Culture and Action, or Why Action Theory is not Optional

The main reason social scientists study culture is because of the (sometimes implicit) hypothesis that culture “affects” or “causes” action (Swidler 2001a, 2001b; Vaisey 2009). If culture was a causally inert cloud of stuff floating around doing nothing, it would not be worth anyone’s attention. That is, cultural theory and action theory are not independent pursuits. Social scientists who study culture have implicit or explicit action theories. Social scientists interested in the “explanation of action” have to propose a story (even if it is only to dismiss it) of how culture enters into such an explanation. More ambitiously, an explicit and coherent theory of culture should be linked to an explicit and coherent theory of action (Parsons 1951, 1972). The action theory part of cultural theory tells us how culture actually performs its causal work.

This means that culture is involved in the explanation of action is not a trivial or self-evident statement. However, it seems to have been treated as such in the history of cultural and action theory in anthropology and sociology, with some exceptions. Whether the statement even makes sense depends on what we mean by “culture” in the first place. Consider the simplest version of the thesis:

CCA:

Culture causes action.

One problem with this (very broad and vague) version of the thesis is that the default (folksy) meanings of the term culture usually imply the existence of some type of “collective mental” phenomenon. This could be, for instance, some kind of belief system, weltanschauung, or collective worldview (Turner 1994, 2014). The default meaning of “action,” on the other hand, is at the individual level. People are doing things, and more literally moving their bodies thus and so to achieve particular goals (e.g., Max Weber’s proverbial woodcutter chopping wood). In the case of CCA, therefore, we have some sort of ghostly, collective mental thing, exercising a direct causal effect on people’s action via unknown mechanisms. This type of “emanationist” picture via which culture exerts effects (e.g., “constraint”) on people was popular in idealist philosophical circles in the 19th-century and anthropological theory in the early twentieth century. It is unclear whether the thesis is conceptually coherent as stated (because it involves ontologically suspect collective abstracta bandying about real people Martin 2015), let alone whether it can ever be stated in a way that can be productively put to the test empirically.

It was not until social and behavioral scientists with interest in both action and cultural theory (such as Talcott Parsons) scrutinized the weaknesses of CCA that its main flaws began to be addressed. One obvious problem is that, even if you think that culture is a collective mental thing, and even if you believe that culture causally affects what people do, it cannot exercise unmediated or direct effects on action. Instead, we need to postulate an indirect causal effect mediated by an individual-level mechanism. The story can then go like this: People internalize collective public culture in the form of mental representations. This reduplicated internalized culture then causes people’s actions.

Thus, the problem of the cultural causation action (a “cultural theory” issue) is rendered equivalent to the problem of the mental causation of action (an “action theory” problem). Proposing a coherent action theory story (or grabbing one off-the-shelf from the storehouse of folk stories) then gives you the solution to the problem of how culture causes action, as long as you have your cultural internalization story straight.

This yields the slightly more complicated, but relatively less problematic, version of the cultural causation of action thesis:

CCA*:

Culture exists as a body of beliefs and ideas external to people.
People internalize external culture so that it becomes personal beliefs and ideas.
Personal beliefs and ideas cause action via an action theory story.

As Swidler (2001b: 75) points out, this is more or less the story of the cultural causation of action that Talcott Parsons developed in a great big heap of writings starting in the early 1950s, when he joined his earlier theory of action (developed in the 1930s) to an analytic concept of culture as a system of collective “patterns” he distilled from the anthropology of the time (1972). For theorists like Parsons, therefore, “the influence of culture depended on showing that certain cultural elements, whether ideas or values, actually operated subjectively, in the heads of actors.”

As Swidler also points out, subsequent cultural analysis in the social sciences became discomfited with the idea of culture being in people’s heads. The complaints seem to have been twofold. Cultural analysts rebelled against CCA*(1) by noting that conceptualizing culture exclusively as abstract symbolic patterns was limited. Culture could also be discursive, or semiotic, or even material. The other versions of public culture can have causal effects on how people act without necessarily going through the internalization process. These alternative variants of how culture shows up outside people not fitting the CCA* story, and not needing to be lodged in people’s heads to affect action can, as Swidler (2001a) does, be used to tell a story of culture affecting action from “the outside in.” Accordingly, in rebelling against the theories of internalization provided by CCA* theorists, cultural analysts in sociology sought other ways in which culture could have causal effects on action that did not rely on internalization stories.

For a while, these seemed like knock-down arguments against CCA* type stories. With the advantage of hindsight, it is not clear whether those were good reasons for completely abandoning the idea that culture operates via internalized beliefs and values (Vaisey 2009; Patterson 2014; Wuthnow 2008). While we can acknowledge that some forms of public culture don’t need to go through people’s heads to affect their actions, a good swath of them actually do (Strauss and Quinn 1997). Ultimately, many of the stories that abandoned CCA* type postulates seem more like changing the subject, and therefore left open a lot of the culture in action problems that CCA* theorists tackled head-on (Strauss and Quinn 1997; Quinn et al. 2018; Patterson 2014). Today, there has been a resurgence of theorizing culture as operating via internalized, or “personal” mechanisms, seeking to avoid the weaknesses of earlier versions of CCA*. For instance, such theories draw on schema theory or dual-process models from cognitive science to show how culture can have (indirect) effects on action as internalized by people.

In this post, I will not address postulates (1) and (2) of CCA*. I will only note that there are ways to conceive of external or public culture in perfectly respectable naturalistic ways that do not make it a ghostly, ontologically suspect entity hovering over people. There are also perfectly respectable ways, consistent with what we know of the cultural neuroscience of learning, to reconceptualize the idea of the internalization of public culture by people. This process also loses the mysterious and problematic cast it acquired in classical cultural theory. As such, there is a path that can get us from CCA*(1) to CCA*(3). Presuming that we have coherent conceptions of public culture and a coherent internalization story, we still need to do the analytic work of providing a story of how internalized mental contents cause action. This is where cultural theorists, even those resurgent “neo-internalization” theorists (Vaisey 2009; Lizardo 2017), have done the least analytic work. However, without an action theory story, there cannot be a “culture causes action” (CCA) story either.

The Standard Action Theory Story

An action theory story is a causal story of how mental states can be (proper, not deviant) causes of action. First, for a mental state to be a cause of action, it has to be the right type of mental state. Mental states with the power to cause action are usually referred to as “motivating,” states. Action theorists in the contemporary philosophy of action disagree on which states (under the usual folk psychological taxonomy of the mental) are motivating in this sense. Humeans say, for instance, that purely representational or cognitive states (like beliefs) cannot be motivational. Instead, only specific types of states, endowed with some sort of conative or affective “oomph” (like wants and desires), can be motivational. Non-Humeans argue that things like beliefs or normative conceptions can be motivational in the sense of being proper causes of action under the right set of conditions. Action here is defined in a commonsensical manner to refer to goal-directed movements of the body (so no reflexes or tics).

What I will refer to as the “standard” action theory story (see Douskos 2017) has been best developed for the case of intentional action. As stated, CCA* is not restricted to intentional actions. It just says that culture can cause action via the mediation of internalized mental states. A lot of recent cultural theory uses a version of CCA*. The internalized mental states take the form of habits, tacit knowledge, skills, etc., to say that culture causes non-intentional actions via the mediation of these types of states. Regardless, I will begin with the standard intentional story, sometimes referred to as “Good Old Fashioned Action Theory” (GOFAT) (Martin 2015; Turner 2018), since if we can make this story work (or at least state the story in a way that could ostensibly work under a charitable interpretation), then it could be possible to derive the non-intentional cases as systematic deviations from the standard case. Besides, it is useful to begin here since “culture causes action” stories were first developed for the intentional case (Parsons 1951). It is only more recently that practice-based versions of CCA stories have been developed for the case of non-intentional action. Still, even here, people have not been prone to state these stories as action theory stories proper (see Lizardo and Strand 2010).

So what is the standard action theory story? It goes like this. Actions begin with the formation of an intention to perform a certain activity in a given context. The intention is an abstract characterization of what the action will be and, most importantly, the action’s goal. Intentions thus have both representational (belief-like) and “motivational” (desire-like) components (which should make both Humeans and non-Humeans happy). Unlike beliefs, however, which are supposed to represent what the actual world is like, intentions represent what a future state of the world will be (if the intention is accomplished). Thus, if I wake up and think to myself, “I will chop some wood this morning,” this mental state counts as an intention because it specifies (represents) the action that I will perform (however sketchily) and stipulates that I have a “pro-attitude” towards that action (I want to chop the wood) (the basics of this story in contemporary action theory are due to Davidson 1980). So unlike desires, which could be things that we want to do but we are not necessarily committed to doing, intentions imply a commitment to engaging in the action represented by the intention.

Intentions are (typically consciously reportable) representational states because they have propositional content. An action is intentional just in case “what we do causally ensues from mental states with pertinent content” (Douskos 2017: 1129). So, if someone asks what I’m doing with this ax, I can always answer that I intend to use it to “chop some wood.” In that respect, intentions provide reasons for (causes of) action and rationalize action (e.g., make it interpretable after the fact). Note that it is precisely this “contentful” status of intentions that provides the link to their being causal effects of internalized cultural beliefs. In fact, under the sociological version of the standard story, intentions get their contents from the internalized beliefs about what is proper or customary to want to do. Once formed, intentions, by having a specific content, cause the tokening of specific sensorimotor representations of the actions that would properly satisfy their content. For instance, an intention to chop wood causes the tokening of specific mental representations concerning placing large pieces of wood in a chopping block, grabbing an ax, wielding in a way that will strike the wood, and so forth. It is in this way that intentions as mental states can be proper causes of action.

But what is being a “proper” cause of action? In the usual parlance of quantitative social scientists, it means being a non-spurious cause of the action. Thus, just like correlation is necessary but not sufficient for causation, preceding (or accompanying) the action is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an intention to be a proper cause of the action. This is because even though intention X can precede action Y, there can be a third factor, Z, that happens after X, but before Y, which is the actual cause of the action. Thus, if I form an intention to chop wood, place the wood in the chopping block, grab the ax, but exactly at that moment, I have a hallucination in which the piece of wood turns into a giant spider which I then try to kill with the ax, then the intention, even though it preceded the action, and even though the action was accomplished (I chopped the wood in the attempt to kill the imaginary spider) is not a proper cause of the resulting action. Instead, the pathological perceptual state was.

Thus, intentions cannot just be “prior” to action. They must be “in charge” of executing the action during the entire duration of the intention-driven action. If “intentions” were to take a break during action execution, this could threaten their being proper causes as other mental causes of action could then sneak in to do the job, rendering the intention spurious as a cause. Intentions, under the standard story, cannot just be initiators of action. They must also sustain the action until its completion: They are action-guiding mental states (Pacherie 2006).

This has led several philosophers to propose a distinction between the role intentions play before action and their role during intentional action. Pacherie (2006) refers to these as “dual intention” theories; these differentiate between constructs such as prior, future-directed, or prospective intentions, which are mental states happening prior to action that “set” the goals for intentional action, and such constructs as “intentions-in-action,” present-directed, or immediate intentions, which are mental states that accompany action during its execution and make sure that the actual act accords with the previously formed prior intention.

Culture and Intention

Classic sources of the standard action theory story in sociology focused on the role of culture in shaping and determining the content of prior intentions. Here the contemporary theory of action in philosophy makes a couple of points consistent with this classical sociological tradition. First, as Bratman (1984) noted, one thing that intentions do is that they serve as “terminators of practical reasoning.” Once someone forms an intention to do X, they stop batting around ideas as to what to do. Intentions stop the (potentially endless) deliberation as to what to do. If I decide to chop wood in the morning, then that determines my morning plans.

The main difference between sociological and other versions of the standard story is the search for cultural patterning across the intentions that people form. Sociological action theorists think of the consequences of a shared culture (e.g., a unified or coherent belief system) for personal action to provide people with a set of common overall intentions. This is how the social-scientific concept of “values,” is used to this day by heirs of this tradition. Values are “conceptions of the desirable” (Kluckhohn 1951:395), or in the standard folk psychological taxonomy, (relatively abstract) beliefs about what is best to want (thus combining representational and motivational components). In this story, the content of people’s specific intentions can be inherited from the more abstract values that they have internalized.

There is a problem here (which I won’t get into detail in this post) of how to derive specific intentions from abstract values (see Martin and Lembo 2020). An abstract value (e.g., self-transcendence, respect for tradition, and the like) can have many specific realizations at the level of concrete action intentions. In the same way, the same concrete intention (to chop wood) can be the realization of distinct abstract values (e.g., competitive economic achievement, spiritual self-realization via the practice of Zen). These one-to-many and the many-to-one problems are, however, not particular to values as a cultural element. It is pervasive in the standard action theory story, reproducing itself in the relationship between a “concrete” intention (e.g., chop wood) and the specific motor programs or bodily movements that realize that intention. Here we can see that chopping wood can have many practical realizations for the same person on different occasions and across different people sharing the same intention. In the same way, the same concrete set of bodily movements can be the realization of distinct intentions.

The other thing that prior intentions do, according to Bratman, is that they prompt practical reasoning about the best means to accomplish the goals encoded in the intention. This is consistent with classical sociological action theory, which poses another role for a set of shared cultural elements that function as “terminators” of this second bout of practical reasoning: Norms. While an a-cultural or purely Machiavellian actor can theoretically wonder about the best way to accomplish a goal in a relatively unconstrained way, normative considerations collapse this deliberative choice space since they rule out most of the potentially feasible ways to accomplish something as out of bounds due to normative considerations. In this way, institutionalized norms serve as heuristics for reasoning because they prevent people from reconsidering the means every time they form an intention. Instead, the default is to go with the normatively appropriate way to perform the intentional action.

To sum up, according to the standard story, internalized culture plays a central role in action that is (properly) driven by intentions as mental causes of action, thus providing a mechanism via which the third link of the CCA* story can be realized. First, internalized cultural beliefs about what is best to want end up setting the goals of most prior intentions for people. Under this story, people internalize motivational mental states that prescribe what they should strive for. These prior intentions then serve as the templates guiding intentions-in-action as they occur. This means that culture has “direct” causal effects on prior intentions as causally effective mental states and “indirect” causal effects on intentions-in-action via prior intentions. Intentions-in-action then directly affect the motor programs tokened to execute the specific bodily movements that realize the prior intention (Pacherie 2006).

Second, internalized culture collapses the search space for proper ways of achieving the prescribed goals. This is done via the construct of norms which are “canned” or “preset” ways of doing things that have the stamp of collective approval, legitimacy, and so forth. Thus, people are motivated to go with the normatively prescribed way rather than think up the best or most efficient way to achieve goals every time they think up a prior intention. In this way, norms directly affect the intentions-in-action that people pursue because they provide content to the mental states that represent the best manner in which intentional goals are to be achieved.

This is a neat story. It is also the story everyone in contemporary sociology, with some notable exceptions, hates (Martin 2015; Whitford 2002; Swidler 2001b) perhaps because it is too neat. My point here has not been to heap hate on this story for the umpteenth time. Instead, it has been to reconstruct the standard story as charitably as possible, showing the linkages between classical action theory in sociology and the contemporary theory of action in the philosophy of mind. The basic idea is that if we are going to tell heterodox stories, the content of the story can change, but not the format. If we are going to say that culture causes action, you cannot skip the step where you specify what type of culture you are talking about, how people internalize it, and how once internalized, this culture links up to some sort of mental cause of action. In future posts, we will see examples of what such heterodox stories might look like.

References

Bratman, M. (1984). Two Faces of Intention. The Philosophical Review, 93(3), 375–405.

Douskos, C. (2017). Habit and intention. Philosophia, 45(3), 1129-1148.

Kluckhohn, C. (1951). Values and Value-Orientations in the Theory of Action: An Exploration in Definition and Classification. In T. Parsons & E. A. Shils (Eds.), Toward a General Theory of Action: Theoretical Foundations for the Social Sciences (pp. 388–433.). Harvard University Press.

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

Lizardo, O., & Strand, M. (2010). Skills, toolkits, contexts and institutions: Clarifying the relationship between different approaches to cognition in cultural sociology. Poetics , 38(2), 205–228.

Martin, J. L. (2015). Thinking Through Theory. W.W. Norton, Incorporated.

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

Pacherie, E. (2006). Towards a dynamic theory of intentions. In S. Pockett, W. P. Banks, & S. Gallagher (Eds.), Does Consciousness Cause Behavior? An Investigation of the Nature of Volition (pp. 145–167). MIT Press.

Parsons, T. (1937). The Structure of Social Action. Free Press.

Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System. The Free Press.

Parsons, T. (1972). Culture and Social System Revisited. Social Science Quarterly, 53(2), 253–266.

Patterson, O. (2014). Making Sense of Culture. Annual Review of Sociology, 40(1), 1–30.

Strauss, C., & Quinn, N. (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning (Vol. 9). Cambridge University Press.

Quinn, N., Sirota, K. G., & Stromberg, P. G. (2018). Introduction: How This Volume Imagines Itself. In N. Quinn (Ed.), Advances in Culture Theory from Psychological Anthropology (pp. 1–19). Springer International Publishing.

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

Swidler, A. (2001b). What anchors cultural practices. In K. K. Cetina, T. R. Schatzki, & E. von Savigny (Eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (pp. 74–92). Routledge.

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

Turner, S. P. (2014). Understanding the tacit. Routledge.

Turner, S. P. (2018). Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer. Routledge.

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

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.

Wuthnow, R. (2008). The sociological study of values. Sociological Forum , 23(2), 333–343.

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.

On the Nature of Habit

Recently, however, some philosophers have begun to pay attention to habits. An example is a series of papers by Bill Pollard starting in the mid-aughts (Pollard, 2006a, 2006b), and more recently Steve Matthews (2017). Pollard tackles some fundamental issues arguing (positively) for habit-based explanations of action as a useful addendum (if not replacement) for folk-psychological accounts (along the lines of previous posts). Here I’d like to focus on Mathews more recent work, which deals with the core characteristics making something a habit.

One useful (implicit) message in this work is that consistent with the modern notion of concepts in cognitive semantics, habits are a radial category. Rather than being a crisp concept with necessary and sufficient conditions of membership, habits are a fuzzy concept, with some “core” or “central” exemplars that share most of the features of habits, and some “peripheral” members that only share some features.

Most anti-habit theorists (with Kant and Kant-inspired theorists such as Parsons being one of the primary examples) equate habit with mindless compulsion and use this equation to expunge habit from the category of action. Critiques of habit theories can thus be arranged on a strength gradient depending on which element of the radial category they decide to focus on. The weakest critiques pick peripheral members, passing them off as “prototypes” for the whole category. Peripheral members of the habit category, such as tics, reflexes, addictions, and compulsions, tend to share few features with action that is experienced as intentional. It is thus easy for these critics to deny habit-based behavior the characteristic that we usually reserve for “action” proper.

Much like American sociological theory post-Parsons (Camic, 1986), habits have been given short shrift in the analytic philosophy of action tradition. As noted in previous posts, one problem is that habit-based explanations, being a form of dispositional account of action, are hard to reconcile with dominant intellectualist approaches to explaining action. The latter, require resort to the usual “psychological” apparatus of reasons, intentions, beliefs, and desires. In habit-based explanations, actions are instead accounted for by referring to their own tendencies to reliably reoccur in specific environments given the agent’s history. This makes them hard to square with typical folk psychological explanations, in which “mental” items are the presumed causal drivers.

Matthews’s argument is that the core or prototypical members of the habit category are what Marcel Mauss called techniques. Skilled ways of being proficient at an action, acquired via an enskillment process requiring training and repetition. These include both “behavioral” skills (e.g. playing the piano, typing, riding a bike) and “cognitive” or “mental” skills, although the latter is less central members of the habit category for most people. In this respect, most bona fide habits are mindful, without necessarily being intentional in the folk psychological sense. They also have five core features, which I discuss next.

Habits are socially shaped.- This might seem obvious. However, there is a tendency in some corners of social theory to think of habit-based accounts as somehow imposing an “individualistic” explanatory scheme. Some people decry while others celebrate (Turner, 1994) the alleged commitment to individualism that comes with habit-based accounts of action. This conception is misguided. Matthews is correct in noting that for core (prototypical) habits are hardly individualistic since they comprise culturally transmitted “techniques” for how to do things (Tomasello, 1999). That each person could have their own way (say of typing or swimming) does not make habits purely individual since they would not be constructed or transmitted if people were Crusoe-like isolates. Instead, most true habits, as revealed by recent sociological “apprenticeship ethnographies” require the embeddedness of the individual in some pedagogical context (for most children this being the family). In this way, most habits are “relational” in a fairly straightforward sense.

Habits are acquired through repetition.- Another one that seems obvious. Nevertheless, I believe this point is more consequential than meets the eye. Recent work emphasizing the root of so-called “dual process” models in theories of learning and memory emphasize that routes to cultural acquisition (ideal-typical “fast” and one shot and “slow” and high repetition) are a key way to partitioning different cultural elements. Namely propositional “beliefs” from non-declarative practices. Habits, having only the slow route of acquisition open to them belong to the latter. Hence the relatively harmless analytic equation of habits and practices. This criterion also serves to demarcate degenerate or borderline examples of the habit radial category such as phobias acquired after a single exposure to a threatening object (e.g., fear of dogs after a dog bite), which depend on analytically and physiologically distinct neural substrates. These we can safely rule out as robust members of the habit category based on the acquisition history criterion.

Habits modify people in durable ways.- As Mike and I have noted (Lizardo & Strand, 2010), this criterion serves to demarcates “strong” habit or practice theories from theories who purport to pay attention to practices but from which embodied agents with their own inertia and history of habituation seem to be absent. Commitment to habit as an explanatory category entails commitment to persons as causally powerful particulars who have been modified by habit in a durable way. This makes durable habits a disposition to behave in such-and-such ways under certain circumstances. Durable modification also entails making conceptual room for the fact that, once acquired, habits are hard to get rid of. So it is usually easier to “refunctionalize” a habit (e.g. take an old habit and put to use for new purposes) than to completely retool.

Since habits operate according to a Hebbian “use or lose it” rule, it is possible for habits to atrophy and decay. However, this decay is relatively graceful and gradual, not fast and sudden. In addition, the previous acquisition of a habit entails faster re-acquisition even when that habit has been weakened or partially lost. This is behind the folk idea that many things are “like riding a bike,” so they can come back easier when you try them again even after a period of disuse.

Considering the “second nature” created by habit means we need to differentiate the temporality of habit (acquisition, use, rehearsal or decay) from the temporality of “macro” social life, as these may not always be in sync; habits will try to persevere even under changing or adverse conditions (Strand & Lizardo, 2017). Durable modification also links nicely to classic sociological notions on the power of “cohorts” to enact social change as history is “encoded” in individuals (Bourdieu, 1990; Ryder, 1965; Vaisey & Lizardo, 2016).

Habits are activated by environmental cues and triggers.- This is one of the better documented empirical regularities in the psychology of action (Ouellette & Wood, 1998). Yet, its meager representation in sociological action theory as an explanatory tool is telling, despite sociologists obvious preference for environmental over attribute-based explanations. Perhaps part of the problem if conceptual; thinking of the environment as a “trigger” may bring fears of removing voluntarism (or as we call it today “agency”) out of the equation thus producing a unidimensional theory of action that reduces action to “conditions” (Parsons, 1937). Yet this fear is unfounded.

First, most people can prospectively plan to enter an environment they know will trigger a habit. For instance, we may set up our work space in the office in a way that facilitates the evocation of the “writing” habit. Second, agents can actively perceive that certain situations have certain “moods” or affordances and they welcome that these trigger reliable (usually pleasant) habits. For instance, a social butterfly can actively perceive that a cocktail party will be good for triggering the complex of habits making up their “outgoing” personality. These have “negative” versions; we avoid certain environments precisely because we know that they’ll trigger a habit we may want to atrophy or decay. There’s no reason to think of the triggering function of environments in purely mechanical ways.

Second, that habits are automatically triggered by environmental cues does not impugn their link to goal-oriented action. In fact, habits can be thought of as a way to facilitate the pursuit and attainment of goals. It is a Parsonian prejudice to presume that the only way to pursue goals is to “picture” them reflectively before the action is initiated and then deploy “effort” to get moving. In fact, this effortful control of action may be subject to more disruption (and thus failure in the attainment of goals) than when agents “offload” the control of action to the environment via habit. In the latter case, goals can be pursued efficiently in a way that is more robust to environmental disruption and entropy.

Habits partake of certain conditions of “automaticity”.- That habits are “automatic” also seems self-evident. However, this can also be conceptually tricky. The problem is that automacity is not a molar concept; instead, it decomposes into a variety of features, some of which can vary independently (Moors & De Houwer, 2006). This can lead to semantic ambiguity because different theorists may actually emphasize different aspects of habitual action when they use the term “automatic” to refer to it.

As already intimated earlier, for prototypical habits, the automaticity feature that most people have in mind is efficiency. After acquiring a habit via lots of repetition people gain proficiency in performing the action. This means that the action can be performed faster and more reliably. Another feature of efficiency is that we no longer have to monitor each step of the action; instead, the action can be performed while our attention resources can be freed to do something else. For instance, experienced knitters can become so efficient at knitting they can do that while reading a book or watching TV.

However, other theorists may take efficiency for granted and point to other features of automaticity as definitional of habitual action. The most controversial of these is the link to intention. For some habits are automatic because they are patterns of behavior that, via the environmental trigger condition mentioned above, bypass intention. This leads to a sometimes counterproductive dualism between “intentional action” and “habit.” I believe a better solution is to think of habitual action as having its own form non-representational “intentionality” (Pollard, 2006b). Driving a car, or riding a bike is intentional action with its own feel, the difference from reflexive intentional action being that representing each step in the action is not required (Dreyfus, 2002).

As noted earlier, the feature of automacity that makes the weakest criterion for defining prototypical habits is (lack of) goal dependence. Most habits are not automatic by this criterion since most habitual action is action for something. Habits without goals (e.g., twirling your hair, tapping your fingers) exist, but they are actually fairly peripheral members of the category. In accord with the pragmatist conception, most habits exist because they help the agent accomplish their goals. As mentioned earlier, most goals are reached via habitual action rather than by reflexive contemplation of ends and effortful initiation of action.

Other features of automaticy are even more peripheral for fixing the nature of habit. For instance, the feature that Bargh refers to as “control.” This refers to whether the agent can “stop” an action sequence once it is started. In this sense, prototypical habits (playing the piano, specifying a regression model) are “controlled” not automatic actions (Pollard, 2006b, p. 60). Skills and procedures, especially those that are narratively extended in Matthew’s (2017) sense, are all “stoppable” by the agent so don’t count as automatic by this criterion. Complete incapacity to stop a line of action only applies to peripheral members of the habit category (e.g., reflexes, phobias, etc.) and probably pertain to habitual actions with short temporal windows.

Note that this refers to whether habits are “intentional” as described above. Most habits may fail to be intentional (in the classical sense) because they are triggered by the environment, but they can be controlled because the agent (if they have the capacity) can stop them once triggered. This is why it is useful to keep different features of automacity separate when thinking about the nature of habit.

Nevertheless, the issue of controllability brings up interesting conceptual problems for habit theory. These have been sharply noted in a series of papers by the philosopher Christos Douskos (to be the subject of a future post). The basic issue is that categorizing an action as a “habit” may be separable from its status as “skill.” Basically, we have lots of skills that do not count as habitual (remaining in “abeyance” so to speak), and some habits that are not skillful. Overall, the ascription conditions for calling a pattern of action a habit, may be more holistic, and thus empirically demanding, than pragmatist and practice theories suppose because they do not reduce to features inherent to the action or its particular conditions of acquisition.

How about the feature of the “unconscious” nature of some automatic actions? Only degenerate or peripheral members of the habit category are “unconscious.” This refers to whether the person reflexively knows whether they are performing the action. Once again, for some peripheral members of the category (cracking your knuckles while engrossed in some other activity), this may apply but it is unlikely to apply to prototypical skills and procedures (we are all aware of driving, typing, etc.). Some people point to “mindless” habit-driven actions as having this feature, such as driving to work when we meant to drive to the store. Here, however, it is unlikely that the person was unconscious of performing the action. So the lapse seems to have been one of failure to exercise control (e.g. stopping the habit because it was not the one that was properly linked to the initial goal) rather than lack of consciousness per se.

Other theorists emphasize unconscious cognitive habits, and maybe for these, this feature is more central than for more prototypical behavioral habits and procedures. Even here, however, unconscious cognitive habits may have the potential to become “conscious” (e.g. the person knows of their existence qua habits) without losing the core automaticity features defining their habitual nature (e.g. the fact they are efficient means to the accomplishment of certain cognitive goals). Overall, however, while most habitual action does rely on subpersonal processes embedded in the cognitive unconscious, most habits are performed in a “mindful” manner (without implying reflexive self-consciousness). As such, they are not automatic actions by this criterion.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford University Press.

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

Dreyfus, H. L. (2002). Intelligence Without Representation–Merleau-Ponty’s critique of mental representation the relevance of phenomenology to scientific explanation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1(4), 367–383.

Matthews, S. (2017). The Significance of Habit. Journal of Moral Philosophy, 14(4), 394–415.

Moors, A., & De Houwer, J. (2006). Automaticity: a theoretical and conceptual analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(2), 297–326.

Ouellette, J. A., & Wood, W. (1998). Habit and intention in everyday life: The multiple processes by which past behavior predicts future behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 124(1), 54.

Parsons, T. (1937). The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press.

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.

Ryder, N. B. (1965). The cohort as a concept in the study of social change. American Sociological Review, 843–861.

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

Tomasello, M. (1999). The Human Adaptation for Culture. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28(1), 509–529.

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

Vaisey, S., & Lizardo, O. (2016). Cultural Fragmentation or Acquired Dispositions? A New Approach to Accounting for Patterns of Cultural Change. Socius, 2, 2378023116669726.

What are Dispositions?

A recurrent theme in previous posts is that social scientists have a lot to gain by replacing belief-desire psychology as an explanatory framework with a dispositional theory of the mental. As I argued before, it is something that we already do and has a good pedigree in social theory.

The notion of disposition has had a somewhat checkered history in sociological theory. It was central to Bourdieu’s definition of one of his core concepts (habitus) and played a central role in his scheme (Bourdieu defined habitus as a “system” of dispositions). Yet, American sociologists seldom use the notion in a generative way. I want to propose here that it should be a (if not the) central notion in any coherent action theory.

Dispositional explanations of action are not philosophically neutral because they make strong assumptions about the linkage between the capacities presumed to be embodied in agents and our ability to make sense of their actions. This is a good thing since a lot of action theories are not explicit as to their commitments. For instance, a dispositional account has to presuppose that the fact we can make sense of other people’s actions (e.g. when skilfully playing the role of folk psychologists) is itself a manifestation of a disposition, which may or may not manifest itself (sometimes we make sense of other people’s actions by taking other stances that are not folk psychological). In this respect, a dispositional account of action is one that must refer to an unobserved process which is only available via its overt manifestations. Because of this, dispositional explanations must deal with some unique conceptual and philosophical challenges (Turner 2007).

I outline some of these in what follows.

First, a dispositional explanation of action is consistent with a realist, capacities-based account of causation and causal powers. One useful such account has been referred to as “dispositional realism.” According to Borghini and Williams (2008, 23), dispositional realism “refers to any theory of dispositions that claims an object has a disposition in virtue of some state or property of the object.”

In addition, the fact that dispositions are properties possessed by their bearers entails that observing an overt manifestation of a disposition suffices to conclude that the agent possesses that disposition. However, the reverse is not the case. Dispositions may fail to manifest themselves even when their conditions for manifestation obtain (Fara 2005: 42). So not observing an action or profession of belief does not indicate the agent lacks the disposition to behave like X or believe X.

For sociologists, whose “objects” are people, this last statement entails for instance, that we can ascribe dispositions to people in the absence of any overt manifestation (e.g. dispositions to believe), and that this ascription is therefore partially independent from any single present (or past) situation in which we may have observed the agent. For instance, we may be familiar with the causal history experienced by the person, know that certain causal histories result in the acquisition of certain dispositions, and thus ascribe dispositions based on our familiarity with a person’s causal history before we see any of their manifestations.

Second, dispositions are causally relevant to their manifestations (Fara 2005, 44). In most settings to say an agent has a disposition (D) to take a given intentional stance (belief, desire) towards propositional content Y, or to engage in action W in context C is to say D suffices to produce that intentional stance or that action in that context.

Third, dispositions are properties of the person, not properties of “the situation” or some external environmental feature. This is not say situations don’t have properties. It is to say, however, that in order for a situational property to apply to the explanation of action, we must presume the agent has a disposition to react in such-and-such a way to that situational property. Environments and situations have no free-standing causal powers in determining action. Any environmental effect has to be mediated by the dispositions to act and react that the agent is taken to possess (Cervone 1997).

This also entails that dispositions have bases, but the dispositions are not reducible to some non-dispositional substrate. Dispositional properties are irreducibly dispositional. Dispositions are not holistic glosses over behavior that could be realizable over “wildly disjunctive” set of underlying substrates. Instead, a dispositional ascription is an inherently ontological claim: something exists (the disposition) the causal power of which is responsible for the overt behavioral manifestation in question.

Do dispositions entail conditionals? A popular philosophical view defines a disposition as those properties of objects or persons that entail a conditional statement. For instance, the disposition “fragile” ascribed to a cup entails the condition “would break if struck by a sufficiently rigid object.” Here I follow Fara (2005) in noting that the conditional account of dispositions fails for a variety of reasons. We can consider something to be a disposition without referring to what would occur in a possible world or mental space. Instead of conditionals, dispositional ascriptions entail habituals (Fara 2005: 63), thus a dispositional explanation of action is consistent with a habit-based theory of action.

Accordinngly, fourth, dispositional realism entails a rejection of the conditional (e.g. counterfactual) definition of causation for explaining action (Martin 2011). The reason for this is that under conditional accounts the causal potency of dispositions is given a backseat in favor of talk about “the laws of nature, possible worlds, abstract realms, or what have you” (Borghini and Williams 2004: 24). This penchant to substitute talk about fake or possible worlds for talk about this world is the source of various pathological understandings of causality in social science (Martin 2011).

Fifth, when we say an agent has a certain disposition to do Y, we say that the agent does Y because of something inherent in his or her nature. Note that this account is perfectly compatible with the idea that this nature is “acquired.” The notion of something behaving like a natural property of an agent is separable from how is it that that something became part of the agent’s nature (e.g. learning or genetics). Sociologists are sometimes allergic to talking about properties inherent in agents lest they be accused of “essentialism.” Once acquired and locked in via habituation, dispositions can function as “second nature” in which case the provisional and qualified use of so-called “essentialist” language is not misleading.

This view of dispositions, as noted earlier, entails that there are not purely situational or derived properties, such as for instance, “relational properties” floating around unmoored in the ontological ether. This is not say there are no relational properties. Instead, it is to say that relational properties depend on dispositional properties but not the reverse: the capacity of the agent to enter into relations with properties and entities in the environment requires dispositions. This is what the joining of a habitual account of action (which trades on dispositional talk) and a field theory (which trades on relational talk) is not arbitrary but required to deal with the sorts of questions sociologists are disposed to ask (Merriman and Martin 2015).

Sixth, the relationship between a disposition and an overt manifestation is normally one to many. A single disposition may manifest itself as distinct forms of overt behavior or experiences depending on context (Borghini and Williams 2004: 24).

Finally, dispositions may organize themselves into systems of dispositions. Bourdieu thought this was the natural tendency. However, a dispositional explanation of action does not require the assumption of overall systematicity. In fact, the weaker assumption of loose coupling until proven otherwise is more likely to be empirically accurate.

In a follow-up post, I will outline other consequences of adopting a dispositional ontology at the level of the actor.

References

Borghini, Andrea, and Neil E. Williams. 2008. “A Dispositional Theory of Possibility.” Dialectica 62 (1). Wiley Online Library: 21–41.

Cervone, Daniel. 1997. “Social-Cognitive Mechanisms and Personality Coherence: Self-Knowledge, Situational Beliefs, and Cross-Situational Coherence in Perceived Self-Efficacy.” Psychological Science 8 (1). SAGE Publications Inc: 43–50.

Fara, Michael. 2005. “Dispositions and Habituals.” Nous 39 (1): 43–82.

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

Merriman, Ben, and John Levi Martin. 2015. “A Social Aesthetics as a General Cultural Sociology?” In Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Art and Culture, 152–210. Routledge.

Turner, Stephen P. 2007. “Practice Then and Now.” Human Affairs 17 (2): 375.