I propose an ethics that is based on stories rather than rules. The things we do in our daily lives (our motor routines) do not require articulatable goals expressible in language. We develop the “good habits” that make us good people by developing/inheriting a set of prototypes, then responding to each life situation by comparing it with those prototypes. Such a multidimensional prototype system could be realized in a connectionist network embodied in a brain/body and embedded in a world. It would not require logical reasoning as such, but rather a form of skilled coping very different from anything else considered by ethical theory. Once we realize that ethical judgments are based on prototypes and stories, rather than rules and justice, we can rethink how best to empower the revolutionary changes that are now taking place in our concepts of ethics and courtesy.

Do nonrepresentational habits display intentionality, in the sense of aiming at, pointing to, or targeting some specific objects? I will here tackle this question from the resources of Dewey's pragmatism, and more precisely from his theory of habits and his functionalist theory of meaning. Meaning, for Dewey, is a normative phenomenon, only occurring in social and linguistic practices. The fact that utterances and thoughts can be about states of affairs does not require a specific mental property of pointing to or targeting for to be explained. Similarly, if behavior and habits can be described as being directed toward objects, this directedness is nothing before or beside the way our actions are normatively framed and organized in certain forms of organism–environment transactions, such as inquiry.

The classical pragmatists provided a clear set of leading ideas about what a habit is. This conception of “habit” is distinct from the behavioral conception of habit as a fixed disposition to respond to stimuli that has been enforced by the environment. This chapter focuses on developing a pragmatic account of habit based on leading ideas from Peirce and Dewey. It also argues that this account can play a useful role in the emerging account of cognition as culturally evolved and enculturated. The combined account demonstrates that the work of the classical pragmatists is as fresh and important now as it was a hundred years ago.

This chapter draws upon John Dewey's habit ontology in order to spell out the metaphysical commitments of social reproduction feminism. First, it outlines the current feminist debates around social reproduction (SR) in order to show where and to what extent this notion demands further conceptualization. It then presents an account of SR that hinges on Dewey's concept of habituation, which can be characterized as a spiral of second and first nature. It goes on to show how this conception of habit can help articulate SR's role in the production of persons, the maintenance of social groups and even in the reproduction of society. This discloses a perspective on the role of SR as enabling both social domination and transformation. Finally, we recapitulate and conclude by noting some implications of the resulting habit ontology of SR for feminist political thought.

Dewey's thought is central to the organicist tradition, which views habit as “‘a primary ontological phenomenon’, shaping the person as a whole and traversing a continuum from the individual to the social, from embodied intentionality to conscious reflection”. This view enjoys a mutually supportive relationship with the theory of linguistic bodies, a nonrepresentational, world-involving account of languaging as a type of embodied social agency. Everything that a linguistic body does and thinks is conditioned by her linguistic habits. Paradoxically, each unique life is built out of the sense-making acts of others. Through constitutive openness to others’ perspectives, habits that define linguistic bodies call forth certain futures. The future depends on which utterances a community privileges and with whom it dialogues. Considering the global climate emergency, I question how we can actually change our future by disrupting the habits that currently comprise what Dewey calls “the endless chain of humanity.”

As John Dewey observed, and contemporary moral psychology confirms, most of our moral deliberation and judgment operates via deeply rooted habits of perception, discrimination, and valuing over which we have little conscious control. These processes are intuitive, automatic, and seldom subject to reflective change. However, we are not just condemned to our reinforced biases, because we are also creatures whose brains exhibit a measure of plasticity, or what Dewey called “habits of flexibility.” Good moral deliberation, therefore, is intelligent reconstruction of habits, and the formation of new habits that make it possible for us to deal constructively with new moral problems that confront us. Moral deliberation of this sort is a process of dramatic imaginative rehearsal of possibilities for conscientiously transforming our habits, in order to deal with the new problems that arise from changed conditions. Conscientiousness is a flexible habit of reflective, empathic, and critical moral inquiry.

We explore different modes of experience in performance, including various experiences of flow, heedful performance, and habit. In contrast to conceptions that take habit to be automatic or a more-or-less rote repetition of behavior, Dewey and Merleau-Ponty consider habit to be a general bodily responsiveness to the world. Dewey's conception of intelligent habit involves a thoughtful attitude of care and attunement to the parameters of the task. Merleau-Ponty likewise describes habit as being both motor and perceptual. Habit is an open and adaptive way in which the body learns to cope with familiar situations in ways that involve some degree of heedful performance. The deployment of a motor habit, for example, adapts to the specific contour of the situation – different situations make different demands on how the habitual task, here and now, ought to be achieved. This conception of habit meshes well with ecological affordance-based accounts of action and perception.

We are creature of habits. This suggests an intimate relationship of self and habits. Our self provides temporal stability and continuity in a changing environment full of contingencies. Such temporal continuity is manifest in our action and, more specifically a particular subset of action, that is, habitual action or habits, as distinguished from goal-directed action. Habits can be characterized by repetitive behavior that provides temporal continuity in temporally discontinuous environmental contexts. The origin and mechanisms of temporal continuity in habits, including its relationship to the self, remain unclear though. Based on various data, we assume that the temporal continuity of self, that is, self-continuity, provides the template for the temporal continuity of habits on behavioral, psychological and neuronal levels. Specifically, we assume that temporal integration of the temporally disparate stimuli related to intention, execution and outcome of action are lumped and integrated together into one temporal unit during their processing – this results in habits. Neuronally, the data from both self and habits suggests that temporal continuity, as measured by the autocorrelation window, may be mediated by the strong power in the slower frequencies in anterior cortical regions like orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Owing to their long phase cycles, the slow frequencies are ideal for integrating and thus pooling different stimuli across time. In conclusion, we here assume an intimate relationship of self and habits in terms of temporal continuity and integration on behavioral, psychological and neuronal grounds.

Emotions are deeply embedded into the social contexts in which they occur. Emotional responses differ largely among various cultures, but also among various social subgroups and individuals. At the same time emotions typically include crossculturally stable bodily and behavioral features and have homologs in other animals like the facial expression in anger or the release of adrenaline in fear. This article will focus on the interplay of bodily responses and social structure that brings about emotions, habits, and skills and their interrelations. Emotions are constituted by a complex pattern of bodily responses that prepare one for action. The relevant bodily responses are tied together through a complex process of socialization in a way that produces typical emotional reactions in certain types of social scenarios that are of relevance for the individual. These social scenarios can be described as affordances that together make up a social structure to which individuals habitually respond.

Habits are fundamental for embodied action. In order to contribute to an embodied account of habit formation, we will bring together the ontological approaches of William James (1842–1910), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), and Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). James treats habits as key to the mind, placing them at the center of his ontology. James argues that the laws of nature characterize immutable habits of matter, and that living things are “bundles of habits.” Likewise, habits play a central role in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. The “lived body,” which Merleau-Ponty often refers to as the “habit body,” determines the character of experience. Nishida argues, following James, that habits structure human behavior and exemplify the continuity of reality. Nishida's nondualism fuses the embodied subject and the ontological world using habits. This has important implications for an embodied theory of habits, and thus for embodied cognitive science. We conclude by exploring ways that Nishida's work Enactivism, and ecological psychology mutually benefit when explored together.

In this chapter what I call the “backside” of habit is explored. I am interested in the philosophical implications of the physical and physiological processes that mediate, and which allow for what comes to appear as almost magic; namely the various sensorimotor associations and integrations that allow us to replay our past experiences, and to in a certain sense perceive potential futures, and to act and bring about anticipated outcomes – without quite knowing how. Thus, the term “backside” is meant to refer both the actual mediation and the epistemic opacity of these backstage intermediaries that allows for the front stage magic. The question is whether the epistemic complexities around sensorimotor mediation give us valuable insights into the nature of human agency and further how they might begin to show us new ways to think of the mind as truly embodied yet not reducible to any finite body-as-object.

In this chapter I argue that a Pragmatist framework can offer us a common ontological framework for both social and cognitive sciences, which represents a promising alternative to both internalist and methodological and ontological individualist approaches to sociality. Accordingly, social interaction is constitutive of cognitive phenomena both at the subpersonal and at the personal level, and at the individual and at the collective level. I reconstruct this model as a form of motor social ontology based on the notion of habit and criticize in this light intentionalist takes on social cognition. Finally, I assess recent arguments in favor of the rediscovery of the notion of “habit” within cognitive sciences, and argue that habit ontology can play a foundational role in embodied cognitive sciences insofar as it can give a unified account of 4E cognition, that is of cognition understood as an embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended phenomenon.

This chapter develops the basic outlines of a social ontology inspired by pragmatism and social interactionism, and explores the status of habits within it. It contends that bare social interactions provide the basic building blocks of such an ontology, and that habits, patterns of interaction, and institutional form provide the basic infrastructure through which bare social interactions obtain the stability required by social life.