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14 - Growing Minds

Pragmatic Habits and Enculturation

from Part III - Socially Embeddded and Culturally Extended Habits

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2020

By
Richard Menary
Edited by
Fausto Caruana  and
Italo Testa
Fausto Caruana
Affiliation:
Institute of Neuroscience (Parma), Italian National Research Council
Italo Testa
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi, Parma
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Summary

The classical pragmatists provided a clear set of leading ideas about what a habit is. This conception of “habit” is distinct from the behavioral conception of habit as a fixed disposition to respond to stimuli that has been enforced by the environment. This chapter focuses on developing a pragmatic account of habit based on leading ideas from Peirce and Dewey. It also argues that this account can play a useful role in the emerging account of cognition as culturally evolved and enculturated. The combined account demonstrates that the work of the classical pragmatists is as fresh and important now as it was a hundred years ago.

Keywords

plasticityabductionexploratory inferencesocial learningcultural evolutionenculturation
Type
Chapter
Information
Habits
Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory
 , pp. 297 - 319
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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