Category: Habit

Habit and the Explanation of Action

Introduction

We are at a curious impasse in explaining action in sociology. On the one hand, the limitations of various standard approaches based on teleological or rule-like notions such as norms, goals, and values are now very well-documented, to the point that further commentary on their inadequacies feels like beating the proverbial dead horse (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Martin & Lembo, 2020; Whitford, 2002). At the same time, a resurgent string of writings based on American pragmatism, practice theory, and phenomenology suggests a proper replacement for such naive teleological notions in explaining action is also apparent. This is, namely, a refurbished conception of action as habit, ridding this notion of all connotations associated with inflexibility, mindlessness, and mechanical repetition acquired from intellectualist traditions of explaining action while emphasizing its flexible, adaptive, mindful, and thoroughly agentic nature (Crossley, 2001; Dalton, 2004; Joas, 1996; Martin, 2011, p. 258ff; Strand & Lizardo, 2015; Wacquant, 2016). The most ambitious of these proposals see habits as the primary “social mechanisms” serving as the micro-foundations for most macro-phenomena of interest to sociologists, opening the black box left closed by traditional quantitative approaches focusing on correlations and macro-level empirical regularities  (Gross, 2009).

In stark contrast to this seeming theoretical success, on the other hand, one would be hard-pressed to find habit figuring as a central explanatory construct in most recent work in the field done by card-carrying sociologists doing empirical work across various areas of research (e.g., gender and sexuality, immigration, race and ethnicity, social psychology, social stratification, and the like).[1] It seems as if, outside some notable islands, habits have become a purely rhetorical, even decorative tool, a resource with which to vanquish older Parsonian or Rational-action ghosts in social theory, offered as an elegant solution to the conceptual difficulties previously generated by these explanatory traditions but apparently incapable of being put to work by mere sociological mortals.

This raises the question: Is habit bound to remain a purely decorative notion in sociology, useful as theoretical window-dressing and conceptual score-settling but useless for being put to explanatory work in our empirical efforts?  The wager of this paper is that the answer is a resounding no. However, the answer will remain “yes” if sociologists stick to their current conceptualizations of habit. For habit to live up to its potential and become a general (and the first and foremost) tool for explaining action, more conceptual clarification work aimed at systematically linking habits—as a “hinge” concept—to other intra and interdisciplinary notions and traditions is required.

Moreover, the very nature of habit needs to be scrutinized in a positive, non-defensive way; that is, not by contrasting habit to other ways of theorizing action (e.g., reflexive or purposive) while repeating for the umpteenth time that habit can be flexible, generative, and non-mechanical. Instead, different—and seemingly contradictory—aspects of the nature of habit need to be explicitly brought to the fore and analytically distinguished. Subsequently, different variants of the habit concept have to be linked to other notions not traditionally associated with habit so that people can trace the linkages and realize that, in deploying these seemingly “non-habit-like” notions to explain action, indeed, they have been doing action-explanation via habit all along.  Finally, critical ambiguities in current formulations of habit, particularly its use as both a particular kind of action and a form all action and cognition can take, will have to be clarified.

The Double of Law of Habit

One roadblock to habit becoming a useful explanatory notion in sociology has to do with a curious feature of the idea, one that has been noted by analysts who relied on the notion from Aristotle, the scholastics, to early enlightenment thinkers, and onwards. This feature of habit was best formulated, developed, and ultimately baptized as the “double law” of habit in a French philosophically eclectic—sometimes also spookily called “spiritualist”—tradition of theorizing action and habit beginning in the late-eighteenth century and continuing into the nineteenth (de Biran, 1970; Ravaisson, 2008).[2] What is this double law? The basic observation is simple and phenomenologically intuitive. The process of habituation (e.g., acquiring a habit via active repetition, passive repetitive exposure, or “practice” in the colloquial sense) can leave two kinds of “by-products” in people, depending on whether we are talking about passive or covert results or whether we are talking about covert or overt results. Habituation has paradoxically distinct effects on each of these by-products.

Before getting to these effects, we need to deal with the first tricky issue, which is the duality of habit as both process and product. That is, habituation produces habits in beings (like people) who can become habituated to things when they engage in repeated practice (or exposed to repeated patterns in experience). The status of habit as both process and product (and more importantly, a process that is necessarily linked to a product) can create confusion. Typically, sociologists use the word “habit” to refer to products (items held or possessed by a person or community). However, they forget that any such act of typing a given cognitive or action item as a habit or as habitual necessarily puts the item in an iterative historical chain of previous instantiations of the item. Nothing can be a habit unless it is the child of repeated enactments in the past since habits can only be born out of such habituation processes (Lizardo, 2021).

The other confusing thing is that habituation processes generally lead to at least three analytically distinct types of habit-like traces or by-products in people. One of these by-products refers to dispositions to perceive the world in specific ways (e.g., perceptual habits). Another results in inclinations to engage in certain acts of conceptual linkage (e.g., “associative” cognition) that, when allowed to run unimpeded, furnish people with conclusions regarding the presumed properties of people, events, and objects in the form of beliefs, intuitions, explanations, attributions, and the like. These intuitions seem “right” or applicable even though the person lacks phenomenal access to the process generating them and without the person having to go through anything that looks like “thinking” in the deductive sense, like deriving conclusions from a chain of premises via a logical calculus (see Sloman (2014) for a consideration of these issues from the perspective of contemporary cognitive psychology). We can thus say that, on the one hand, we have perceptual habits; namely, inclinations or dispositions to see (or, more generally, experience) the world in particular ways, while on the other hand, we have cognitive habits manifested as tendencies to believe that certain things are true about particular objects or settings. The third set of via-products of habituation processes is the generation of inclinations or tendencies to act in specific ways in particular settings toward particular people and objects. These inclinations, tendencies, or dispositions are typically, but not necessarily—as they can be subverted by other causal chains in the world—manifested as overt actions. These are what most people (including sociologists) mean when they use the word habit.[3]

The notion of habit unifies capacities usually seen as distinct (perception, cognition, overt-action) as variations of a common genus; what they have in common is that they are all types of acts. Thus, in seeing the world thus and so, we engage in specifiable perceptual acts (see Noë, 2004), and in drawing conclusions that go beyond the information given via associative cognition, we engage in cognitive acts (see Bruner, 1990). Overt actions have always been recognized as acts, but the beauty of the habit concept is bringing the same “active” element to mental capacities that are typically seen as removed from action.[4] Habit theorists always tend to announce that the point of the concept is to transcend the dualism between mind (e.g., thinking/perceiving) and body (acting in the world) but are seldom clear as to how the notion of habit accomplishes this. One way to clarify this transcendence is by noting that, ultimately, when conceptualizing perception, cognition, and action as all the products of the same habituation process, we are also saying that we are ultimately talking about the same kind of act-like capacities people end up having. Nevertheless, regardless of their common ancestry as of acts, it is essential to keep distinct these three forms of habit-as-product-of-habituation can take in people since they “hinge” on, and point toward, distinct sets of constructs, concerns, and empirical referents. We take up each one in turn.

Perceptual Habits, Cognitive Habits, and Fluency

This first side of the double law of habit is that repeated experiences leave covert traces in persons related to perception and how we respond to the world’s offerings (more generally, the sensibility).[5] Here the idea is that the more we are exposed to a given experiential pattern, the easiest it is to take in and perceptually process the next time around. This is the aspect of repetition that contemporary psychologists see it as leading to perceptual fluency. The “feeling of fluency” resulting from perceptual habituation (e.g., the ease that comes from perceiving things we have perceived before) itself has many downstream consequences, the most consequential of which, from the perspective of sociological action theory, is the tendency of experiencing aesthetic pleasure when exposed to experiential patterns that have become easy to grasp as a result of repeated previous encounters.

Repeated exposure to patterns and regularities in experience leads to the formation of cognitive habits. These experiential regularities may take the form of configurational co-occurrences of object properties or temporal contiguities among events we are exposed to. Here the result is the creation of an inclination toward linkage and association. That is, via cognitive habituation, we learn the expected associations between properties in objects experienced as synchronic wholes or gestalts or between events experienced successively in time. In the configurational case, repeated exposure to objects featuring correlated properties leads to the cognitive habits allowing people to infer the presence of unseen (but previously encountered) properties just from exposure to others with which they are associated; categorization, therefore, is made possible via associative cognitive habits (Rosch, 1978). Thus, upon hearing barking nearby, we expect to see a slobbery, perhaps friendly quadruped with a wagging tail in short order. In the successive event case, cognitive habits linking successive happenings were those enlightenment empiricists saw as leading, such as the tendency for people to experience sequentially repeated events as united by an unseen causal relation. For instance, as Hume argued, the experience of willing to move my arm and seeing my arm subsequently move comes, via a cognitive habit, to be seen as united in a hidden causal essence responsible for the connection (“the self”).

The cases of perceptual and cognitive habituation have many common threads.  First, with repetition, we tend to create unities in experience from what were initially separate experienced events or features. Second, the direct uptake of these unities becomes more accessible and easier each time, which means that cognitive and perceptual habituation is always experienced as a form of facilitation for creating and experiencing such unities. Finally, with the fluent creation of unities in experience, there comes an inevitable diminution of sensibility concerning the lower-order features (synchronic or temporal) brought together under the unity. This is a paradoxical “desensitizing” effect of habituation mentioned by double-law habit theorists; however, this so-called desensitization (also mentioned by Simmel (2020) in his famous essay on the Metropolis) can itself become a platform for increased perceptual discrimination concerning the unity so created, we stop perceiving parts so that we may more easily grasp the whole. That is, while lower-order sensations or reactions to incoming stimuli decrease with habituation, capacities to identify and discriminate between higher-order perceptual gestalts become swifter and more refined—captured in the dictum that, with habit, sensations fade while perceptions become more acute. As Sinclair puts it, with habitual repetition, “active perceptions, although they become more indifferent insofar as they involve less effort, become clearer, more assured, and more distinct” (2011, p. 67). This is why discrimination among distinct qualitative properties of objects (e.g., among expert wine tasters) can increase with habituated repetition even as sensibility to other properties of the experience (ones that would overwhelm the novice) decreases; attenuation is the condition of possibility for enhanced discrimination at a more encompassing level of experience. Aesthetic appreciation of what becomes easy to perceive via perceptual habituation is thus central to any attempt to build a “social aesthetics” (Merriman & Martin, 2015).

Repetition, fluency, and skilled action

The other side of the double law is more familiar to sociologists as it deals with the generations of “habits” taking the form of overt action. More accurately, this is action in the form of habit, with habituality being a quality of action (rather than a hidden essence behind action). Action is habitual to the extent that it tends to acquire a set of specifiable signatures. One of these is the formation of dispositions or inclinations to act when encountering settings where we have performed similar actions.[6]  The other, similar to the increased facility or fluency referred to earlier concerning cognitive habits, has to do with the fact that habitual actions become easier to perform with repetition, with the various micro-actions constitutive of larger action units coming to be united into a more articulated smoothly flowing sequence. Concerning the first (increased habitual “automaticity” as leading to less “initiation control”) Ravaisson (2008, p. 51) notes that with repetition, there emerges “a tendency, an inclination that no longer awaits the commandments of the will but rather anticipates them, and which even escapes entirely and irremediably both will and consciousness.” Thus, there is an indelible link between action and motivation, as repeated actions “the facility in an action gained through its repetition can become a pre-reflective desire, tendency or   carry out the act” (Sinclair, 2011, pp. 73–74). Bourdieu (1984), for instance, proposed that “taste” is such a habitual form, such that we tend to enjoy or like the things that we are used to consuming, with this taste becoming a motivation to engage in further acts of consumption when encountering similar objects, experiences, and settings affording the actualization of the habit (Lizardo, 2014).

Note that in the case of overt action habits, we also have increased facilitation, just like in the perceptual and cognitive act case. Thus, habituation in the form of repetition leads to the creation of more fluid activity units, just like in the perceptual habit case. Repeated action thus tend to form unified gestalts, in which the initial micro-actions come to fit together into a more practically fluent whole. “Enskilment” is thus tied to the creation of inclinations to act in contexts in which the habitual skill can be performed (e.g., a piano “calls out” to be played but only in the skilled piano player).

Note here we run into another ambiguity in the use of “habit.” One refers to the fluid and assured performance of actions acquired via practice and repetition. The other refers to a synchronic action sequence such that an action is habitual only if it is regularly repeated at specified intervals. Double-law theorists make this distinction by pointing to fluency, facility, disposition, and inclination to act given context. If the aim is to forestall confusion, it is better to use “skill” to refer to the fluent quality of habitual actions as distinct from the dispositional component. To explain why someone  performs an action in the here-and-now by pointing to a disposition or inclination necessarily places the current action in a historical series of actions performed in the past by the same person (Lizardo, 2021). Pointing to the skillfulness, fluidity, gracefulness, or aesthetically pleasing nature of the activity does no such thing. The reason is that logically, these two qualities of action, namely, the skillful and the dispositional, need not be connected. A skilled (fluency-habit) piano player may not necessarily be “in the habit” (inclination) of playing the piano on regular occasions. In the same way, one can be less than skilled as a driver and still be “in the habit” of driving to work every day. It is only habit as inclination that enters into explaining occurrent actions (see Lizardo, 2021 for further argument), and as such, the privileged sense when using the notion of habit to make sense of people’s activities.[7]

References

Bourdieu, P. (1996). The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (S. Emanuel, trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1992)

Bruner, J. S. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Harvard University Press.

Camic, C. (1986). The Matter of Habit. The American Journal of Sociology, 91(5), 1039–1087.

Crossley, N. (2001). The phenomenological habitus and its construction. Theory and Society, 30(1), 81–120.

Dalton, B. (2004). Creativity, Habit, and the Social Products of Creative Action: Revising Joas, Incorporating Bourdieu. Sociological Theory, 22(4), 603–622.

de Biran, P. M. (1970). The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking. Greenwood.

Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? The American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023.

Gross, N. (2009). A Pragmatist Theory of Social Mechanisms. American Sociological Review, 74(3), 358–379.

Joas, H. (1996). The Creativity of Action. University of Chicago Press.

Lizardo, O. (2014). Taste and the logic of practice in distinction. Czech Sociological Review, 50(3), 335–364.

Lizardo, O. (2021). Habit and the explanation of action. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 51, 391–411.

Martin, J. L. (2011). The Explanation of Social Action. Oxford University Press.

Martin, J. L., & Lembo, A. (2020). On the Other Side of Values. The American Journal of Sociology, 126(1), 52–98.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception (C. Smith, trans.). Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1945)

Merriman, B., & Martin, J. L. (2015). A social aesthetics as a general cultural sociology? In Routledge international handbook of the sociology of art and culture (pp. 152–210). Routledge.

Ngo, H. (2016). Racist habits: A phenomenological analysis of racism and the habitual body. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 42(9), 847–872.

Ngo, H. (2017). The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment. Lexington Books.

Noë, A. (2004). Action in Perception. Bradford book.

Ravaisson, F. (2008). Of Habit. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In E. Rosch & B. B. Lloyd (Eds.), Cognition and categorization (pp. 27–48). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Simmel, G. (2020). The metropolis and the life of spirit. Journal of Classical Sociology, 1468795X20980638.

Sinclair. (2015). Is there a“ dispositional modality”? Maine de Biran and Ravaisson on agency and inclination. History of Philosophy Quarterly, 32 (2), 161–179.

Sinclair, M. (2011). Ravaisson and the Force of Habit. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 49(1), 65–85.

Sloman, S. A. (2014). Two systems of reasoning: An update. In J. W. Sherman, B. Gawronski, & Y. Trope (Eds.), Dual-process theories of the social mind (Vol. 624, pp. 69–79). The Guilford Press, xvi.

Strand, M., & Lizardo, O. (2015). Beyond world images: Belief as embodied action in the world. Sociological Theory,  33 (1), 44–70.

Toribio, J. (2021). Responsibility for implicitly biased behavior: A habit‐based approach. Journal of Social Philosophy, josp.12442. https://doi.org/10.1111/josp.12442

Wacquant, L. (2016). A Concise Genealogy and Anatomy of Habitus. The Sociological Review, 64(1), 64–72.

Whitford, J. (2002). Pragmatism and the untenable dualism of means and ends: Why rational choice theory does not deserve paradigmatic privilege. Theory and Society, 31(3), 325–363.

Endnotes

  1. Note that the claim here is not that no sociologists currently use habit and related notions (e.g., habitus) as explanatory resources. Of course, there are many such people. The claim is that if one were to peruse run-of-the-mill research published in the usual places, the prevalence of habit as a tool for explaining action would be much lower (in fact, almost infinitesimal), especially when compared to expectations one gets from reading the aforementioned theoretical literature, according to which they should be the primary explanatory go-to notion, and not a once in a while exception tied to particular theorists or approaches (e.g., Bourdieusian and pragmatist sociologies). Admittedly, “disconnects” between lofty theoretical discourse and empirical work done in the sociological trenches are neither rare nor new. What is new is that the current absence of habit as a prominent explanatory resource in empirical work is happening in the context of a relatively peaceful consensus, (almost extreme given the history of theoretical debate in the discipline) that they should be indeed front and center. 
  2. Oddly, the most famous habit theorist in modern social theory, Pierre Bourdieu, seemed to have been entirely unaware of this French (!) tradition, as far as I can tell, given published works, interviews, and lectures. Instead, Bourdieu teleported straight from Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas to the twentieth century, defaulting to Chomskyan talk of “generative schemes” or Husserlian allusions to habitude when pointing to the active, creative aspect of habitual activity. This is quite a shame because Ravaissson’s (and before him De Biran’s) habit theories contain potent formulations, sometimes superior to much better touted twentieth-century figures like Bergson or Merleau-Ponty could have helped Bourdieu more effectively sidestep a variety of misunderstandings. In more recent work, Martin (2011, p. 259, fn. 34) considers de Biran but skips over Ravaisson, even though the latter builds on and transcends many of the limitations of Biran’s treatment while anticipating formulations of later thinkers like Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. 
  3. For instance, Camic (1986, p. 1044) defines habit as “a more or less self-actuating tendency or disposition to engage in a previously adopted or acquired form of action.”
  4. Note that a key implication of the habitualization of perception and cognition is that, just like we are (ethically, morally) responsible for our overt actions, we are also responsible for our perceptual and cognitive acts, especially when these end up harming the objects of our perceptions and cognitions, as in the case of so-called implicit biases (Ngo, 2017, p. 35ff; Toribio, 2021). Note that the question of responsibility becomes orthogonal to whether you meant to get the repetitive habituation process started in the first place since most of the habitual perceptual and cognitive acts we engage in daily were probably acquired by more passive forms of exposure to repetitive experiences in the world.
  1. The idea that we have perceptual habits is usually traced to sociologists to Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) or the American pragmatists, and later Bourdieu (see in particular 1992/1996, p. 313ff). However, it emerged first in the philosophical enlightenment tradition leading to empiricism (it was the basis of Hume’s skeptical arguments against causation and the self) and figured prominently among French double-law theorists of the 19th century. The distinction between habits in action and perception survives today in critical-phenomenological attempts to identify the habitual dimension of oppressive regimes. For instance, in considering “racist habits,” Ngo (2016, p. 860) distinguishes between “bodily gesture or response, and racialized perception” as two primary registers (italics added).
  2. That habits have their own “dispositional” modality, standing between necessity (what always occurs) and contingency (what may occur, but we cannot predict) is something that is lost in some discussions, especially those that depart from Kant’s equation of a (specific form of) habit with mechanical “necessitation.” Habits are what may occur somewhat predictably, but only if everything in the world is right. Dispositionality is thus the modality of all habits (Sinclair, 2015), in that they are potential tendencies that may or may not be manifested. This is why talking about “dispositions” (like Bourdieu sometimes did) as if referring to yet another by-product of habituation (separately from habits) is redundant; all habits are technically dispositions. 
  3. Ascriptions of fluidity and grace in action performance (e.g., “skill”) are more likely to be normative than they are explanatory, although they can serve as the basis of identity and relationship-formation when people create “communities of skill.”

 

 

Bourdieu, Dewey, and Critiques of Dual-Process Models in Sociology

Sociologists have been interested in cognition at least as far back as Durkheim, who, with his nephew Marcel Mauss, sought to uncover the social origins of mental categories (Durkheim [1912] 1995; Durkheim and Mauss, [1903] 1963). However, it was arguably Pierre Bourdieu who “supercharged” the cognitive turn in contemporary sociology (Cerulo, 2010), providing an invaluable foundation for studying the social and cultural dimensions of cognition. One of the many reasons why Bourdieu has been so useful for sociologists is the clear affinities between his work (particularly his conception of “habitus”) and a variety of influential frameworks and research programs within the cognitive sciences, most notably embodied cognition, cognitive schemas, and dual-process cognition (see DiMaggio, 1997; Lizardo, 2004; Lizardo and Strand, 2010; Vaisey, 2009).

Bourdieu versus Dewey on Reflexivity, Habit, and Deliberation

Bourdieu has been central to what Brekhus (2015) described as the “individual practical actor approach” to culture and cognition, which, he notes, resurrects the pragmatist concern for individual thought and practical action. There is, of course, a lot of common ground between Bourdieu and American pragmatism, and Bourdieu himself noted that he and John Dewey shared an emphasis on dispositional action and a rejection of conceptual dualisms (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 122). However, there are some subtle but consequential differences in the way Bourdieu and Dewey theorized cognition and action that have direct relevance for how sociologists analyze and conceptualize automatic and deliberate processing. I suggest that some of the criticisms aimed at early and influential work on dual-process cognition (specifically the work of DiMaggio (1997) and Vaisey, 2009)) also apply to Bourdieusian practice theory, and reflect a perspective more aligned with the work of Dewey. I focus on three of the major criticisms sociologists have made regarding early dual-process model scholarship – 1) that automatic and deliberate processes are dynamic and interactive rather than separate and independent processes, 2) that deliberation is not rare but commonplace, and 3) that dual-process models are non-exhaustive – all of which go against Bourdieu and are supported by Dewey.

The Integration of Habit and Reflexivity

First, several sociologists have argued that automatic and deliberate processes are not wholly separate or independent (as in DiMaggio (1997) and Vaisey (2009)) but are instead highly dynamic and interactive processes (e.g., Cerulo, 2018; Leschziner and Green, 2013; Winchester, 2016). This speaks directly to the fact that early accounts of dual-process cognition in sociology fit the general structure of Bourdieusian practice theory, which argues that actors generally rely upon the unconscious dispositions of habitus save for times of “crisis” in which they may be “superseded” for “rational and conscious computation” (Bourdieu, 1990: 108; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 131-137). Here, Bourdieu seems to imply that habitus and reflective thought are mutually exclusive, rather than dialogical (Crossley, 2013: 151).

Conversely, in my recent article in Sociological Theory (Brett, 2022), I draw on Dewey’s account of deliberation, which conceives of reflective thought and habits as directly interwoven: “Deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like. It is an experiment in making various combinations of selected elements of habits and impulses, to see what the resultant action would be like if it were entered upon” (Dewey, [1922]2002: 190). Instead of asking whether an action was the result of either automatic or deliberate thought, this invites us to ask how and to what degree did both automatic and deliberate processing contribute to a given action or decision. I also draw upon Dewey’s account of a “reflective disposition,” a habit which itself encourages more thorough and protracted deliberation. Unlike Bourdieu, Dewey suggested that habit and deliberation were integrated to such a degree that “it is a perilous error to draw a hard and fast line between action into which deliberation and choice enter an activity due to impulse and matter-of-fact habit” (Dewey, [1922]2002:279). Therefore, for those arguing for the interactive nature of automatic and deliberate processes, Dewey provides a much more suitable theoretical foundation.

The Importance of Reflection

A second and related criticism of early dual-process scholarship is that it discounts the role of reflection (e.g., Hitlin and Kirkpatrick-Johnson 2015; Mische 2014; Vila-Henninger 2015), wrongly arguing that deliberate cognition both rarely occurs and is rarely in charge of our action (DiMaggio, 1997; Vaisey, 2009). Again, this fits with Bourdieu’s account, in which crisis-induced deliberation was generally a rare occurrence, resulting from large-scale social or political disruptions. In contrast, such disruptions were both more mundane and more common for Dewey (Crossley, 2013: 151), resulting from the dynamic relationship between flesh-and-blood actors and ever-changing social and material environments. Though Dewey viewed habit as the predominant mode of human conduct, he did not discount reflection, but stressed that the disruption of habit and the emergence of deliberation was a regular and consequential occurrence in our everyday lives.

Beyond Habit and Reflexivity

Lastly, in a more recent critique, Pagis and Summers-Effler (2021) suggest that dual-process models alone do not exhaust the range of human practices and experiences. They argue that aesthetic engagement – “open and purposeful attention to the immediate context that overrides both habitual and reflective/deliberative processing” (2021:1372) – is a cultural practice that does not fit either automatic or deliberate processing. Aesthetic engagements are motivated by curiosity and exploration and require sustained uncertainty through the inhibition or overriding of both automatic and deliberate cognition. They theorize aesthetic engagement through both phenomenology and pragmatism, most notably drawing on Dewey’s distinction between “perception” and “recognition”: aesthetic engagement involves dwelling in (open and curious) perception and bracketing the automatic and deliberate processes involved in recognition (e.g., automatic categorization, deliberate search for meaning). Conversely, it is difficult (perhaps impossible) to locate a mode of cognition and action within Bourdieu’s work that precludes both automatic processes (i.e., habitus) or deliberate processes (e.g., conscious computation).

Taken together, it seems as though some of the major criticisms aimed towards dual-process models in sociology could have just as easily been directed at Bourdieu. Although sociologists have drawn from a variety of empirical work from the cognitive sciences to make claims about the dual-nature of cognition, it is possible that the persistence of assumptions like process-independence is partly the result of thinking about cognition through Bourdieu. Furthermore, one wonders what dual-process scholarship, or even culture and cognition more broadly would look like had Dewey, rather than Bourdieu, served as the primary framework for theorizing cognition.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Brekhus, Wayne H. 2015. Culture and Cognition: Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Brett, Gordon. 2022. “Dueling with Dual-Process Models: Cognition, Creativity, and Context.” Sociological Theory: 07352751221088919.

Cerulo, Karen A. 2010. “Mining the Intersections of Cognitive Sociology and Neuroscience.” Poetics 38(2):115–32.

Cerulo, Karen A. 2018. “Scents and Sensibility: Olfaction, Sense-Making, and Meaning Attribution.” American Sociological Review 83(2):361–89.

Crossley, Nick. 2013. “Habit and Habitus.” Body & Society 19(2-3): 136-161.

Dewey, John. [1922] 2002. Human Nature and Conduct. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company.

DiMaggio, Paul. 1997. “Culture and Cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23:263–87.

Durkheim, Emile. [1912] 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.

Durkheim, Emile, and Marcel Mauss. [1903] 1963. Primitive Classification. London: Cohen and West.

Hitlin, Steven, and Monica Kirkpatrick-Johnson. 2015. “Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead.” American Journal of Sociology 120(5):1429–72.

Leschziner, Vanina, and Adam Isaiah Green. 2013. “Thinking about Food and Sex: Deliberate Cognition in the Routine Practices of a Field.” Sociological Theory 31(2):116–44.

Lizardo, Omar. 2004. “The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34(4): 375-401.

Lizardo, Omar, and Michael Strand. 2010. “Skills, Toolkits, Contexts and Institutions: Clarifying the Relationship between Different Approaches to Cognition in Cultural Sociology.” Poetics 38(2):205–28.

Mische, Ann. 2014. “Measuring Futures in Action: Projective Grammars in the Rio+20 Debates.” Theory and Society 43(3–4):437–64.

Pagis, Michal, and Erika Summers-Effler. 2021. “Aesthetic Engagement.” Sociological Forum 36(S1):1371–94.

Vaisey, Stephen. 2009. “Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action.” American Journal of Sociology 114(6):1675–715.

Vila-Henninger, Luis Antonio. 2015. “Toward Defining the Causal Role of Consciousness: Using Modelsof Memory and Moral Judgment from Cognitive Neuroscience to Expand the Sociological Dual-Process Model.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 45(2):238–60.

Winchester, Daniel. 2016. “A Hunger for God: Embodied Metaphor as Cultural Cognition in Action.” Social Forces 95(2):585–606.

Consciousness and Schema Transposition

In a recent paper published in American Sociological Review, Andrei Boutyline and Laura Soter bring much-needed conceptual clarification to the sociological appropriation of the notion of schemas while also providing valuable and welcome guidance on future uses of the concept for practical research purposes. The paper is a tour de force, and all of you should read it (carefully, perhaps multiple times), so this post will not summarize their detailed argument. Instead, I want to focus on a subsidiary but no less important set of conclusions towards the end, mainly having to do with the relationship between declarative and nondeclarative cognition and an old idea in sociological action theory due to Bourdieu (1980/1990) that was further popularized in the highly cited article by Sewell (1992) on the duality of structure. I refer to the notion of schematic transposition.

In what follows, I will first outline Bourdieu’s and Sewell’s use of the notion and then go over how Boutyline and Soter raise a critical technical point about it, pointing to what is perhaps a consequential theoretical error. Finally, I will close by pointing to some lines of evidence in cognitive neuroscience that seem to buttress Boutyline and Soter’s position.

The idea of schematic transposition is related to an older idea due to Piaget of schema transfer. The basic proposal is that we can learn to engage in a set of concrete activities (e.g., let’s say “seriation” or putting things in rows or lines) in one particular practical context (putting multiple pebbles or marbles in a line). Then, after many repetitions, we develop a schema for it. Later, when learning about things in another context, let’s say “the number line” in basic arithmetic, we understand (assimilate) operations in this domain in terms of the previous seriation schema. Presumably, analogies and conceptual metaphors also depend on this schema transfer mechanism. In Logic of Practice, Bourdieu built this dynamic capacity for schema transfer into the definition of habitus everyone loves to hate, noting that the habitus can be thought of as “[s]ystems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures…” and so forth (p. 53).

This idea of transposibility ends up being essential for a habit theory like Bourdieu’s because it adds much-needed flexibility and creativity to how we conceive the social agent going about their lives (Joas, 1996). This is because thinking of action as driven by habitus does not entail people stuck with “one-track” inflexible or mechanical dispositions. Instead, via their capacity to transpose classificatory or practical habits learned in one domain to others, their internalized practical culture functions in a more “multi-track” way, being thus adaptive and creative. In an old paper on the notion of habitus (2004), I noted something similar to this, pointing out that “it is precisely this idea of flexible operations that allows for the habitus to not be tied to any particular content…instead, the habitus is an abstract, non-context specific, transposable matrix” (p. 391-392). Thus, there is something about transposability that seems necessary in a theory of action so that it does not come off as overly deterministic or mechanical.

In his famous 1992 paper, Sewell went even further, putting transposability at the very center of his conception of social change and agency. Departing from a critique of Bourdieu, Sewell noted two things. First (p. 16), any society contains a multiplicity of “structures” (today, we’d probably use the term “field,” “sphere,” or “domain”). Secondly (p. 17), this means people need to navigate across them somehow. Single-track theories of habit and cognition cannot explain how this navigation is possible. This navigation is made possible, according to Sewell, only by theorizing “the transposability of schemas.” As Sewell notes:

…[T]he schemas to which actors have access can be applied across a wide range of circumstances…Schemas were defined above as generalizable or transposable procedures applied in the enactment of social life. The term “generalizable” is taken from Giddens; the term “transposable,” which I prefer, is taken from Bourdieu…To say that schemas are transposable, in other words, is to say that they can be applied to a wide and not fully predictable range of cases outside the context in which they are initially learned…Knowledge of a rule or a schema by definition means the ability to transpose or extend it-that is, to apply it creatively. If this is so, then agency, which I would define as entailing the capacity to transpose and extend schemas to new contexts, is inherent in the knowledge of cultural schemas that characterizes all minimally competent members of society (p. 17-18).

Thus, in Sewell, the very concept of agency becomes defined by the actor’s capacity to transpose schemas across contexts and domains!

Nevertheless, is the link between the idea of schema and that of schematic transposition cogent? Boutyline and Soter (2021) incisively point out that it may not be. To see this, it is important to reiterate their “functional” definition of schemas as “socially shared representations deployable in automatic cognition” (735). The key here is “automatic cognition.” As I noted in an earlier post on “implicit culture,” a common theoretical error in cultural theory consists of taking the properties of forms of “explicit” representations we are familiar with and then postulating that there are “implicit” forms of representation having the same properties, except that they happen to be unconscious, tacit, implicit and the like. The problem is that representations operating at the tacit level need not (and usually cannot) share the same properties as those operating at the explicit level.

Boutyline and Soter note a similar tension in ascribing the property “transposable,” to a tacit or nondeclarative form of culture like a schema, which generally operates in type I cognition. In their words,

A..correlate of Type I cognition is domain-specificity. Type II knowledge can be context-independent and abstract—qualities enabled in part via the powerful expressive characteristics of language—and tied to general-purpose intelligence and logical or hypothetical reasoning…In contrast, Type I knowledge is often domain-specific—thoroughly tied to, and specifically functioning within, contexts closely resembling the one in which it was learned…Type II knowledge (e.g., mathematical or rhetorical tools) can be transposed with relative ease across diverse contexts, but the principles that underlie Type I inferences may not be transferrable to other domains without the help of Type II processes.

So, it seems like both Bourdieu and Sewell (drawing on Bourdieu) made a crucial property conjunction error, bestowing a magical power (transposability) to implicit (personal) culture. This type of personal culture cannot display the transposability property precisely because it is implicit (previously, I argued that people do this with a version of symbolic representational status). Boutyline and Soter (p. 742) revisit Sewell’s example of the “commodity schema,” convincingly demonstrating that, to the extent that this schema ends up being “deep” because it is transposable, specific episodes of transposability cannot themselves operate in automatic autopilot. Instead, “novel instance[s] of commodification” must be “consciously and intentionally devised” (ibid). Thus, to the extent that they are automatically deployable, schemas are non-transposable. Transposability of schemas requires that they be “representationally redescribed” (in terms of Karmiloff-Smith 1995) into more flexible explicit formats. Tying this insight to recent work on the sociological dual-process model, Boutyline and Soter conclude that the “application of existing knowledge to new domains understood as a feature of effortful, controlled cognition” (750).

Boutyline and Souter’s compelling argument does pose a dilemma and a puzzle. The dilemma is that a really attractive theoretical property of schemas (for Bourdieu, Sewell, and the many, many people who have used their insights and been influenced by their formulation) was transposability. Without it, it seems like schemas become a much diminished and less helpful concept. The puzzle is that there are many historical and contemporary examples of empirical instances of what looks like schematic transposition. How does this happen?

Here, Boutyline and Soter provide a very elegant theoretical solution, drawing on recent work suggesting that culture can “travel” within persons across the declarative/nondeclarative divide via redescription processes and across the public/personal one via internalization/externalization processes. They note that because schemas are representational, they can be externalized (or representationally redescribed) into explicit formats (from nondeclarative to declarative). People can also internalize them from the public domain when they interact in the world (from public to personal/nondeclarative; see Arseniev-Koehler and Foster, 2020). As Boutyline and Soter note, representational redescription,

…could make the representational contents of a cultural schema available to effortful conscious cognition, which we suspect may be generally necessary to translate these representations to novel domains. After they are transformed to encompass new settings, the representational contents could then travel the reverse pathway, becoming routinized through repeated application into automatic cognition. The end product of this process would be a cultural schema that largely resembles the original schema but now applies to a broader set of domains. Representational redescription may thus be key to social reproduction, wherein familiar social arrangements backed by widely shared cultural schemas…are adapted so they may continue under new circumstances (751).

Does cognitive neuroscience’s current state of the art support the idea that consciousness is required to integrate elements from multiple experiential and cultural domains? The answer seems to be a qualified “yes,” with the strongest proponents suggesting that the very function of consciousness and explicit processing is cross-domain information integration (Tononi, 2008). A more plausible weaker hypothesis is that consciousness greatly facilitates such integration. Without it, the task would be challenging, and for complex settings such as the socio-cultural domains of interest to sociologists, perhaps impossible. As noted by the philosophers Nicholas Shea and Chris Frith,

The role of consciousness in facilitating information integration can be seen in several paradigms in which local regularities are registered unconsciously, but global regularities are only detected when stimuli are consciously represented…consciousness makes representations available to a wider range of processing, and processing that occurs over conscious representations takes a potentially wider range of representations as input (2016, p. 4).

This account supports Boutyline and Soter’s insightful observation that it was an initial mistake to link the property of transposability to schemas, especially in the initial formulation by Bourdieu, where schemas were seen as part of habitus (Vaisey, 2009). Therefore, schemas reside in the implicit mind and operate as automatic Type I cognition (Sewell was more ambiguous in this last respect). Work in cognitive psychology and the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness supports the idea that transposition requires information integration across domains. For complex domains, conscious representation and deliberate processing may be necessary for the initial stages of transposition (Shea & Frith, 2016). Of course, as Boutyline and Souter note, once institutional entrepreneurs have engaged in the first bout of transposition mediated by explicit representations, the new schema-domain linkage can be learned by others via proceduralization and enskilment, becoming part of implicit personal culture operating as Type I cognition.

Finally, a corollary of the preceding is that we may not want to follow Sewell in completely collapsing the general concept of agency into the more restricted idea of schematic transposition, as this would have the untoward consequence of reducing agency to conscious representations and system II processing over these, precisely the thing that practice and habit theories were designed to prevent. 

References

Arseniev-Koehler, A., & Foster, J. G. (2020). Machine learning as a model for cultural learning: Teaching an algorithm what it means to be fat. In arXiv [cs.CY]. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/c9yj3

Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (R. Nice, trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1980)

Boutyline, A., & Soter, L. K. (2021). Cultural Schemas: What They Are, How to Find Them, and What to Do Once You’ve Caught One. American Sociological Review, 86(4), 728–758.

Joas, H. (1996). The Creativity of Action. University of Chicago Press.

Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1995). Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science. MIT Press.

Lizardo, O. (2004). The Cognitive Origins of Bourdieu’s Habitus. Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, 34(4), 375–401.

Sewell, W. H., Jr. (1992). A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation. The American Journal of Sociology, 98(1), 1–29.

Shea, N., & Frith, C. D. (2016). Dual-process theories and consciousness: the case for ‘Type Zero’cognition. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2016(1).

Tononi, G. (2008). Consciousness as integrated information: a provisional manifesto. The Biological Bulletin, 215(3), 216-242.

Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action. American Journal of Sociology, 114(6), 1675–1715.

Beyond Cultural Clumps

Clumppity-Clump

Traditional approaches to the study of culture begin with “cultural clumps” and theorize from there. Like the devil, these clumps have been given many names throughout history. For instance, the unqualified use of the term “culture,” from Tylor’s famous definition onward, is usually meant to refer to such a mega clump. But others also use the term “system,” “pattern,” “worldview,” “national character,” and the like to refer to their favorite clump. The only difference is that sometimes the clumps are homogeneous (where the agglomerated parts are all the same kind, such as “beliefs,” or “symbols,”). Other times, as with Tylorian/Boasian definitions, the clumps are heterogeneous, including everything learned and made by people (e.g., “the cultural heritage”), whether mental or material (Bidney, 1968).

In previous posts, I have proposed a different approach: Rather than beginning with clumpy “culture concepts,” start your theorizing with cultural kinds, which are the component pieces out of which cultural clumps are made, not with the clumps. This makes the existence of cultural clumps into an empirical, not an analytic issue. It also shifts the analytic attention of cultural analysis to token examples of the kinds (e.g., a given belief, schema, practice, artifact). Following what is already standard practice in empirical work, we should study specific instances of cultural kinds (e.g., the belief in witches in seventeenth-century Salem), not (usually non-existent or spurious) cultural clumps.

The problems with the cultural clump approach are many and will not be rehearsed in detail here (see, e.g., Turner, 1994; Bourdieu, 1973). These include an ontologically incoherent holism, the unjustified projection of hard to establish (e.g., “downward”) causal power to such spurious cultural wholes, and the like. In this respect, the entire “culture concept” tradition has been an analytic failure to the extent that theorizing about holistic culture clumps (e.g., “systems,” “patterns,” worldviews,” and the like) was the point of departure rather than one possible endpoint. As noted before, most “culture concepts” are (usually doomed) packages of ontic claims not redeemable in any respectable sense. In this sense, “culture concepts” should be abandoned as a starting point for theorizing cultural analysis. Instead, we should stick to studying the actual things that we are interested in. Those things are cultural kinds, not culture concepts. Of course, we can always define the kinds if we like, but we could just point to them if we are stumped.

Does this mean that clumps do not exist? Of course not. Cultural kinds do have the dispositional capacity to come together into clumps. However, none of these clumps will ever be so gigantic as to meet the criteria of the “worldviews,” and “Weltanschauungen” of the old culture clump approach (e.g., encompassing populations in the thousands or millions). Although specific token kinds (e.g., the daily practice of salah among Muslims) can and do reach these distributional scales (Anderson, 1991). So cultural analysts in the social sciences do study clumps. Still, likely, such clumps will seldom go beyond the scale of the “mesolevel” (Rinaldo & Guhin, 2019). Most will be downright “micro” (Fine, 1979). Just like socialism, really existing cultural clumps are smaller, less powerful, and less all-pervasive than previously thought, but that also means we can study them.

So, what are the different clumps? We can proceed to typologize the relevant kinds of clumps we are likely to encounter using our previous typology of cultural kinds. For instance, when it comes to the culture people can internalize, we can distinguish between declarative sentence-sized beliefs people can assent to (e.g., “in America, everyone can make it if they work hard enough”), and nondeclarative practices or skills. So, that means that ideally, there should be at least two types of culture clumps. Clumps made up of various pieces of “knowledge-that,” and clumps made up of multiple pieces of “knowledge-how.”

Belief Systems

The first kind of culture clump, belief systems made from propositions meshed into webs of implication, is a classic of cultural analysis (Archer, 1995). In fact, it may be the uber clump (e.g., the “prototypical” culture clump) having played a central role in some of the most influential (e.g., functionalist) lines of cultural theory in the mid-twentieth century. For instance, the idea of a belief system, still popular in both sociology and political science, is the culture-clump that emerges when various pieces of knowledge-that come to be linked together.

Today, the folk (and some analytic) conceptions of culture are based on the belief system imagery. So, when we say, “in this culture,” things are done this way or that, we mean something like “within the ambit of this particular belief system shared by these people here.” Other lines of cultural analysis reject sentence-like beliefs as the units and go for “word-sized” concepts instead, but retain the basic holistic culture clump imagery. For instance, Sausserian approaches to “symbol systems,” (e.g., Leach, 1976) conceive of culture as a set of semiotic elements (words, concepts) linked together by webs of semantic relations (e.g., antonymy, synonymy, hyponymy, and the like). So if a semiotic “cultural logic” reigns over a given collective (e.g., the American code of civil society), it is presumed to be coherent, shared, and the like, at scale.

As Turner (1994) has noted, there is also an entire tradition of cultural analysis positing various types of clumps (e.g., worldviews and the like), seemingly made up of interlinked sets of “assumptions” and “presuppositions,” except that they live in some (incoherent) “implicit” or “tacit” compartment of the collective mind. As I’ve argued before, this is also a non-starter. So, the whole “collective-presuppositional” tradition of analysis is just another version of the belief-system-style culture clump (but with even more extravagant and indefensible ontic claims), as are some lines of Weberian interpretation that rely on the “world image” concept (Strand & Lizardo, 2015).

Overall, it is unlikely that you are talking about anything if you are talking about any of these clumps. Empirical studies of belief systems in sociology, political science, and the cognitive science of religion show that consistent belief systems are scarce and hard to maintain. If they exist, it is not at the scale imagined by traditional culture clump theory. Instead, pristine, elaborate, and well-connected belief systems tend to exist among numerical minorities. These are usually motivated experts who have a lot of time and energy to invest in maintaining and making explicit all the logical links, expunging contradictions, and the like (e.g., in the Conversian tradition in political science, these are political elites, and in religious studies, these are religious professionals; in most empirical studies of “cultural logics” these are also shared within the ambit of particular professions like journalists). At the folk level, belief systems are fragmented and inconsistent, with any linkages (to the extent they exist) due not to deductive logic but to non-rational or a-rational factors like political identity, heuristics, or ingroup/outgroup dynamics (Boutyline & Vaisey, 2017). This frees up (survey, interview) researchers to just study the cultural kinds (e.g., the specific beliefs or attitudes) themselves à la carte without buying them wholesale as necessarily coherent sets of belief systems (e.g., Kiley & Vaisey, 2020; Vaisey & Lizardo, 2016).

Habitus

But what about clumps made of nondeclarative pieces of know-how? This kind of clump has not had as storied a career in cultural analysis as the belief system type. In fact, only one prominent theorist has argued for the existence of this type of clump. I refer to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which, as initially defined, was indeed proposed as a culture clump (Bourdieu, 1990). However, Bourdieu was self-consciously reacting against the anthropological versions of the clumps discussed earlier (both in its belief-systems functionalist form and its semiotic system Sausserian/Levi-Straussian forms). As an alternative, Bourdieu proposed a culture clump made of a different kind of cultural kind. Not sentence-sized beliefs or word-sized symbols, but action-sized pieces of bodily know-how, nondeclarative skills, and abilities linked together to form a clump-like system he called habitus; the culture clump everyone loves to hate.

There is some confusion whether the habitus is a culture clump at all because Bourdieu was so adamant about distinguishing his clump from the anthropologists’ clumps that he suggested that the habitus had nothing to do with the “culture concept” because he equated that to clumps made of beliefs and symbols (Lizardo, 2011). Today we are smart enough to recognize that practices, skills, and the like are bona fide cultural kinds (Reckwitz, 2002), so we can qualify Bourdieu’s proposal. Habitus is a culture clump, it is just a clump whose cultural components are habits, which is a bit counter-intuitive at first, but now we are used to it. However, as a culture clump, the habitus has all the defects and weaknesses of all culture clump concepts:

  1. It is a “holistic” concept, so people begin with the clump rather than study the kinds (e.g., the actual habits the habitus is made of).
  2. The concept takes the clumping for granted instead of giving us a story of where the clump from comes in the first place (habits are assumed to be clumped into a system ex ante).
  3. The clump is applied so that its scale ends up being way more extensive than the clump can credibly handle (so that entire classes and even nations (!!!) have a “habitus“).

Predictably, post-Bourdieusian theorists have just “deconstructed the clump,” pointing out that the habitus (within people) can be cleft, split, fragmented, clivé, and the like; in addition, across people, collectives seldom share a homogeneous habitus, with diversity in habits within-groups and cross-cutting overlaps between-groups being the rule rather than the exception (Lahire, 2011). So, we are left with the pieces (this or that habit or skill) without having to force them into coherent systems where they fit together harmoniously. Theoretically, this is not as dramatic as discovery or theoretical advance as some claim, since “deconstructing the clump” is precisely the story of post-functionalist theory in sociology and anthropology (e.g., Swidler, 2001; Hannerz, 1992).

The recipe is easy. Suppose you give me a culture clump (regardless of what it is made of). In that case, it is easier to show out that it is fragmented, inconsistent, and the like than to show that it is a highly structured holistic entity. The reason for that is that proposing a clump exists is always a stronger claim than suggesting a given standalone component’s existence and causal efficacy. At the end of the post, I will provide you with one reason why.

For instance, the proposition “Americans hate welfare because they believe that with hard work they can make it,” is much easier to defend empirically than saying, “Americans hate welfare because they have imbibed an entire neoliberal ideology composed of hundreds of beliefs linked together by chains of logical implication, and their hating of welfare follows as a strict deduction from the high-level principles up in the chain.” Of course, trying to establish the empirical validity of this last is a hopeless undertaking. But the first hypothesis has a fighting chance. This hypothesis will moreover be consistent with the fact that the same person who hates welfare because they think that with hard work they can make it can also tell you in the next breath that they believe the game is rigged for the little guy like themselves by college professors and other elites, without their hating of welfare because they think that with hard work they can make it, being in the least impinged by the fact that college professors, whose median salary is way smaller than this person’s, are standing in the way of their dreams. 

Note that in this last respect, any “critical” theory of “ideology,” in which this last is just a giant culture clump composed of a bunch of interlinked beliefs, will fail for the same analytic reasons as vanilla functionalist culture clump theory. Thus, regardless of whether you are a happy functionalist who likes the existing state of affairs, or an angry Jacobin who would like the revolution tomorrow, if you live by the clump, you die by the clump.

Regardless, deconstructing the habitus clump has been empirically liberating because it has allowed researchers to just study how particular skills and abilities are acquired in a social context without having to worry about fitting those specific pieces of know-how into a larger habitus-like clump (e.g., Cornelissen, 2016). Ultimately, habitus is a failed concept not because it proposed the (still generative!) idea that pieces of know-how could (theoretically) come together to form soft-assembled systems, but because it took such systems for granted and began their theorizing from there. Just like post-functionalist theory, it is better to follow the post-Bourdieusian clump-deconstructors and point out that splitting, fragmentation, and the like is the norm and that if you end up finding some very coherent set of skills and abilities clumped together into a giant coherent habitus, then you better explain how that happened because that is the actual puzzle.

Clumps versus Entropy

Given the vicissitudes of both know-that clumps and know-how clumps, it seems like we can derive a general lesson for why culture clumps have struggled so much in the history of cultural theorizing. Overall, the moral of the story seems to be to not take clumps as pre-existing analytic entities, take their clumpiness (if it exists) as a puzzle to be explained, and assume that the “normal” state is not clumpiness but disorganization, such that the clumping of cultural kinds into anything resembling a coherent system becomes the explanatory puzzle.

The general proposal goes as follows. Begin with the kinds themselves (more accurately specific tokens thereof) and follow them into the field (or the RStudio interface) to see if they do indeed clump together with others of their kind (or with different kinds altogether!). What we don’t want to do is begin with clumps or “clump concepts” that allegedly tell you about the clumps and their mystical powers over people via ex-ante argumentation. The primary point is that, even if the cultural kinds you follow don’t end up assembling into clumps, you still have something to study. It is a fallacy to think that culture can only be causally powerful, Power Rangers style, only when assembled into giant clumps. Instead, token cultural kinds by themselves have causal powers; whether they come together into clumps is incidental. A single belief or habit can be causally powerful on its own (think of your Twitter habit) independently of whether it is part of a more extensive belief system, cultural logic, or habitus. 

From this, it follows that even if you were to find and describe a coherent culture clump located at an appropriate mesolevel (e.g., the habitus of French humanities Professors who live in Paris), you should probably also consider all the centripetal forces operating to fragment, split, or otherwise bring disorganization to the clump in question so that the various pieces of the clump go all in their different ways (Cornelissen, 2016).

This last set of considerations give us a clue as to why it is not a good idea to take clumps for granted. Borrowing a generative idea from the work of Terry McDonnell (2016), it is time cultural analysts place the kinds they study within the context of entropy. Things, including cultural things, tend toward disorder and disorganization. That means it is always cheaper to say “this belief exists,” or “some percentage of Americans believe this,” than to say “Americans are under the sway of an individualist ideology.” Following the logic of entropy, the latter would be probabilistically less likely because to keep together a pristine ideology in which the number of logical or inferential links increases exponentially in the number of elements, shared in a population of hundreds, thousands, or millions, just sounds utterly insane and improbable. Too many factors are working against it. People are learning and unlearning that, forgetting this, motivated-reasoning their way to this other thing (Sperber, 2011).

That means that pockets of coherence and clumpiness, where they exist, are deserving of study because there you will have both a causal genetic story to tell (how did this set of beliefs clump emerge from a disorganized collection of considerations?) and a synchronic entropy-negating story to tell (how is this belief maintained so that its clumpiness and organization persist?). Note that both questions also apply to habitus-style know-how clumps. Moreover, both questions play to the comparative strengths of sociological work, since we know that while a given individual may struggle to sustain a coherent belief system or a coherent habitus on their own, this becomes easier when embedded in fields endowed with institutional structures, authority figures, interpersonal relationships and the like (Rawlings, 2020).

Outside-in versus Inside-out (Again)

Here I want to reiterate that this outside-in story is not a general-purpose story of the causal power of culture. Instead, it is a special-purpose story of where cultural clumps (if they exist) might come from and what social mechanisms help sustain them (Sewell, 2005; Swidler, 2001). It has been an analytic mistake to sell these special-purpose outside-in stories as general substitutes for how “culture” (in general) works. The problem is that this over-generalization of the outside-in story takes away all causal power from internalized cultural kinds (Vaisey, 2008). As noted earlier, this is a fallacy; cultural kinds can be causally powerful on their own, so that a single belief, attitude, or nondeclarative disposition links to action (from the inside-out) without having to be part of a larger clump and without having to fit with or be consistent with the other cultural kinds the same person has internalized (Lizardo, 2017).

So whether “cultural kinds affect action,” is an entirely disjoint question from “what are the mechanisms by which cultural kinds come to form coherent clumps.” For the former, a pure outside-in story is an overreach; for the latter, it is an excellent place to start. As noted, there are now well-established, and long-running lines of work in cultural analysis showing that cultural kinds (specific beliefs, attitudes, or know-how) can affect action from the inside-out independently of their membership in clumps, so answering this question in the affirmative is not a negation of the idea that outside-in mechanisms might be essential for the formation and maintenance of entropy-defying culture clumps at micro and mesolevels.

However, questions remain. Are belief systems made of sentence-sized kinds and habituses made up action-sized habits the only culture clumps that exist? Are all culture clumps affected by entropic forces to the same extent? Do we need to postulate distinct mechanisms keeping the different clumps together? These will be the subject of future posts.

References

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities. 1983. rev. ed. London: Verso.

Archer, M. S. (1996). Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory. Cambridge University Press.

Bidney, D. (1968). Theoretical Anthropology. Transaction Publishers.

Bourdieu, P. (1973). The three forms of theoretical knowledge. Social Sciences Information. Information Sur Les Sciences Sociales, 12(1), 53–80.

Boutyline, A., & Vaisey, S. (2017). Belief Network Analysis: A Relational Approach to Understanding the Structure of Attitudes. The American Journal of Sociology, 122(5), 1371–1447.

Cornelissen, S. (2016). Turning distaste into taste: context-specific habitus and the practical congruity of culture. Theory and Society, 45(6), 501-529.

Fine, G. A. (1979). Small Groups and Culture Creation: The Idioculture of Little League Baseball Teams. American Sociological Review, 44(5), 733–745.

Hannerz, U. (1992). Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. Columbia University Press.

Kiley, K., & Vaisey, S. (2020). Measuring stability and change in personal culture using panel data. American Sociological Review, 85(3), 477-506.

Lahire, B. (2011). The Plural Actor. Polity.

Leach, E. (1976). Culture and communication: The logic by which symbols are connected. An introduction to the use of structuralist analysis in social anthropology. Cambridge University Press.

Lizardo, O. (2011). Pierre Bourdieu as a post-cultural theorist. Cultural Sociology, 5(1), 25-44.

Lizardo, O. (2017). Improving Cultural Analysis: Considering Personal Culture in its Declarative and Nondeclarative Modes. American Sociological Review, 82(1), 88–115.

McDonnell, T. E. (2016). Best Laid Plans: Cultural Entropy and the Unraveling of AIDS Media Campaigns. University of Chicago Press.

Rawlings, C. M. (2020). Cognitive Authority and the Constraint of Attitude Change in Groups. American Sociological Review, 85(6), 992-1021.

Rinaldo, R., & Guhin, J. (2019). How and Why Interviews Work: Ethnographic Interviews and Meso-level Public Culture. Sociological Methods & Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124119882471

Sewell, W. H., Jr. (2005). The concept (s) of culture. In G. M. Spiegel (Ed.), Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn (pp. 76–95). Routledge.

Sperber, D. (2011). A naturalistic ontology for mechanistic explanations in the social sciences. In P. Demeulenaere (Ed.), Analytical sociology and social mechanisms (pp. 64–77). Cambridge University Press.

Swidler, A. (2001). Talk of love: How culture matters. University of Chicago Press.

Turner, S. P. (1994). The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions. University of Chicago Press.

Vaisey, S. (2008). Socrates, Skinner, and Aristotle: Three Ways of Thinking About Culture in Action. Sociological Forum, 23(3), 603–613.

Vaisey, S., & Lizardo, O. (2016). Cultural fragmentation or acquired dispositions? A new approach to accounting for patterns of cultural change. Socius, 2, 2378023116669726.

 

Simmel as a Theorist of Habit

The Journal of Classical Sociology has recently made available online a new translation, by John D. Boy, of Simmel’s classic essay on “The Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit” (better known to sociologists and urban studies people in previous translations as “The Metropolis and Mental Life”). Boy has an intriguing argument, in the translation’s introductory remarks, for why returning to Simmel’s original “spiritual” language and moving away from the “psychological” language of early translators (e.g., the German “geist” could be translated as either “spirit” or “mind”) is more faithful to Simmel’s original intellectual context and aims.

Here I would like to focus on a neglected aspect of the essay, namely, the implicit theory of habit (and its relation to the intellect and emotions) that Simmel deploys in the introductory paragraphs to set up the main argument that follows. Thus, this post can be read as a companion to previous disquisitions on habit and habit theory in this blog (see here, here, and here) and as a supplement to Charles Camic’s (1986) earlier point about the centrality of the concept of habit for most of the classical social theorists in sociology (Simmel is not one of the theorists treated at length in Camic’s classic paper) and the related story of how the idea was excised from the sociological vocabulary in the post-Parsonian period. In fact, concerning Simmel’s essay on the metropolis, in particular, it bears mentioning that one of the very earliest works influenced by Simmel’s approach (published in American Journal of Sociology in 1912) took the title “The Urban Habit of Mind” (Woolston, 1912).

Simmel on Habit and Metropolitan Life

Simmel argues that the rapid succession of novel and unpredictable stimuli in the city breaks previous habits of sensation developed in a non-urban context. Therefore, Simmel subscribes to the idea that habits are more easily developed whenever people are exposed to repetitive, internally consistent stimuli. In the more predictable non-urban setting, where each new sensation is a lot like the previous one, people can develop habits of sensibility that render them less susceptible to experience sensations in a powerful way. Simmel thus subscribes to the psychological principle that, as we develop habits of sensibility via the exposure to repetitive sensations, these fade from consciousness: “Lasting sensations, slight differences and their succession according to the regularity of habit require less consciousness” (Simmel, 2020, p. 6, emphasis added).

The city disrupts this equilibrium. It does so primarily by increasing the novelty and the unpredictability of sensory stimulation. This “intensification of nervous stimulation” is brought about “by the rapid and constant chance of external and internal sensations” (ibid, italics in original). Thus, the converse psychological principle applies: If habits are created via exposure to repetition, then exposure to novelty and non-repetition increases “consciousness” (which Simmel conceptualizes here as opposed to habit). For Simmel, people “are creatures of difference; their consciousness is stimulated by the difference between the current sensation and the ones preceding it” (ibid, emphasis added).

The disruption of habits of sensation in the city via the intensification of sensory stimulation serves as the primary psychological contrast to small-town life:

In producing these psychological conditions in every crossing of the street and in the tempo and multiplicity of its economic, occupational and social life, the metropolis creates a strong contrast to small-town and country life with its slower, more habitual, more regular rhythm in the very sensory foundation of the life of our souls, due to the far larger segment of our consciousness it occupies given our constitution as creatures of difference (ibid, boldface added).

This sets up a contrast, Simmel argues, between the calculative intellect (which Simmel associates with non-habitual cognition) and more spontaneous affect and emotion, which Simmel associates with the “more unconscious” strata of the psyche. In this way, small-town life “is founded upon relationships of disposition and emotion that have their root in the more unconscious strata of the soul and are more likely to grow out of the quiet regularity of uninterrupted habits” (ibid, emphasis added).

Thus, Simmel makes another equation here, linking habit to emotion, affect, and drives (and other residents of a more vitalistic, “dynamic” unconscious) and habit, which is separated from mental functions associated with intellect, which, for Simmel, are the more “transparent and conscious higher strata” of our inner life. This dualistic approach to habit, which distinguishes it from higher intellectual functions, seems to owe a lot to Maine de Biran’s early nineteenth-century reflections on the subject, which also made such a distinction between habit and the intellect (de Biran, 1970; see the discussion in Sinclair, 2011), one that would be criticized by Félix Ravaisson (2008).

Simmel’s reasoning and series of dualistic linkages here lead him to an odd, and seldom noted, conclusion: People who live in the city, insofar as they are forced to use “the intellect” to perform actions that would otherwise (in a non-urban context) be driven by habit, are therefore less “habit-driven” than non-urban people! This what is behind his famous “protective organ” argument, whose linkage to the habit/intellect contrast has not been noted before. For Simmel, city dwellers have to develop a way to deal with the sensory barrage in a way that prevents them from “reacting according to…[their] disposition.” Instead, “the typical metropolitan person relies primarily on…[their] intellect” (ibid). And “this intellectuality, which we have recognized as a defense of subjective life against the assault of the metropolis, becomes entangled with numerous other phenomena” (ibid).

Conclusion

The phenomena that Simmel went on to link to urban life, inclusive of the money economy, the blasé attitude, individualism, liberty, the division of labor, cosmopolitanism, fashion, and the rest, are well-known to students of Simmel’s foundational essay. Less well-known, however, are how the core premises of the piece are built on Simmel’s much-neglected (but explicitly laid out) assumptions of how the habit links to the intellect, consciousness, sensation, and emotion.

References

Camic, C. (1986). The Matter of Habit. The American Journal of Sociology, 91(5), 1039–1087.

de Biran, P. M. (1970). The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking. Greenwood.

Ravaisson, F. (2008). Of Habit. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Simmel, G. (2020). The metropolis and the life of spirit. Journal of Classical Sociology, 1468795X20980638.

Sinclair, M. (2011). Ravaisson and the Force of Habit. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 49(1), 65–85.

Woolston, H. B. (1912). The Urban Habit of Mind. The American Journal of Sociology, 17(5), 602–614.

Habit versus Skill

Habit versus Skill Ascriptions

Habit and skill tend to be run together in social theory and the philosophy of action (Dalton, 2004). However, there are good conceptual and empirical reasons to keep them distinct (Douskos, 2017b). Notably, the ascription of skill and habits entail different things about action, and only one (habit) is explanatory in the way outlined in a previous post.

When we ascribe a skill to an actor, we are usually interested in making a purely descriptive statement of “capacity ownership” but not putting the action in a larger explanatory scheme. This is generally because skill ascriptions, in contrast to dispositional habit ascriptions, usually speak of potential and not occurrent actions. When we ascribe a skill to an actor, we are simply saying that they can perform it, not that they regularly do so in response to the solicitations of a given context. This gets at the difference between capacity and tendency ascriptions (Schwitzgebel, 2013). Thus, when we say that a person is proficient at something (e.g., playing the piano, tennis, proving mathematical theorems), we do not necessarily mean they are in the regular habit of doing it. A person can possess a skill (being proficient at speaking a foreign language) without being in the habit of exercising it. In this case, the skill (while possessed) does not count as a habit.

In this way, the requirement of having a history of previous repetition and exercise does not work in the same way for habits and skills (Douskos, 2017a). In the case of skills, the link between past repetition and current exercise is a matter of the contingent way biological nervous systems “learn” given their natural constitution (e.g., via Hebbian tuning requiring multiple exposures). If we lived in a world like that portrayed in the science fiction film The Matrix, where skills (e.g., being able to fly a helicopter) can be downloaded directly into the motor cortex of people hooked up to the system in a matter of seconds, then a history of repetition would not be required for skill possession. This is different from the conceptual linkage between a history of repetition and habit ascription. When we explain an action by saying it is a habit, we are necessarily placing it in such a causal history, which requires by conceptual necessity a history of previous repetition (Douskos, 2017a, p. 509).

The same goes for the dispositional nature of actions we call habits. The explanatory advantage of habit explanation is the tight link to context, which allows us to refer to people’s inclinations even before we see them occurring. Thus, action counts as a habit when the agent is disposed to produce it in a given context (as well as reasonably similar contexts). In the case of skill, a person can have the capacity without having the disposition to exercise it in any given context. A skill can become a habit by acquiring this dispositional profile (we get into the habit of playing the piano in the evenings), but it need not have this dispositional profile (we can know how to play the piano without it being triggered regularly by a given context).

In sum, even though current skill possession implies some previous history of skill acquisition via repetitive activity, it does not mean that the skill exercise is a regular practice right now (habit). Nor do we mean the skill is exercised regularly when the person encounters a given set of conditions (disposition). Only habits have these two features.

In this last sense, dispositional (habit) ascriptions are more general than skill ascriptions since they need to be added if we want to explain the occurrence of skilled action. Thus, we may differentiate ascriptions of habitual skills to explain a given action from pure capacity ascriptions that simply posit a person’s capacity to do something. Also, habits can explain action, even if nothing about the action is exceptionally skillful. For instance, we can account for Sam’s habit of regularly driving at 8:00 am by pointing out that the action is a component of Sam’s “driving to work habit,” even if Sam is not a skillful driver. In this sense, calling something a habit implies a holistic and historical take on the action (indicating a regular history of repetition and disposition manifestation) that is partially orthogonal to how well (in the normative sense of skill) an action is performed. Thus, there are both skillful and not necessarily skillful (but still “automatic”) types of habit ascriptions, both of which can be used to explain action.

Habit, Techniques, and Skill

In a recent paper, Matthews (2017) argues that the core or prototypical members of the habit category are what Marcel Mauss called techniques (1973). Ways of being proficient at an action (e.g., tying your shoes), acquired via an enculturation process requiring training and repetition (see here for further discussion). These include both “behavioral” techniques, such as playing the piano, typing, riding a bike, and “perceptual” or “mental” techniques. However, the latter is less central members of the habit category for most people (despite being as pervasive as overt action habits) since habit is usually associated with over action or practice, even though both overt and covert “actions” can become habitual (Matthews 2017: 399). However, the most maximal conception of habits can easily extend the concept to the standard mental items (such as beliefs, desires, emotions, and the like) that figure as part of folk psychology. In that respect, there is no reason to restrict the use of habit to overt actions, even when acknowledging that semantically, over behaviors are more central members of the habit category than covert mental actions, such as believing a proposition or making an aesthetic or moral judgment.

Habitual actions, due to repetition and reinforcement, tend to acquire the facility and fluidity that we associate with skills, even though not all habits are necessarily skillful. So if habits are techniques, they tend toward the skilled end of performance, or at least toward the “good enough” end in performing their assigned function. However, the conceptual distinction between habits and skills needs to be kept since habit ascriptions and skill ascriptions buy you different things from an action theory point of view (Douskos, 2017b). A habit ascription entails conceptually entails a previous history of repetition, regularity of current performance, and a dispositional profile tied to context. It is habit ascription, not skill ascriptions, that offers a workable alternative to the intentionalist idiom when it comes to the explanation of action. All that is implied by skill is flexibility, fluidity, and proficiency in acting. As such, skills are a type of action (e.g., more or less skillful) but in themselves are not a resource for explaining action.

The main reason some analysts tend to insist on the “skilled” nature of most habits, however, is to move away from the misleading idea that only fixed, repetitive action patterns count as habits (Pollard, 2006). Habit theorists in the American-pragmatist (e.g., Deweyian) or French-Aristotelian (Ravaisson, Bourdieu, Merleau-Ponty) mold like to emphasize that when they speak of habit, they speak of flexible dispositions that adapt to their current context of enactment (and thus are different on each occasion) and not mechanical repetitions. As such, sometimes, we find these theorists equating habits and skills or proposing that all habits are skillful or creative (Dalton, 2004).

However, it seems like considering habits as dispositions clarifies their flexible, non-repetitive, non-mechanical nature, without getting into the conceptual hot water (and ultimately unproductive conundra) that equating habits and skills does (Douskos, 2017a, 2017b). As such, I propose to place proficiency as a core characteristic of habit, not skill. Proficiency is a weaker criterion because, while respecting the classic observation that the repetition of habitual action results in facilitation, it does not imply that such facilitation necessarily leads to “skillful” enactment. As noted, many habits are not particularly skillful but get to the point of being “good enough” to get the job done.

References

Dalton, B. (2004). Creativity, Habit, and the Social Products of Creative Action: Revising Joas, Incorporating Bourdieu. Sociological Theory, 22(4), 603–622.

Douskos, C. (2017a). Pollard on Habits of Action. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 25(4), 504–524.

Douskos, C. (2017b). The spontaneousness of skill and the impulsivity of habit. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1658-7

Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body∗. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–88.

Pollard, B. (2006). Explaining Actions with Habits. American Philosophical Quarterly, 43(1), 57–69.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2013). A Dispositional Approach to Attitudes: Thinking Outside of the Belief Box. In N. Nottelmann (Ed.), New Essays on Belief: Constitution, Content and Structure (pp. 75–99). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Habit as Prediction

In a previous post, Mike Strand points to the significant rise of the “predictive turn” in the sciences of action and cognition under the banner of “predictive processing” (Clark, 2015; Wiese & Metzinger, 2017). This turn is consequential, according to Mike, because it takes prediction and turns it from something that analysts, forecasters (and increasingly automated algorithms) do from something that everyone does as the result of routine activity and everyday coping with worldly affairs. According to Mike:

To put it simply, predictive processing makes prediction the primary function of the brain. The brain evolved to allow for the optimal form of engagement with a contingent and probabilistic environment that is never in a steady state. Given that our grey matter is locked away inside a thick layer of protective bone (e.g., the skull), it has no direct way of perceiving or “understanding” what is coming at it from the outside world. What it does have are the senses, which themselves evolved to gather information about that environment. Predictive processing says, in essence, that the brain can have “knowledge” of its environment by building the equivalent of a model and using it to constantly generating predictions about what the incoming sensory information could be. This works in a continuous way, both at the level of the neuron and synapse, and at the level of the whole organism. The brain does not “represent” what it is dealing with, then, but it uses associations, co-occurrences, tendencies and rhythms to predict what it is dealing with.

In this post, I would like to continue the conversation on the central role of prediction in the explanation of action and cognition that Mike started by linking it to some previous discussions on the nature and role of habit in action and the explanation of action (see here, here, and here). The essential point that I wish to make here is that there is a close link between habit and prediction. This claim may sound counterintuitive at first. The reason is that the primary way that habit and practice have been incorporated into contemporary action theory is by making habit, in its “repetitive” or “iterative” aspect, a phase or facet of action that looks mainly backward to the past (e.g., Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Because prediction is necessarily future-oriented, most analysts think of it as also necessarily non-habitual and thus point to other non-habit like processes, such as Schutzian “projection,” that implies a break with habitual iteration. These analysts presume that there is a natural antithesis between habit and iteration (which at best may bring the past into the present) and anticipation of forthcoming futures.

Rethinking Habit for Prediction

The idea that habit is antithetical to prediction makes sense, as far as it goes, but only because it hews closely to a conception of habit that accentuates the “iterative” or repetitive side. But there are more encompassing conceptions of the role of habit in action that emphasize an iterative side to habit and an adaptive, and even “anticipatory” side. Here I focus on one such intellectual legacy of thinking about habit, which remains mostly unknown in contemporary action theory in sociology. It was developed by a cadre of thinkers, mainly in France, beginning in the early nineteenth century and extending into the early twentieth century. This approach to the notion of habit characteristically combined elements of Aristotelian, Roman-stoic, scholastic, British-empiricist, Scottish-commonsense, French-rationalist, and German-idealist philosophy, and then-novel developments in neurophysiology such as the work of Xavier Bichat. Its two leading exponents were Pierre Maine de Biran (1970) and the largely neglected (but see Carlisle (2010) and Sinclair (2019)) work of Félix Ravaisson (2008). These thinkers exercised a broad influence in the way habit was conceptualized in the French tradition, extending its influence into the work of the philosophers Albert Lemoine, Henry Bergson, and more notably, Maurice Merlau-Ponty (Sinclair, 2018).

The Double Law of Habit

The primary contribution of these two thinkers, especially Ravaisson, was developing the double law of habit. This was the proposal that habit (conceptualized as behavioral or environmental repetition) had “contradictory” effects on the “passive” (sensory, feeling) and the active (skill, action) faculties: “sensation, continued or repeated, fades, is gradually obscured and ends by disappearing without leaving a trace. Repeated movement [on the other hand] gradually becomes more precise, more prompt, and easier” (de Biran, 1970, p. 219)

In other words, facilitation in the realm of perception leads to “habituation,” meaning that experience becomes less capable of capturing attention. We become inured to the sensory flow, or in the case of experience that generate feelings (e.g., of pleasure, disgust, and so forth), the feelings “fade” in intensity (e.g., think of the difference between a first-year medical student and an experienced surgeon in the presence of a corpse). This is an argument that was deployed by Simmel to explain the “deadening” effect of urbanism on sensory discrimination and emotional reaction, generative of what he called the “blase attitude” in his classic essay on the “Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit.”

When it comes to action, on the other hand, habituation via repetition leads to the opposite of passivity; namely, facilitation of the activity (becoming faster, more precise, more self-assured) and the creation of an automatic disposition (e.g., triggered in partial or complete independence from a feeling of “willing” the action) equipped with its own inertia and bound to continue to its consummation unless interrupted. Habituated action “becomes more of a tendency, an inclination” (Ravaisson 2008: 51). This is the double face (or “law”) of habit.

Prediction as Attenuation

Trying to puzzle out these apparently contradictory effects of habituation led to a lot of head-scratching (and creative theorizing) both on the part of de Biran and Ravaisson and subsequent epigones like Bergson, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that a solution to the “double-law” puzzles emerges when the predictive dimension of both perception and action is brought to the fore. The case of “perceptual attenuation” considered below, for instance, provides the mechanism for the “fading” of the vibrancy of experience whenever we become proficient at canceling out the error produced by those experiences via top-down predictions (Hohwy, 2013). Here the “top” are generative hierarchical models instantiated across different layers in the cortex, and the bottom is incoming sensory stimulation from the world (where the job of the model is to infer the hidden causes of such stimulation).

That is, as experience is repeated and the distributed, hierarchical generative models tune their parameters to effectively figure out what’s coming before it comes, we begin to preemptively cancel out prediction error. Cancelation of prediction error leads to subsequent perceptual attenuation, such that incoming sensory information no longer commands (or requires) attention. The result is that attention is freed to concentrate on other more pressing things (e.g., the parts of the experience that are still producing precise error and thus demand it). In this respect, sensory and feeling attenuation is the price we pay for becoming good at predicting what the world offers. Prediction is at the basis of “passive” habituation (the first face of the double law).

Prediction as Facilitation

But what about the facilitation side? Here prediction, in the form of what is known as active inference, is also at play. However, this time, instead of prediction in the service of canceling out error from exteroceptive signals, the acquisition of skill turns into our capacity to cancel out prediction error emanating from our action in the world, for instance, via proprioceptive signals that track the sensory consequences of our activity. Repeated activity leads us to form increasingly accurate generative models of our action (the dynamic motor trajectory of our bodies and their effectors) in a particular environment. This means that we can anticipate what we are going to do before we do it, leading to the loss (via the mechanism described above) of the feeling of “effort” or even “willing” at the point of action initiation (Wegner, 2002), which is a phenomenological signature of habitual activity.

This is consistent with the idea that Parsonian “effort” rather than being the sine qua non of truly “free” action partially unmoored from its “conditions” (as the Kantian legacy led Parsons to implicitly assume) actually points to poorly performed (because badly predicted) action, in other words, action that is driven by generative models that are not very good at anticipating our next move. This is action that is at war with the environment not because it is “independent” from it, but because (due to lack of habituation an attunement to its objective structure of probabilities) is partially at war with it, and thus disconnected from its offerings (Silver, 2011).

The connection between habit and prediction becomes clear. On the one hand, repetition results in the attenuation of sensory input. While this was usually referred to as the “passive” side of the double-law, we can now see, drawing on recent work on predictive processing, that this is only a seeming passivity. At the subpersonal level, attenuation happens via the successful operation of well-honed generative models of the environmental causes of the input, working continuously to cancel out those incoming signals that they successfully predict. These models are one set of “habitual tracks” laid out by our experience of consistent patterns of experience.

On the “active” side, which is more clearly recognized as “habit,” proficiency in action execution also comes via prediction, but this time, instead of predicting how the distal structure of the world, we predict the same world we “self-fulfill,” as we act. Moving in the world feels like something to us (proprioception), and as we repeat activities, we become proficient in predicting the very sensory stimulation that we generate via our actions. The two sides of the double-law, which show up in contemporary predictive cognitive science as the difference between “perceptual” and “active” inference (Pezzulo et al., 2015; Wiese & Metzinger, 2017), are thus built on the predictive capacities of habits. This was something that was anticipated by Ravaisson when he noted that

[A] sort of obscure activity that increasingly anticipates both the impression of external objects in sensibility and the will in activity. In activity this reproduces the action itself; in sensibility it does not reproduce the sensation, the passion…but class for it, invokes it; in a certain sense it implores the sensation (Ravaisson 2008: 51).

Habit is thus the confluence of what has been called perceptual inference (predicting incoming signals by tuning a generative model of their causes) and active inference (self-fulfilling incoming signals via action so that they conform to the model that already exist), in other words, prediction as it facilitates our engaged coping with the world, is the nature of habit. More accurately, to the extent that we can predict the world, we do so via habit.

References

Carlisle, C. (2010). Between Freedom and Necessity: Félix Ravaisson on Habit and the Moral Life. Inquiry: A Journal of Medical Care Organization, Provision, and Financing, 53(2), 123–145.

Clark, A. (2015). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press.

de Biran, P. M. (1970). The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking. Greenwood.

Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? The American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023.

Hohwy, J. (2013). The Predictive Mind. Oxford University Press.

Pezzulo, G., Rigoli, F., & Friston, K. (2015). Active Inference, homeostatic regulation and adaptive behavioural control. Progress in Neurobiology, 134, 17–35.

Ravaisson, F. (2008). Of Habit. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Silver, D. (2011). The moodiness of action. Sociological Theory, 29(3), 199–222.

Sinclair, M. (2018). Habit and time in nineteenth-century French philosophy: Albert Lemoine between Bergson and Ravaisson. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: BJHP: The Journal of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, 26(1), 131–153.

Sinclair, M. (2019). Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit. Oxford University Press.

Wegner, D. M. (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. MIT Press.

Wiese, W., & Metzinger, T. (2017). Vanilla PP for Philosophers: A Primer on Predictive Processing. In T. Metzinger & W. Wiese (Eds.), Philosophy and Predictive Processing.

Varieties of Implicitness in Cultural-Cognitive Kinds

In a previous post, I addressed some issues in applying the property of “implicitness” to cultural kinds. There I made two points; first, unlike other ontological properties considered (e.g., concerning location or constitution), implicitness is a relational property. That is, when we say a cultural kind is implicit, we presume that there is a subject or a knower (as the second element in the relation) for whom this particular kind is implicit. Second, I pointed out that because of this, when we say a cultural-cognitive kind (mentally represented, learned, and internalized by people) is implicit, we don’t mean the same thing as when we say a non-cognitive (public, external, artifactual) kind is implicit. In particular, while implicitness is a core property of cultural-cognitive kinds (essential to making them the sort of cultural kinds they are), they are only incidental for public cultural kinds; that is to say the former cannot lose the property and remain the kinds they are, but the latter can.

One presumption of the previous discussion is that when we say that a cultural-cognitive kind is implicit, we are talking about some kind of unitary property. This is most certainly not the case (see Brownstein 2018: 15-19). In this post, I disaggregate the notion of “implicitness” for cultural-cognitive kinds, differentiating at least two broad types of claims we make when we say a given cultural-cognitive kind is implicit.

A-Implicitness

First, there is a line of work in which implicitness refers to the status of a cultural-cognitive kind as well-learned. As Payne and Gawronski (2010) note, researchers relying on this version of implicitness come out a tradition in cognitive psychology focusing on attention and skill acquisition (Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider 1977, 1984; Schneider & Shiffrin 1977). The fundamental insight from this work is that any mental or cognitive skill can come, with repetition and practice, to be fully “automatized.” Initially, when learning a new skill or using a cultural-cognitive tool for the first time, it is likely that we rely on controlled processing. This type of processing is demanding of cognitive resources (e.g., attention), slow, and highly dependent on capacity-limited short-term memory. With practice, however, a cultural-cognitive kind may come to be used automatically; we can now use it while also having at our disposal the full panoply of attention and cognitive capacity related resources, such as short term memory.

Think of the experienced knitter who can weave a whole scarf while reading their favorite novel; contrast this to the beginner knitter who must devote all of their attention and cognitive resources into making a single stitch. In the experienced knitter case, knitting as a cultural-cognitive skill has become fully automatized (well-learned) and can be deployed without hogging central cognitive resources. This is certainly not the case in the beginner’s case. Standard cases discussed in the phenomenology of skill acquisition and in the anthropology of skill (e.g., H. Dreyfus 2004; Palsson 1994), fall in this version of “implicitness.” Chess or tennis playing becomes “implicit” for the skilled master or player in the Shiffrin-Schneider sense of going from an initially controlled to an automatic process (S. Dreyfus 2004).

As Payne and Gawronski (2010) note, this version of implicitness (hereafter a-implicitness) focuses the learning and cultural internalization process, isolating the relational property of acquired facility, or expertise (captured in the concept of automaticity) a given agent has gained with regard to the cultural-cognitive kind in question.

When transferred to such cultural-cognitive kinds as beliefs or attitudes, the a-implicitness criterion disaggregates into two sub-criteria. We may say of an attitude that is a-implicit if it (a) automatically activated or (b) once activated, applied or put to use in an efficient and non-resource demanding manner.

Thus, a stereotype for a category (filling in open slots in the schema with non-negotiable default) is a-implicit when its activation happens without much intervention (or control) on the part of the agent after exposure to a given environmental cue or prompt. A given stereotype may also be a-implicit in that, once activated, individuals cannot help but to use for purposes of categorization, inference, behavior, and so on. One thing that is not implied when ascribing a-implicitness is that agents are not aware of their using a cultural-cognitive kind in question. For instance, people may be very well aware that their using a default stereotype for a category (e.g., I feel this neighborhood is dangerous) even if this stereotype was automatically activated.

U-Implicitness

Another line work on implicitness comes out of cognitive psychological research on (long term) “implicit” memory. From this perspective, a given cultural-cognitive kind is implicit if people are unaware that it affects their current feelings, performances, and actions (Greenwald & Banaji 1995). In this type of implicitness (hereafter u-implicitness), a key criterion is introspective inaccessibility of a given cultural-cognitive entity.

This was clearly noted by Greenwald and Banaji (1995: 8) in their classic paper heralding the implicit measurement revolution, who defined implicit attitudes as “introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects.” While there is a link to the notion of a-implicitness in the mention of “traces of past experience” (which imply a previous history of internalization or enculturation) the key criterion for something being u-implicit is that people are not aware that a cultural-cognitive element is influencing their current cognitive, affective, and/or behavioral responses to a given object at the moment.

In the case of u-implicit cultural-cognitive entities, what exactly is it that people are not aware of? As Gawronski et al. (2006) note, there are at least three separate claims here. First, there is the idea that people are not aware of the sources of the cultural-cognitive kinds they have internalized. That is, something is u-implicit because the conditions under which they internalized it are not part of (autobiographical or episodic) memory, so people cannot tell you where their beliefs, attitudes, or other internalized cultural-cognitive entities “come from.”

Second, something can be u-implicit if people are not aware of the fact that a given cultural-cognitive kind (such as an implicit attitude) is “mediating” (or influencing) their current thoughts, feelings and actions. That is, a cultural-cognitive entity is “u-implicit” in the sense that people are not aware of its content. For instance, a person may implicitly associate obesity with a lack of competence, and this cultural-cognitive association may be automatically implicated in driving their judgments and actions toward fat people. However, when asked about it, people may be unable to report that such an attitude was driving their judgment. Instead people will provide report on the explicit attitudes that they do have content-awareness of, and this content will sometimes differ from the one that could be ascribed from the reactions and behaviors associated with the u-implicit cultural kind.

Finally, people may be content-aware that they have internalized a given cultural-cognitive entity (e.g., a schema or attitude) but not be aware (and in fact deny) that it controls or affects subsequent thoughts, feelings and actions; that is people may lack effects–awareness vis a vis a given internalized cultural-cognitive element.

Figure 1. Varieties of Implicitness.

A branching diagram depicting the different types of implicitness discussed so far is shown in Figure 1 above. First, the notion of implicitness splits into two distinct properties, one applicable to public (non-mental) cultural kinds and the other applicable to cultural-cognitive kinds. Then this latter one splits into what I have referred to as a-implicitness and u-implicitness. A-implicitness, in turn, may refer to automaticity of activation or automaticity of application (or both) and u-implicitness may refer to unawareness of source (learning history), unawareness of the content of the cultural-cognitive kind itself when it is operating (e.g., an “unconscious attitude, belief, schema, etc.), or unawareness that the activation of this cultural-cognitive kind influences action.

Note that “unawareness” may also bleed into elements of a-implicitness (as noted by the dashed lines in the figure). For instance, a cultural-cognitive kind can become so automatic (in the well-learned sense) that people become unaware of its automatic activation or its application. The most robust way a cultural-cognitive entity can be implicit thus would combine elements of both a- and u-implicitness.

Implications

So, what sort of claim do we make of a cultural-cognitive kind when we say it is implicit? As we have seen, there is no unitary answer to this. On the one hand, we may mean that people have come to internalize the cultural kind (via multiple exposure, repetition, and practice) to the extent that they have acquired a relation of expertise and facility toward it. This is undoubtedly and least ambiguously the case for cultural-cognitive kinds recognize as (either bodily or mental) skillful habits. Thus, chess masters have an “implicit” ability to recognize chessboard patterns and produce a winning move, and expert piano players have an implicit ability to anticipate the finger movement that allows them to play the next note in the composition.

Note that while the typical examples of a-implicitness usually bring up expert performers, we are all “experts” at deploying and using mundane cultural-cognitive kinds acquired as part of our enculturation history, including categories (and stereotypes) used in everyday life, as well as ordinary skills such as walking, driving, or using a multiplication table. Once ensconced by practice, all of these cultural-cognitive elements have the potential to become “implicit” via proceduralization. In fact, it is the nature of habitual action to be a-implicit in the sense discussed both in terms of automatic activation by contextual environmental cues and of efficient (non-resource demanding) deployment once activated (unless it is overriden via deliberate, effortful pathways).

U-implicitness, on the other hand, is a stronger (and thus more controversial) claim. To say a cultural-cognitive kind is u-implicit is to say that it operates and affects our thoughts, feelings, and activities outside of awareness. Since the discovery of the unconscious in the 19th century and the popularization of the notion by Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, and followers in the 20th (Ellenberger 1970), the idea of something being both “mental” and “unconscious” has been controversial (Krickel 2018). The reason is that our (folk psychological) sense of something being mental implies that we are related to it in some way. For instance, we have beliefs, or possess a desire. It is unclear what sort of relation we have to something if we are not even aware of standing in any type of relation to it. But not all types of u-implicitness cut that deep. Among the varieties of u-implicitness, lack of content awareness is much more controversial than lack of source awareness, and when coupled with a lack of effects awareness, becomes even more controversial, especially when it come to issues of ascription and responsibility accounting.

For instance, we could all accept having forgotten (or never even committed to memory) the conditions (source) under which we learned or internalized a bunch of attitudes, preferences, and beliefs we hold for as long as we have awareness of the content of those attitudes, preferences and beliefs. What really throws people for a loop is the possibility they could have a ton of attitudes, preferences, and beliefs whose content they are not aware of and drive a lot of their behavior, thoughts, and feelings.

This is also a critical epistemic and analytic problem in socio-cultural theory featuring strong conceptions of the unconscious. In particular, the prospects of cultural-cognitive entities doing things “behind the back” of the social actor rears its ugly head. For instance, Talcott Parsons (1952) (infamously) suggested that “values” could be the sort of cultural-cognitive entity that was u-implicit (internalized in the Freudian sense), and which people had neither source nor content awareness of, putting him in the odd company of Marxist theorists which made similar claims concerning the internalization of ideology, such as Louis Althusser (DiTomaso 1982). Both proposals are seen as impugning the actor’s “agency” and committing the sin of “sociological reductionism.”

A more likely possibility is that a lot of internalized cultural-cognitive entities are not implicit in the full sense of combining both a and u-implicitness. Instead, most things are in-between. For instance, the “moral intuitions” emphasized by Jonathan Haidt (2001), can be a-implicit (automatically activated and automatically used to generate a moral judgments) without being (wholly) u-implicit. In particular, we may lack source awareness of our moral intuitions, but have both content (there’s a phenomenological or introspective “feeling” that we are experiencing with minimal content) and effects awareness (we know that this feeling is why we don’t want to put on Hitler’s t-shirt or eat the poop-shaped brownie). The same has been said for the operation of implicit attitudes and biases (Gawronski et al. 2006); they could be automatically activated and even used, and people could be very aware that they are in fact using them to generate (stereotypical) judgments, but, despite this content awareness, people may be in denial about the attitude driving their behavior (lack effects-awareness).

Habitus and Implicitness

In sociology and anthropology, various “implicit” cultural-cognitive elements are conceptualized using the lens of practice and habit theories, with Bourdieu’s theory of habitus providing the most influential linkage between cultural analysis in sociology and anthropology and research on implicit cognition in moral, social, and cognitive psychology (Vaisey 2009). The foregoing discussion highlights, however, that conceptions of implicitness in sociology and anthropology are too coarse for this linkage to be clean and that a more targeted and disaggregated strategy may be in order.

In the theory of habitus, for instance, Bourdieu emphasizes issues of learning, habituation, and expertise, which leads to the acquisition and internalization of a-implicit cultural-cognitive kinds; in fact the habitus can be thought of as a (self-organized, self-maintaining) system of such a-implicit kinds. This is especially the case when speaking of how actors acquire a “feel for the game,” or the set of skills, dispositions, and abilities allowing them to skillfully navigate social fields. In this case, it is not too controversial to emphasize the a-implicit status of a lot of habitual action and the a-implicit status of habitus as a whole.

However, when discussing how the theory of habitus helps explain phenomena usually covered under older Marxian theories of “ideology” and “consent” for institutionalized features of the social order, Bourdieu tends to emphasize features of implicitness coming closer to the u-implicit pole; that is, the fact that most of the time people do not have conscious access to the sources, content, and even effects of the u-implicit cultural-cognitive processes ensuring their unquestioning acquiescence to the social order (Burawoy 2012). This switch is not clean, and it is unlikely that the theory of implicitness that hovers around the “expertise” side of the issue (linking habitus to skillful action within fields) stands on the same conceptual ground as the one emphasizing unawareness and unconscious “consent” (Bouzanis and Kemp 2020).

While these issues are too complex to deal with here, the conceptual cautionary tale is that it is better to be explicit and granular about implicitness, especially when ascribing this property to a cultural-cognitive element as part of the explanation of how that element links to action.

References

Bouzanis, C., & Kemp, S. (2020). The two stories of the habitus/structure relation and the riddle of reflexivity: A meta‐theoretical reappraisal. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 50(1), 64–83.

Brownstein, M. (2018). The Implicit Mind: Cognitive Architecture, the Self, and Ethics. Oxford University Press.

Burawoy, M. (2012). The roots of domination: beyond Bourdieu and Gramsci. Sociology, 46(2), 187-206.

DiTomaso, N. (1982). “ Sociological Reductionism” From Parsons to Althusser: Linking Action and Structure in Social Theory. American Sociological Review, 14–28.

Dreyfus, H. L. (2005). Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 79(2), 47–65.

Dreyfus, S. E. (2004). The Five-Stage Model of Adult Skill Acquisition. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 24(3), 177–181.

Ellenberger, H. F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious. London: Allen Lane.

Gawronski, B., Hofmann, W., & Wilbur, C. J. (2006). Are “implicit” attitudes unconscious? Consciousness and Cognition, 15(3), 485–499.

Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: a social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological review, 108(4), 814.

Krickel, B. (2018). Are the states underlying implicit biases unconscious? – A Neo-Freudian answer. Philosophical Psychology, 31(7), 1007–1026.

Pálsson, G. (1994). Enskilment at Sea. Man, 29(4), 901–927.

Parsons, T. (1952). The superego and the theory of social systems. Psychiatry, 15(1), 15–25.

Schneider, W., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: I. Detection, search, and attention. Psychological Review, 84(1), 1.

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Shiffrin, R. M., & Schneider, W. (1984). Automatic and controlled processing revisited. Psychological Review, 91(2), 269–276.

Vaisey, S. (2009). Motivation and Justification: A Dual-Process Model of Culture in Action. American Journal of Sociology, 114(6), 1675–1715.

Habitus and Learning to Learn: Part III

Language, Habitus, and Cultural Cognition

The recasting of habitus as a neuro-cognitive structure conducive to learning opens up promising avenues otherwise foreclosed in traditional cultural theory (see here and here for previous discussion). However, it also opens up some analytical difficulties, especially when it comes to the role of language and linguistic symbols in cultural cognition. Two observations deserve to be made in this respect.

First, language (and linguistic symbols) are the products of habitus; yet, the underlying procedural capacities productive of language (as practice) and linguistic symbols (as objectified products) cannot themselves be linguistic. This is actually a good thing. If external linguistic symbols were the product of a set of internal structures that also had the status of language-like symbols, we would get ourselves into an infinite regress, as we would have to ask what establishes the meaning of those symbols. This is a version of Harnad’s (1990) “symbol grounding” problem, as this is known in cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

As both Wittgenstein and Searle have proposed in different ways, the only way to forestall this regress is to posit a non-representational, non-symbolic “background” where the buck stops. This backgground is then generative of structures that end up having representational and symbolic properties (such as linguistic symbols). I propose that the neuro-cognitive habitus is such a “background” (Hutto 2012), as it was precisely to deal with this problem in the sociology of knowledge that led Bourdieu to resort to this (ironically scholastic) construct (Lizardo 2013).

Do We Think “With” Language?

Second, it appears to us (phenomenologically) that we think using (or via the medium) of language. That is, thought presents itself as a sort of “internal conversation” happening using internal linguistic symbols which may even have the same dialogical structure of dyadic or interactive conversations we have with others (Archer 2003). In fact, in the symbolic interactionist/pragmatist tradition of Mead and in the “activity theory” of Vygotsky, interactive or dialogic conversation comes first, and internal conversations with ourselves later. From this perspective, the origins of the self (conceived as a symbolic representation the agent constructs of themselves) are both dialogic, linguistic, and even “semiotic” (Wiley 1994).

Insofar as the habitus makes possible our direct, embodied engagement with the world, then it is the locus of thinking or at least a type of thinking that allows for practice, action, and problem-solving. The problem is that the kind of thinking that happens via language does not seem to have the properties required for the “online” control of action and practical engagement with the world (Jeannerod 2001). If habitus engages a particular type of thinking, and even if there is a type of “cultural-cognition” happenning via habitus, then it has tobe a sort of non-linguistic cultural cognition.

This means we need to make conceptual space for a type of cognition that still deserves the label of thinking, that is affected by culture and experience, but that is not linguistic in its essence or mode of functioning. The basic proposal is that this is the base-level non-linguistic cultural cognition is made possible by habitus, and that the most substantial cultural effects on the way we think happen because culture affects this non-declarative procedural type of thinking (Cohen and Leung 2009).

From the perspective of traditional lines of cultural theory having long roots in sociology and anthropology, suggesting the existence of a type of thinking that does not rely on language, and much less making this type of thinking more basic than the linguistic one, is an odd proposal (Bloch 1986). In the standard approach, culture is equated with language, thinking is equated with language use, and cultural effects on cognition are reduced to the impact of cultural patterns in the way we use language to make sense of the world and to talk to ourselves, and others (Biernacki 2000).

A neural recasting of habitus reminds us that, while culture also affects the way that we use language to think (Boroditsky 2001), insofar linguistic cognition is grounded on non-linguistic cognition, equating the entirety of culture’s effects on thinking to its impact on the way we use language to think “offline” when decoupled from action in the world would be an analytic mistake.

Two Ways of Engaging the World

As now well-established by work in the dual-process framework in social and cognitive psychology (Lizardo et al. 2016), we can distinguish between two ways in which culture-driven cognition (or “culture in thinking”) operates. One relies on the use and manipulation of explicit symbolic tokens that can be combined in a linear order into higher-order structures, such as the sentences of a natural language. These linguistic symbols have the potential to stand in arbitrary relations to the things that they represent. This type of cognition is serial, slow, and in many ways, “cognitively costly” (Whitehouse 2004:55).

The habitus does not typically rely on this type of linguistic, sentential processing to “get action” in the world (Glenberg 1997). Insofar as the habitus shapes and produces culture, the role of linguistic symbols in cultural analysis has to be rethought (Lizardo et al. 2019). One premise that is undoubtedly on the wrong track is that personal culture embodied in habitus is, in its essence, linguistic or is primarily symbolic in a quasi-linguistic sense (Lizardo 2012).

In its place, I propose that habitus operates at a non-linguistic level. But what exactly does this entail? In contrast to the linguistic theory of internalized personal culture, the habitus relies on cognitive resources that aer imagistic, perceptual and “analog.” The neural structures constitutive of habitus learn (and thus “internalize” culture) by extracting higher-order patterns from the world that are meaningful at a direct experiential level. The linkages between these patterns are not arbitrary but are constrained to be directly tied to previous experience, so that they can be used to deal successfully with subsequent experiences sharing similar structure (Bar 2007).

In this last respect, the habitus recognizes connections between practical symbolic structures when these are compatible with its experiential history. Habitus uses the structural features of previous experience, directly linked to our status as embodied, spatial and temporal creatures, to bring order, predictability, and regularity to the most diverse action domains (Bourdieu 1990a).

The (Emergence of) the Scholastic Point of View

In a neural reconceptualization of habitus, language, linguistic structures and linguaform modes of expression are put in their place as supported by analog structures derived from experience. In fact, as shown in modern cognitive linguistics, most of the features of spoken language usually thought of as being endowed with some sort of mysterious, autonomous and ineffable “linguistic” or “semiologic” quality are grounded in the type of embodied, directly perceptual encoding and processing of meanings that is characteristic of habitus (Langacker 1991).

The status of modes of cognitive processing highly reliant on language in the cognitive economy of the social agent and the cultural economy of the social world has been overblown in social and cultural theory (using the misleading imprimatur of Ferdinand De Saussure). A neural recasting of habitus as a learning to learn structure reminds us that the foundations of meaning and culture are non-linguistic, non-propositional, non-sentential, and in a strong sense not symbolic, since they retain an intuitive, easily recoverable perceptual logic grounded in non-discursive forms of thinking, perception, and activity (Bloch 1991).

How Habitus Keeps Track of Experience

Following a connectionist rethinking of the notion of mental representation proposed in the previous post, I propose that the habitus “stores” experiential traces in terms of what has been referred to as what the philosopher Andy Clark has referred to as “super-positional storage; “[t]he basic idea of superposition is straightforward. Two representations are superposed if the resources used to represent item 1 are [at least partially] coextensive with those used to represent item 2” (Clark 1993: 17).

This observation carries an important analytical consequence, insofar as the dominant theory of culture today—the linguistic or semiotic theory—tacitly presupposes that the way in which cultural information is stored by persons resembles and is constrained to match those modes of storage and representation that are characteristic of linguistic symbols. This includes, amodality (the non-analogic nature of representational vehicles) and partial separability of the conceptual resources that are devoted to represent different slices of experience. For instance, under the standard model there is little (if no) overlap between the underlying conceptual resources used to represent the (more abstract) notion of “agency” and the (more concrete) notion of “movement.”

But if habitus uses overlapping resources to capture the structure of experience, then it must encode similarities in experiential content directly and thus arbitrariness is ruled out as a plausible encoding strategy: “[t]he semantic…similarity between representational contents is echoed as a similarity between representational vehicles. Within such a scheme, the representations of individual items is nonarbitrary” (Clark 1993: 19). This means that the habitus will attempt to deal with more abstract categories removed from experience and linked to seemingly arbitrary non-linguistic symbols by mapping them to less arbitrary categories linked to experience. In this respect, there will be substantial overlap between the conceptualization of freedom and movement, with the latter serving as the ground providing semantic support for our thinking about the former (Glenberg 1997).

This means that whatever strategic (from a cognitive viewpoint) structural signatures are found in the relevant experiential domain, will have an analogue in the structural representation of that domain that comes to be encoded in the neural structure of habitus. Here, the structure of the underlying neural representation is determined by experience. In the traditional account, the experience is “neutral” and some exogenous cultural grid, with no necessary relation to experience is imposed on this sensory “flux.” This is what Martin (2011) has referred as “the grid of perception” theory of culture.

The neural recasting of habitus offered here provides an alternative to this approach, which highlights the primary role experience without subordinating it to a “higher” order set of cultural categories, standing above (and apart) from experience.

Natural Born Categories

As noted, the habitus stores traces of long-term procedural knowledge in the synaptic weights coding for the correlated features of the objects, events and persons repeatedly encountered in our everyday dealings. The ability of habitus to extract the relevant structural and statistical features from experience (and only these), along with the super-positional encoding of experiential information, leads naturally to the notion of habitus as a categorizing engine, in which categories take prototype structure, with central (exemplar) members (sharing most of the relevant features) toward the center and less prototypical members in the periphery. The extraction of prototype-based categories via habitus allows us to understand and act upon experiential domains sharing similar structural features using overlapping cognitive resources.

In addition, whenever a given slice of experience comes to recurrently present the agent with the same set of underlying regularities, a general “category” will be extracted by the habitus. This category, comprising both entity (object) and event (process) prototypes, will be composed of contextually embodied features corresponding to those given by experience. At the same time they are capable of being transferred (“transposed”) to domains of experience that share similar structural features. “Schematic transposition” is thus a natural consequence of the way habitus is transformed by, and subsequently organizes, experience.

References

Archer, M. S. 2003. Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge University Press.

Bar, M. (2007). The proactive brain: using analogies and associations to generate predictions. Trends in cognitive sciences, 11(7), 280-289.

Biernacki, Richard. 2000. “Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry.” History and Theory 39(3):289–310.

Bloch, Maurice. 1986. “From Cognition to Ideology.” Pp. 21–48. in Knowledge and Power: Anthropological and Sociological Approaches, edited by R. Fardon. Edinburgh: Scottish University Press.

Bloch, Maurice. 1991. “Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science.” Man 26(2):183–98.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990a. The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990b. “The Scholastic Point of View.” Cultural Anthropology: Journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology 5(4):380–91.

Clark, Andy. 1993. Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change. MIT Press.

Cohen, Dov and Angela K. Y. Leung. 2009. “The Hard Embodiment of Culture.” European Journal of Social Psychology 39(7):1278–89.

Glenberg, Arthur M. 1997. “What Memory Is for: Creating Meaning in the Service of Action.” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20(01):41–50.

Harnad, Stevan. 1990. “The Symbol Grounding Problem.” Physica D. Nonlinear Phenomena 42(1):335–46.

Hutto, Daniel D. 2012. “Exposing the Background: Deep and Local.” Pp. 37–56 in Knowing without Thinking: Mind, Action, Cognition and the Phenomenon of the Background, edited by Z. Radman. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Jeannerod, M. 2001. “Neural Simulation of Action: A Unifying Mechanism for Motor Cognition.” NeuroImage 14(1 Pt 2):S103–9.

Joas, Hans. 1996. The Creativity of Action. University of Chicago Press.

Langacker, R. W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Descriptive Application. Vol. 2. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Lizardo, O. 2012. “Embodied Culture as Procedure: Cognitive Science and the Link between Subjective and Objective Culture.” Habits, Culture and Practice: Paths to Sustainable.

Lizardo, Omar. 2013. “Habitus.” In Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, edited by Byron Kaldis, 405–7. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Lizardo, O. 2016. “Cultural Symbols and Cultural Power.” Qualitative Sociology. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11133-016-9329-4.pdf.

Lizardo, Omar, Robert Mowry, Brandon Sepulvado, Dustin S. Stoltz, Marshall A. Taylor, Justin Van Ness, and Michael Wood. 2016. “What Are Dual Process Models? Implications for Cultural Analysis in Sociology.” Sociological Theory 34(4):287–310.

Lizardo, Omar, Brandon Sepulvado, Dustin S. Stoltz, and Marshall A. Taylor. 2019. “What Can Cognitive Neuroscience Do for Cultural Sociology?” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 1–26.

Lizardo, Omar and Michael Strand. 2010. “Skills, Toolkits, Contexts and Institutions: Clarifying the Relationship between Different Approaches to Cognition in Cultural Sociology.” Poetics 38(2):205–28.

Martin, John Levi. 2011. The Explanation of Social Action. Oxford University Press.

Whitehouse, Harvey. 2004. Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. New York: AltaMira Press.

Wiley, Norbert. 1994. The Semiotic Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Habit and the Explanation of Action

Habits play a double role. They are both a kind of action and a resource for explaining action. This makes them different from other parts of the conceptual arsenal used by people (and social scientists) to explain action. For instance, while the notion of belief is a resource for explaining action (“Sam opened the fridge because they thought there was leftover pizza in there”), belief itself is not a type of action. In this respect, the mentalistic notion that is closest to that of habit is intention. Like habits, intentions play double roles as both a central element in the explanation of action (“Alex swatted at the fly because they intended to kill it”) and as a type of action (“intentional” versus “unintentional”).

Accordingly, it is not a surprise than in the history of the philosophy of action and action theory in the social sciences, habit or habitual action is counterposed, often invidiously, to intention and intentional action (Camic 1986). In the intellectualist tradition in sociology (Parsons 1937; Campbell 2009; Archer 2010), habits are seen as not having equal explanatory status in relation to intentions. In fact, some go on to define action as those patterns of activity that have intentions as the main causal driver (Campbell 2009; Searle 2003). Habit-driven action, from this perspective, does not even deserve to be called action, devolving into mere “behavior” or “reflex” tied to environmental “conditions.” In a previous post, I talked about the criteria of what makes action a habit. Here, I will argue that (lay or scientific) explanations of action using habit as a resource, are as legitimate as those appealing to the mentalistic vocabulary of intentions, beliefs, and desires. They are not only a coherent way of explaining action, but they also have distinctive analytic advantages.

How do habit explanations explain action? According to Pollard (2006b, 57), habit explanations explain by “referring to a pattern of a particular kind of behavior which is regularly performed in characteristic circumstances, and has become automatic for that agent due to this repetition.” The notion of automaticity is doing a lot of work here, and I dealt with what that entails in the previous post referenced earlier. For present purposes the thing to note is that, for Pollard, when we explain action via habit, we are putting a given action in a larger context of previously performed actions in the past. Explaining action by calling it a habit forces us to say something about the person’s previous history, while putting the present action in the context of that history. When we say a person did something out of habit, we imply that they (a) have done this activity in the past many times before, and (b) due to this repetition they have acquired the tendency to perform the action in similar circumstances in the present (and will do so in the future). The conjunction of repetition and the acquisition of automaticity and fluidity in performing the action is sufficient to explain why the person is doing the action in the present.

Note that this type of action explanation differs from the one John Levi Martin (2015: 217) has referred to as “Good Old Fashioned Action Theory” (GOFAT). First, the habit explanation is minimally intellectualistic, as it does not traffic in the usual representational talk of internal mental entities such as intentions, beliefs, desires, and the like (Strand and Lizardo 2015). Second, the explanation is not teleological in the sense of pointing to the causal force of aims, goals or desired future states in accounting for action (Parsons 1937). Instead, it is the past history of repetition that makes the action persevere in the present and that past history of habituation is sufficient to explain the current occurrence of the act (without implying that habits lack goal directedness). Finally, the explanation is causal-historical in the sense that the “habit” can only be thought of as a cause of the action when it is put in the context of the person’s previous history. Habits necessarily make reference to a history of acquisition and “ontogenesis” which itself may be put in the context of a larger social history involving multiple agents, socializing institutions, and so on (Bourdieu 1988, 1996). In this respect, habits explain by taking a given action and putting it in the more encompassing landscape of previously repeated tokens of the same action. The overall “habit” then, is a complex object, is composed of all of those temporally distributed actions.

This type of explanation, in which something is accounted for by pointing to the fact that it is “building block” of a larger whole has been referred by Pollard (2006b) as a constitutive explanation, and isolated as what makes habit explanations of action distinctive from intentional ones. Intentional explanations of action point to the causal role of internal mentalistic constructs, the most important of which (namely, intentions) are also teleological (Searle 2003). Habit based explanations negate teleology, minimize the role of representational constructs, and put the causal mechanisms underlying action in a larger ontogenetic context presupposing a previous history of repetition and enculturation.

Note also that it is important to clarify what sort of causal relation we are talking about here. In common parlance, it is natural to imply that having a habit is a cause of the present action. But note that if a habit explanation implies that the present action is constitutive of the temporally extended entity we are referring to as a habit, then habits are not causes of a given action. Instead, a given action that is identified as a habit is explained by being part of a larger ensemble of similar actions that form part of a given individual’s previous history. While habits don’t cause actions a given habitual action may have it’s efficient subpersonal causes each time it is performed (Pollard, 2006a). 

Habit-based explanations also imply a different relationship between the agent and the resources used to explain action than intentional explanations. In the latter, the relationship between the agent and the mental constructs (beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on) used to account for action is one of possesion. That is, an agent is said to have beliefs, desires, intentions, and the like (Abelson 1986). This possessive relation also implies a theory of change, that is just like one can abandon a physical possession, one can also “drop” a belief, desire, or intention. The theory of change implied by GOFAT makes these “changes of mind” something that people can also do intentionally, and which thus requires effort and control. In a habit-based explanation as noted by Pollard (2006a), the relevant relation between person and explanatory resource (habit) is not one of possession but of also constitution.

Although the Latin root of habit (habere, to “hold” or “have”) does invite the possessive interpretation, and although we normally speak of people “having” or “kicking” a habit, the relationship implied is stronger. Rather than having habits, people are their habits. As Pollard (2006a: 245) notes “if one acquires a habit of Φ-ing, one thereby makes Φ-ing one’s own, and Φ-ing is quite literally, part of who one is.” The (social) self, as noted by the American pragmatists, is just such a bundle of mental and emotional habits.

As such, “kicking” or “dropping” a habit is a different matter than changing your mind about a belief. For one, the timescales are different; one can happen in the span of seconds, but dropping or changing a habit can take years and only be partially successful. While both belief and habit change qualify as intentional actions, the role intentions play in each is different.

In the case of belief change the link between intention and action is more or less direct; confronted with evidence controverting a belief, a controlled act of belief revision can take place. In the case of habit, having the intention of changing does not necessarily result in the habit disappearing. In fact, the intention to drop a habit may be a necessary, but is hardly a sufficient condition for change. In this respect changing habits imply a fundamental retooling of the self, changing who the person is in a more fundamental way than changing a belief or an intention. Habits can decay, and new habits can replace them, but the timescale of change is slower. Ontogenetically the accumulation of habits constitutes a perduring self, with its own “inertia” that is resistant to change even in the face of environmental disruption (Strand & Lizardo, 2017).

 

References

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Bourdieu, P. (1996). The state nobility: Elite schools in the field of power (L. Clough, trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Camic, C. (1986). The Matter of Habit. The American Journal of Sociology, 91(5), 1039–1087.

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Pollard, B. (2006a). Action, Habits, and Constitution. Ratio, 19(2), 229–248.

Pollard, B. (2006b). Explaining Actions with Habits. American Philosophical Quarterly, 43(1), 57–69.

Searle, J. R. (2003). Rationality in Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Strand, M., & Lizardo, O. (2015). Beyond world images: Belief as embodied action in the world. Sociological Theory. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0735275115572397

Strand, M., & Lizardo, O. (2017). The hysteresis effect: theorizing mismatch in action. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 47(2), 164–194.