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15 - “Habit Is Thus the Enormous Flywheel of Society”

Pragmatism, Social Theory, and Cognitive Science

from Part III - Socially Embeddded and Culturally Extended Habits

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2020

By
Stephen Turner
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

Pragmatism arose in response to the dominant philosophical ideas of the time, one of which was neo-Kantianism. Present approaches in cognitive science often derive from basic neo-Kantian ideas, notably the notion that social life and language depend on shared “frames.” Pragmatism rejected these neo-Kantian ideas, and instead relied on an extended notion of habit. But the extension required a response to some core neo-Kantian concerns. Pragmatism provided some psychological thinking, especially in William James, and in the critique of the reflex arc concept. This was paralleled and extended by Russian psychologists. They developed a research program which supported alternative accounts of the key problematics of neo-Kantianism, such as the nature of categories and of abstraction. This bears directly on social theory, which uncritically adopted ideas of shared frameworks as an explanatory shortcut, without providing a psychological or cognitive account of how this kind of sharing was possible.

Keywords

pragmatismJohn DeweyWilliam Jamesneo-KantianismA. F. Luria
Type
Chapter
Information
Habits
Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory
 , pp. 320 - 336
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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