Abstract
Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body dualism is ready to be overcome with the rise of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4E) cognition. We review the enactive approach and highlight how it moves beyond the traditional stalemate by integrating both autonomy and sense-making into its theory of agency. It defines a habit as an adaptive, precarious, and self-sustaining network of neural, bodily, and interactive processes that generate dynamical sensorimotor patterns. Habits constitute a central source of normativity for the agent. We identify a potential shortcoming of this enactive account with respect to bad habits, since self-maintenance of a habit would always be intrinsically good. Nevertheless, this is only a problem if, following the mainstream perspective on habits, we treat habits as isolated modules. The enactive approach replaces this atomism with a view of habits as constituting an interdependent whole on whose overall viability the individual habits depend. Accordingly, we propose to define a bad habit as one whose expression, while positive for itself, significantly impairs a person’s well-being by overruling the expression of other situationally relevant habits. We conclude by considering implications of this concept of bad habit for psychological and psychiatric research, particularly with respect to addiction research.
Highlights
The notion of habit has a long and complex history that can be traced back to Aristotle
Research on habits declined drastically in the mid-1950s with the advent of the cognitive sciences (Barandiaran and Di Paolo, 2014), since by that time this notion had become strongly linked with behaviorism, whose study of habits had focused on finding the laws of association between an external stimuli and an observable response, excluding any reference to mental processes or states (e.g. Watson, 1913; Pavlov, 1927), or even to neural ones (e.g. Skinner, 1938)
The cognitive sciences aimed at explaining the cognitive mechanisms and mental processes underlying intelligent behavior, so the study of habits understood as conditioned reflexes was considered irrelevant for their purposes: what behaviorism explained in terms of habits, cognitive science did it in terms of information processing and representations (Barandiaran and Di Paolo, 2014; Wood and Rünger, 2016)
Summary
It is one of the most widely explored notions in the history of Western philosophy and science of mind, occupying a privileged position in the work of prominent figures, such as Hume, Hartley, Hegel, James, Morgan, Bergson, Thorndike, Husserl, Watson, Dewey, Pavlov, Skinner, Merleau-Ponty, Piaget, Hebb, Ricoeur, and Deleuze (Sparrow and Hutchinson, 2013)
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