Abstract
Habitual actions unfold without conscious deliberation or reflection, and yet often seem to be intelligently adjusted to situational intricacies. A question arises, then, as to how it is that habitual actions can exhibit this form of intelligence, while falling outside the domain of paradigmatically intentional actions. Call this the intelligence puzzle of habits. This puzzle invites three standard replies. Some stipulate that habits lack intelligence and contend that the puzzle is ill-posed. Others hold that habitual actions can exhibit intelligence because they are guided by automatic yet rational, propositional processes. Others still suggest that habits guide intelligent behaviour without involving propositional states by shaping perception in action-soliciting ways. We develop an alternative fourth answer based on John Dewey’s pragmatist account of habit. We argue that habits promote intelligent behaviour by shaping perception, by forming an interrelated network among themselves, and by cooperating with the environment.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
One reviewer indicated that one might dissolve the puzzle by simply acknowledging that while some habits are automatic, others are flexible, suggesting that the puzzle is set up arbitrarily. As we illustrate repeatedly below, however, habitual actions at least sometimes appear both flexible and uncontrolled. In that case, the question of understanding how these two features cohere remains an important issue demanding resolution.
We thank an anonymous reviewer for urging us to clarify what we mean by intelligence.
We do not mean to suggest that this tendency is universal. Recently, indeed, many challenges have been raised against the neo-behaviorist view of habits as the enemy of goal-directed projects and pursuance of rational ends (e.g. Bernacer and Murillo 2014; Egbert and Barandiaran 2014; Jan De Houwer 2019; Robbins and Costa 2017).
If habit is not distinguished from skill in terms of intelligence, how should we understand their difference? We are inclined to say that the distinction is much blurrier than one might think. In fact, some habitual actions like pen-twirling are seemingly skilful in themselves (Silver 2019; see Hutto and Robertson 2020 for discussion). Elaborating the relation between habit and skill, however, is a challenge that lies well beyond the scope of this paper. For more discussion on this issue, see Douskos (2017) and Cappuccio et al. (2020).
For more discussion, see Robertson (ms) “Flowing without knowing? Where and when intellectualism about know-how fails”.
See Cappuccio and Wheeler (2012) for more on the significance of the holistic background in Dreyfus’ account of “absorbed coping” and “ground-level intelligence”.
For existing attempts to revive Dewey’s concept of habit in contemporary research, see Cohen (2007) and Turner and Cacciatori (2016). While these works explore the contemporary relevance of Dewey in the context of routine research in the organization sciences, we aim to do so in the context of philosophy of mind and action, or more specifically, in order to propose an answer to the intelligence puzzle. We thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing us to these works of which we were previously unaware.
Turner and Cacciatori (2016) draws a distinction between automatic and skilful habit. They further distinguish infused from contested habit based on how it relates with deliberation. The last two categories, however, seem to describe types of relationships that can hold between habits and deliberations, rather than different types of habits as such. Assessing how these distinctions relate to Dewey’s distinction between intelligent and routine habit is an issue lying beyond the scope of this paper.
As an anonymous reviewer indicated, there are also cases in which we abstract information from the immediate situation and share it in propositional form not necessarily in order to resolve a problem here and now. Determining how Dewey accommodates such cases and the validity of his account in this regard lies beyond the scope of this paper.
Dreyfus does not explicitly discuss the holistic organization of habits, but given his Heideggerian background, he may concur with the analysis being presented here. However, we can note an important distinction between different holistic approaches. Heideggerian holism is primarily ontological, elucidating how something can be what it is only against a background of relevant practices. For example, driving habits presuppose a social and technological environment in which people drive cars abiding by traffic rules and hence cannot be reduced to whatever internal processes that sustain our habitual driving behaviours. Our point is more directly about the nature of mind and action. We appeal to the holistic organization of habits to explain how we end up pursuing a single course of action in habitual performance. In contrast, Dreyfus tells a single-minded story when it comes to this question without mentioning the role of anything like the dynamical cooperation of interconnected habits. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing us to clarify this issue.
Contemporary habit research acknowledges the significance of the environment in habit formation, habit maintenance, and habit change, yet also tend to endorse the internalist view described here. Wood and Rünger (2016) notes, for example: “Once habits form, perception of the relevant context cues automatically activates the mental representations of the habitual response” (p. 292, emphasis added). Assessing how this assumption of internalism might be affecting the research is an important issue that lies beyond the scope of this paper. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing us to clarify this point.
We do not mean to suggest that Dreyfus and Dewey should be construed as providing conflicting definitions of habitual action. Indeed, a reviewer helpfully drew our attention to the deep consonance between Dreyfus’ notion of an organism being enabled to establish and maintain a maximal grip upon its environment, on the one hand, and Dewey’s notion of inquiry facilitating a continual balance between organism and its environment, on the other.
Determining how interventions into the extra-personal situation can contribute to the formation and maintenance of intelligent habits is an issue that requires much empirical research (see Wood 2017 for a review).
This suggests that, although habits are synchronically uncontrolled, we control them diachronically by making interventions in the environment and in our lives. Sometimes this form of control might manifest itself as a conscious attempt to “break the habit”. As an anonymous reviewer pointed out, one might—echoing Peirce—say that truly intelligent creatures have habits of habit-formation. For more discussion, see Legg and Black (2020).
References
Bernacer J, Murillo JI (2014) The Aristotelian conception of habit and its contribution to human neuroscience. Front Hum Neurosci 8:883. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00883
Cappuccio M, Wheeler M (2012) Ground-level intelligence: action-oriented representation and the dynamics of the background. In: Radman Z (ed) Knowing without thinking. Palgrave Macmillan, London
Cappuccio M, Miyahara K, Ilundáin-Agurruza J (2020) Wax on, wax off! Habits, sport skills, and motor intentionality. Topoi-Int Rev Philos. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09720-3
Cohen MD (2007) Reading Dewey: reflections on the study of routine. Organ Stud 28:773–786
De Houwer J (2019) On how definitions of habits can complicate habit research. Front Psychol 29:2642. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02642
Dewey J (1922) Human nature and conduct. Dover Publications, New York
Douskos C (2017) Habit and intention. Philosophia 45:1129–1148. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9810-z
Dreyfus HL (2002) Intelligence without representation – Merleau-Ponty’s critique of mental representation: the relevance of phenomenology to scientific explanation. Phenomenol Cogn Sci 1:367–383
Dreyfus H (2007) The return of the myth of the mental. Inquiry 50:352–365
Dreyfus HL (2013) The myth of the pervasiveness of the mental. In: Schear JK (ed) Mind, reason, and being-in-the-world. Routledge, London
Egbert MD, Barandiaran XE (2014) Modeling habits as self-sustaining patterns of sensorimotor behavior. Front Hum Neurosci 8:590. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00590
Fridland E (2017) Automatically minded. Synthese 194:4337–4363. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0617-9
Graybiel AM (2008) Habits, rituals, and the evaluative brain. Annu Rev Neurosci 31:359–387. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.neuro.29.051605.112851
Hasselberger W (2017) Propositional attitudes and embodied skills in the philosophy of action. Eur J Philos 26:449–476. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.12259
Hutto DD, Myin E (2013) Radicalizing enactivism: basic minds without content. The MIT Press, Cambridge
Hutto DD, Robertson I (2020) Clarifying the character of habits: understanding what and how they explain. In: Testa I, Caruana F (eds) Habits: pragmatist approaches from cognitive science, neuroscience, and social theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Kalis A, Ometto D (2019) An Anscombean perspective on habitual action. Topoi-Int Rev Philos. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-019-09651-8
Krakauer JW (2019) The intelligent reflex. Philos Psychol 32:823–831. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2019.1607281
Legg C, Black J (2020) What is intelligence for? A Peircean pragmatist response to the knowing-how, knowing-that debate. Erkenn. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00301-9
Levy N (2017) Embodied savoir-faire: knowledge-how requires motor representations. Synthese 194:511–530. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0956-1
Miyahara K, Ransom TG, Gallagher S (2020) What the situation affords: habits and heedful attitudes in skilled performance. In: Testa I, Caruana F (eds) Habits: pragmatist approaches from cognitive science, neuroscience, and social theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Owens D (2017) Habitual agency. Philos Explor 20:93–108
Papineau D (2013) In the zone. R Inst Philos Supp 73:175–196
Pavese C (2019) The psychological reality of practical representation. Philos Psychol 32:784–821. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2019.1612214
Pollard B (2006) Explaining actions with habits. Am Philos Quart 43:57–69
Quinn JM, Pascoe A, Wood W, Neal DT (2010) Can’t control yourself? Monitor those bad habits. Personal Soc Psychol Bull 36(4):499–511. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167209360665
Ramírez-Vizcaya S, Froese T (2019) The enactive approach to habits: new concepts for the cognitive science of bad habits and addiction. Front Psychol 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00301
Robbins TW, Costa RM (2017) Habits. Curr Biol 27:R1200–R1206. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.09.060
Ryle G (2009) The concept of mind. Routledge, Oxon
Silver K (2019) Habitual weakness. Thought 8:270–277
Stanley J (2011) Know how. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Stanley J (2016) Knowledge, habit, practice, skill. J Philos Res 40:315–323
Stanley J, Krakauer J (2013) Motor skill depends on knowledge of fact. Front Hum Neurosci 7:503. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00503
Stanley J, Williamson T (2001) Knowing how. J Philos 98:411–444
Sternberg RJ, Kaufman SB (eds) (2011) The Cambridge handbook of intelligence. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Turner S, Cacciatori E (2016) The multiplicity of habit: Implications for routines research. In: Howard-Grenville J, Rerup C, Tsoukas H (eds) Organizational routines: how they are created, maintained, and changed. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Verplanken B, Aarts H (1999) Habit, attitude, and planned behaviour: is habit an empty construct or an interesting case of foal-directed automaticity? Eur Rev Soc Psychol 10:101–134. https://doi.org/10.1080/14792779943000035
Wood W (2017) Habit and in personality and social psychology. Personal Soc Psychol Rev 21:389–403
Wood W, Rünger D (2016) Psychology of habit. Annu Rev Psychol 67:289–314
Wood W, Labrecque JS, Lin P-Y, Rünger D (2014) Habits in dual-process models. In: Sherman JW, Gawronski BG, Trope Y (eds) Dual-process theories of the social mind. The Guilford Press, New York
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the ARC Discovery Project “Minds in Skilled Performance: Explanatory Framework and Comparative Study” (DP170102987) and the JSPS KAKENHI Project “Developing a habit-centred paradigm of philosophy and science of mind” (20K00001).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Miyahara, K., Robertson, I. The Pragmatic Intelligence of Habits. Topoi 40, 597–608 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09735-w
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09735-w