Abstract
In this chapter, I will proceed to discuss the generation and maintenance of ignorance in the agent’s cognition as the product of a habit (in Peircean words) of thought and action. Indeed, “habit” is not an easy term in Peirce’s epistemology: on the one hand it often signifies the rule of action that is attained with the fixation of belief (Peirce 1998a); on the other hand, it also describes an almost instinctual process that determines further reasonings, the element “by virtue of which an idea gives rise to another” (Peirce 1958b, Vol. VII, Book II, p. 215). Stressing the apparently wide separation between these two traits of habit in the epistemic continuum between doubt and belief, I will illustrate: (a) a knowledge-based kind of habit and (b) an ignorance-based one. Both are necessary for the beginning of thought and are the roots of the ampliative reasoning condensed in another Peircean keyword: abduction.
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Notes
- 1.
To be more accurate, this general definition only refers to Peirce’s epistemological and psychological analysis of habit, as my study is structured within it. Indeed, it would be difficult to encompass Peirce’s many uses of the concept of habit in a single definition, no matter how broad. As many contributors in the volume edited by West and Anderson (2015) emphasized, habit is “by no means exclusively a mental act” (Coletta 2016) or a notion that belongs just to the analysis of human or animal cognition (even if it amply regards emotion, experience, and understanding (Gorlée 2016)); indeed, it is a concept used by Peirce and subsequent researchers also in the philosophical study of physics and biology to comprehend natural disposition (Stjernfelt 2016), physical laws (Pickering 2015), and regularities as energy dispersal and biological system propagation (West 2016). Moreover, it also appears to be a relevant concept in the Peircean semiotic triadic of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness: for a thorough analysis of this topic, I refer the reader to West (2014).
- 2.
Indeed James’ (1920) psychological treatment stresses the neural grounding of habit.
- 3.
On Peirce’s concept of habit in the distinction between his definition of logica utens and logica docens, cf. (Pietarinen 2005).
- 4.
Even if it is very natural to identify “valid inferences” with “deductions”, I should say that A-type reasonings do not have to be necessarily considered as valid deductions. Indeed, the agent can apply a justificatory A-reasoning even when she commits fallacies that in specific cases lead from correct (true) premises to correct (true) answers. In these controversial cases, and in a practical sense, some fallacies can effectively justify some beliefs and so they can be correctly included in the reasonings of A-type.
- 5.
Peirce’s stress on the physical effort is related to an embodied perception of surprise that may not be totally available to consciousness, as a “full” surprise would be: the result of a mismatch between one’s beliefs and the external world can be tacitly revealed by the increased physical effort required to carry out the planned action, when it is driven by a habit that is not valid anymore.
- 6.
- 7.
Cf. Part 1, Chap. 3.
- 8.
As presented in the first part of this dissertation, the epistemic bubble can be described as the automatic ascription of knowledge to the agent’s believing system. The result is that the embubbled agent is unable to perfectly distinguish what she know from what she merely believes; the difference can be spotted only by a third-person perspective.
- 9.
Though this is not the appropriate lieu of discussion, I clearly side along those maintaining that definining affordances as immediate, direct perception of possibilities does not imply the necessary impossibility to learn and develop new affordances apart from those that are naturally available to our cognitive system—chiefly because of phylogenesis. Gibson himself seemed to be quite clear in assimilating the artifactual dimension to the natural one, in contending (right after the definition of affordance quoted above) that the artifactual environment “is not a new environment—an artificial environment distinct from the natural environment—but the same old environment modified by man. It is a mistake to separate the natural from the artificial as if there were two environments; artefacts have to be manufactured from natural substances. It is also a mistake to separate the cultural environment from the natural environment, as if there were a world of mental products distinct from the world of material products. There is only one world, however diverse, and all animals live in it, alright we human animals have altered it to suit ourselves” (Gibson 1979, p. 130).
- 10.
Another interesting interpretation of the connection between habit and affordance is given by West (2014, p. 119).
- 11.
Peirce himself stressed that “genuine doubt always has an external origin, usually from surprise”, all the more because it is not possible to give oneself a “genuine surprise” by an “act of the will” (Peirce 1958b, 5.443). The agent’s misrepresentation of the emergence of surprise, connected with habit formation, is interestingly analyzed by Colapietro (2016). Indeed, he advocates the possibility that the agent can effectively play an active part in the stimulation of her own state of surprise, nonetheless she is cognitively prevented from fully recognizing her role in the process.
- 12.
Peirce himself used the word struggle to stress the violent trait of this condition (Peirce 1998b, p. 114).
- 13.
In Peirce’s unfinished essay Pragmatism, analyzed by Bergman (2016), the complex dynamic of habit-change is considered the “ultimate logical interpretant”. While addressing the reader to Bergman’s paper for further enlightenment, I should mention that the ultimate logical interpretant, defined as the “concluding goal of cognitive sign action”, refers to many topics I already discussed: for instance the clarification of a habit as the actions it would produce, the establishment of such a habit of action in our nature, and the revision of existing habits.
- 14.
Also Aliseda (2016) richly analyzes abductive reasoning as the process that guides the transition between doubt and belief in Peirce’s epistemology.
- 15.
As I will report also in the sixth chapter, the classical schematic representation of abduction is expressed by what Gabbay and Woods (2005) call the AKM-schema, as contrasted to their own GW-schema (Gabbay-Woods). In the AKM, A refers to Aliseda (1998, 2006), K to Kowalski (1979), Kuipers (1999), and Kakas et al. (1992), M to Magnani (2009) and Meheus et al. (2002). A detailed illustration of the AKM schema is given in ((Magnani 2009), chapter two, subsection 2.1.3), together with the recent EC-Model (Eco-Cognitive Model) of abduction.
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Arfini, S. (2019). Of Habit and Ignorance. In: Ignorant Cognition. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 46. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14362-6_6
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