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Consensus on Peirce’s concept of habit : before and beyond consciousness
West D., Anderson M., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2016. 434 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319459-18-9)
Date Reviewed: Aug 16 2017

Charles Sanders Peirce (sounds like “purse”) was one of the four great American philosophers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the others being Josiah Royce, William James, and John Dewey. Peirce is usually grouped among the pragmatists, but his writings extend to and apply to logic, epistemology, ethics, linguistics, and anthropology. He is one of the founders of semiotics, the analysis of signs in languages. Semiotics includes syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics, which are inherent in the design and implementation of computer programming languages.

This book was prepared in memorial of Peirce’s death a century ago in 1914. There are 29 contributors in this volume from philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, and literature. The book is divided into an introductory chapter with 22 subsequent chapters divided into three main parts. The first part consists of background material, the second part examines the action component of habit, and the third part explores the embodiment of habit in the mental processes of individuals and groups.

The theme of the book is Peirce’s concept of “habit,” which pervades Peirce’s thought. In everyday speech, habit is a pattern of behavior that has been acquired and has become so automatic that it is hard to break. Usually, the everyday use habit has a negative connotation (a bad habit) like biting one’s nails, smoking, or an addiction. It can also be neutral, as in the mug of coffee first thing in the morning, or positive, like regularly flossing one’s teeth. Myrdene Anderson, one of the two editors of the volume, in the introductory initial chapter describes habit thus: “Peirce asserted that, rather than persons having habits, it is that habits have us – that we dwell in and through habits. By extension, culture would be itself little beyond habit and so would be individual personalities. ... Habit may be to humans as water is to fish.”

The implications of Peirce’s redefinition of habit are presented as layers in each section of papers burrowing down from the more general aspects in the first set, more confined embodiments in ethics and belief in the second section, and then detailed discussions of habit in psychology, cultural anthropology, logic, semiotics, and epistemology in the third section. One of the papers included is “Habits, Habit Change, and the Habit of Habit Change According to Peirce” by Winfried Nöth, appearing in the first section. Since habit is a context, how can the context change? Is changeability of a context a context in itself? In the section on habits and action, two sample chapters are “Belief as Habit” by Atocha Aliseda and “Indexical Scaffolds to Habit-Formation” by Donna West, the co-editor of the book. In the former chapter, Peirce’s concept of habit is applied to belief systems, including religion and cultural systems as well as more secular systems of belief, including scientific paradigms. In the latter chapter, the question of how habits are structured and formed is the topic. Two sample essays in the third part on habits and mental processes are “Of Habit and Abduction: Preserving Ignorance or Attaining Knowledge?” by Lorenzo Magnani, Selene Arfini, and Tommaso Bertolotti and “Social Minds and the Fixation of Belief” by Nathan Houser. The paper by Magnani et al. discusses the third form of logic, abduction, advocated by Peirce. The classical forms of logic, deductive and inductive, are well known but imply a false dichotomy. Peirce examined how people think when they want to solve problems and to find causes of phenomena. How are hypotheses formulated? How are explanations discovered? People work backwards, not inductively from numerous cases in a probabilistic manner to propose a general rule, but rather to uncover underlying causes. This is the basis of all mythology and of all science. Houser’s paper deals with the social psychology of institutional knowledge, belief, and culture as something separate from learning by an individual. Institutions are subject to and create their own habits as well as individuals.

The papers are all challenging reading because the language of presentation used by philosophers, semioticians, and anthropologists is unfamiliar to readers who are physical or computational scientists or engineers. I found myself motivated to learn more about Peirce’s philosophy by directly reading his books and papers. His work is important for scientists and engineers for several reasons: (1) insight into the study of process, language, and what it means to know (epistemology); (2) the study of systems and the cultures they create and impose on individuals; and (3) the use of the abductive logic in addition to deduction and induction for analysis. The last point was the final philosophical effort of Peirce. Implementing abductive reasoning is practical today in research on artificial intelligence and autonomous reasoning in robots.

Reviewer:  Anthony J. Duben Review #: CR145488 (1710-0656)
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