Abstract
Charles Sanders Peirce, far more than any scholar in recent centuries in the West, devoted much of his productive life to probing the idea of and behavior of “habit”. In order to do so, he both narrowed and widened his focus on the notion. Otherwise an ordinary term in quotidian use in English, habit suggests regularity, usually pertaining to individual human behavior—but Peirce also focused on habit’s utility for understanding behavior beyond the human, and even processes beyond the organic world. In pursuit of refining and operationalizing habit, Peirce drew on any number of disciplines, close to and far from his expertise—these spanning from logic/philosophy, biology and psychology to theology and cosmology. Peirce’s foundational work on habit continues to be irresistible for contemporary humanities scholars, social scientists, scientists, and for practitioners beyond the academy diagnosing the ills of self and society, as Peirce’s oeuvre in its infra-dialectical form (frequently in fragmentary paragraphs), cannot be satisfactorily appreciated through any rear-view mirror. Rather, one might say that, in recognizing the habits behind habits and habit-change—whether confirming them through belief or challenging them through doubt—Peirce still invites us to permute, expand, contest, and refine his explorations of a century ago.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Pogo’s iconic remark appears in the “Pogo” daily strip upon finding nature sullied by trash, Earth Day, 1971.
References
Anderson, Myrdene, and Dinda L. Gorlée. 2011. Duologue in the familiar and the strange: Translatability, translating, translation. In Semiotics 2010, ed. Karen Haworth, Jason Hogue, and Leonard G. Sbrocchi, 221–232. Ottawa: Legas Press.
Anderson, Myrdene, and Katja Pettinen. 2014. Perception: Seeing is believing? In Semiotics 2013, ed. Jamin Pelkey, and Leonard G. Sbrocchi, 217–224. Ottawa: Legas.
Aristotle. 1926 [c.335 B.C.E.]. The Art of Rhetoric (Loeb Classical Library, 193) (translated from the Greek by John Henry Freese). London: Heinemann.
Bernacer, Javier, and Jose Ignacio Murillo. 2014. The Aristotelian conception of habit and its contribution to human neuroscience. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8: 883. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00883.
Brent, Joseph. 1998 [1993]. Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Bryant, Levi R. 2014. Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Chen, M.Keith. 2013. The effect of language on economic behavior: Evidence from savings rates, health behaviors, and retirement assets. American Economic Review 103(2): 690–731.
Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray.
Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Research Unit (DMHDRU). (1972-present). Publications in numerous venues from New Zealand longitudinal study, cf. Moffit et al., 2013.
Durst-Andersen, Per. 2011. Linguistic supertypes: A cognitive-semiotic theory of human communication. Berlin: Mouton.
Durst-Andersen, Per. 2012. What languages tell us about the structure of the human mind. Cognitive Computation 4: 82–97.
Gibson, James J. 1979. The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Henry, Richard Conn. 2005. Concept: The mental universe. Nature 436 [7047] (7 July 2005): 29.
Jakobson, Roman. 1970. Linguistics. Main trends of research in the social and human sciences; Part 1: Social Sciences, 419–463. Berlin: Mouton, for UNESCO.
Kelly, Walt. 1972[1971]. Pogo: We have met the enemy and he is us. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Kroeber, Alfred L., and Clyde Kluckhohn. 1952. Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 47.1. Cambridge: Peabody Museum.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1936. The great chain of being: A study of the history of an idea. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Margulis, Lynn. 1971. Whittaker’s five kingdoms of organisms: Minor revisions suggested by considerations of the origin of mitosis. Evolution 25(1): 242–245.
Moffitt, Terrie E., Richie Poulton, and Avshalom Caspi. 2013. Lifelong impact of early self-control: Childhood self-discipline predicts adult quality of life. American Scientist 101 (September–October 2013): 352–359.
Monod, Jacques. 1971. Chance and necessity: An essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. i. 1867–1913. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. 1–6, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–1935. Vols. 7–8, ed. Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958. [References to Peirce’s papers will be designated by CP, followed by volume, period, paragraph number.].
Peirce, Charles Sanders. i. 1867–1893. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writing. Vol. 1 (1867–1893), eds. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. [References to this volume will be designated by EP 1, followed by colon, page number.].
Peirce, Charles Sanders. i. 1893–1913. The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writing. Vol. 2 (1893–1913), ed. the Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. [References to this volume will be designated by EP 2, followed by colon, page number.].
Peirce, Charles Sanders. i.1867–1913. Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. Vols. 1–6 to date, ed. the Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. [References to these volumes will be designated by W, followed by volume number, colon, page number.].
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. 1984[1979]. Order Out of Chaos. Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. Translated from the French. Boulder, Colorado: New Science Library.
Rosen, Robert. 1985/2012. Anticipatory systems: Philosophical, mathematical, and methodological foundations. New York: Pergamon.
Salthe, Stanley N. 1993. Development and evolution: Complexity and change in biology. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Thom, René. 1968. Topologie et signification. L’iige de la science 4: 219–242.
Thom, René. 1975. Structural stability and morphogenesis: An outline of a general theory of models. London: Benjamin.
Uexküll, Jakob von. 1957[1934] A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds. pp. 5–80 in Instinctive behavior: The development of a modern concept, edited and translated from the German by Claire H. Schiller. New York: International Universities Press, Inc.
Waugh, Linda R. 1982. Marked and unmarked—A choice between unequals in semiotic structure Semiotica 38.3/4: 299–318.
West, Donna E. 2014. From habit to habituescence: Peirce’s continuum of ideas. The SSA annual: Semiotics 2013, eds. Jamin Pelkey and Leonard G. Sbrocchi, 117–126. Toronto: Legas Press.
Williams, Raymond. 1985[1981]. The sociology of culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Williams, Raymond. 2014[1985, 1976]. Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. New York: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Anderson, M. (2016). Preamble—Peircean Habit Explored: Before, During, After; and Beneath, Behind, Beyond. In: West, D., Anderson, M. (eds) Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45920-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45920-2_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-45918-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-45920-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)