Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit

This book constitutes the first treatment of C. S. Peirce’s unique concept of habit. Habit animated the pragmatists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who picked up the baton from classical scholars, principally Aristotle. Most prominent among the pragmatists thereafter is Charles Sanders Peirce. In our vernacular, habit connotes a pattern of conduct. Nonetheless, Peirce’s concept transcends application to mere regularity or to human conduct; it extends into natural and social phenomena, making cohesive inner and outer worlds. Chapters in this anthology define and amplify Peircean habit; as such, they highlight the dialectic between doubt and belief. Doubt destabilizes habit, leaving open the possibility for new beliefs in the form of habit-change; and without habit-change, the regularity would fall short of habit – conforming to automatic/mechanistic systems. This treatment of habit showcases how, through human agency, innovative regularities of behavior and thought advance theprocess of making the unconscious conscious. The latter materializes when affordances (invariant habits of physical phenomena) form the basis for modifications in action schemas and modes of reasoning. Further, the book charts how indexical signs in language and action are pivotal in establishing attentional patterns; and how these habits accommodate novel orientations  within event templates. It is intended for those interested in Peirce’s metaphysic or semiotic, including both senior scholars and students of philosophy and religion, psychology, sociology and anthropology, as well as mathematics, and the natural sciences.

• Agency and Patiency
• Doubt and Belief
• Etiology of Habit
• Evolutionary Affordances
• Habit-change
• Inductive and Abductive Reasoning
• Knowledge and Action
• Laws of Thirdness
• Mental Complexions of Habit
• Mental Pattern
• Science and Religion
• complexity

“A substantial and important book, one that illuminates not only some of the complex details of Peirce s thought, but also a wide range of issues in pragmatism, semiotics, and philosophical anthropology for which his thinking about habit is shown to be relevant.” (Michael L. Raposa, From the Pluralist, Vol. 14 (2), 2019)

“Thematic consensus that can be drawn from this important work it is that habits are not the result of mechanical-organic processes resulting from repeated actions, but rather involve agency, imagination, and semiosis. … Biologists are increasingly adopting a version of Peirce’s basic perspective of evolution … .” (Marcel Danesi, Biosemiotics, Vol. 11, 2018)

• Department of Modern Languages, State University of New York at Cortland, Cortland, USA

  Donna E. West

• Department of Anthropology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA

  Myrdene Anderson

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