and adjustable modes of response that are world directed and context sensitive. So understood, habits are wholly unlike the exercise of blind mechanisms or mindless reflexes. Nevertheless, we resist the familiar forced choice of thereby understanding habits in standard cognitivist terms. Our proposal aims to avoid the twin mistakes of either underintellectualizing or overintellectualizing habits. In tune with our enactivist elucidation of the core character of habits, the chapter also explicates how habits, so conceived, can support and thwart our larger projects.

In this introductory chapter 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 cognitive sciences from James's introspectionism, through behaviorism and computationalism, up to 4E cognition and the rediscovery of a pragmatist action-oriented stance to cognition. We then investigate how the abandonment of the notion of habit 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. 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. Subsequently we show that 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. Finally, we provide an overview of the book and a chapter-by-chapter summary.

Pragmatism arose in response to the dominant philosophical ideas of the time, one of which was neo-Kantianism. Present approaches in cognitive science often derive from basic neo-Kantian ideas, notably the notion that social life and language depend on shared “frames.” Pragmatism rejected these neo-Kantian ideas, and instead relied on an extended notion of habit. But the extension required a response to some core neo-Kantian concerns. Pragmatism provided some psychological thinking, especially in William James, and in the critique of the reflex arc concept. This was paralleled and extended by Russian psychologists. They developed a research program which supported alternative accounts of the key problematics of neo-Kantianism, such as the nature of categories and of abstraction. This bears directly on social theory, which uncritically adopted ideas of shared frameworks as an explanatory shortcut, without providing a psychological or cognitive account of how this kind of sharing was possible.

What role is played by habitual behaviors in sport skill? To answer this question we examine and contrast two different views on habit: the intellectualist and the enactivist. Intellectualism, which can be traced back to William James’ mechanist account of habits as reflex-like automatic dispositions, claims that deliberation and explicit goal-representation are necessary to make behavior intelligent and flexible because habits alone do not have this capacity. Enactivism, on the contrary, claims that habits are both necessary for and constitutive of the development of sports skills because they can be inherently intelligent and flexible. After reviewing behavioral and neuro-cognitive evidence in favour of each view, we offer an anti-intellectualist argument to support the enactivist view: habitual behaviors are legitimate sources of prereflective motivation and bodily know-how. Accordingly, skillful action control is not constrained but disclosed by habit formation. Automatism then is not a drawback for strategic control and improvisation but their pragmatic foundation.