Abstract
In order to study the notion of habit as an instance of Thirdness in Peirce’s work, it is necessary to go back to the intuitions at the basis of Peirce’s categories, trying to spell out concretely, as I think this has not been done before, the meaning of the three categories. This involves entangling the notions of fallibilism and of the collaborative work of the community of scholars, which may not have been taken seriously by most scholars pursuing the Peircean tradition. It is suggested that Peirce’s phenomenology is a version of Husserl’s phenomenology imposing a lot of constraints on the variation in imagination. In order to make sense of habit as Thirdness, we have to extend Peircean phenomenology into Husserlean phenomenology, abandoning the language of degeneracy, which is not very enlightening. Important contributions to the study of habit has also been made by several sociologists and psychologists.
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Notes
- 1.
As I have argued elsewhere (Sonesson 1996, 2009b, 2010), iconicity and indexicality are not always independent of the sign character, but we will accept Peirce’s position here, for the sake of the argument. In another context, Peirce (c. 1897: CP 4.157) does indeed argue that “it is not the resemblance that causes the association, but the association that constitutes the resemblance”, anticipating the similarity critique of Nelson Goodman (see Sonesson 1989: 226ff).
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- 3.
Cf. Peirce (c. 1897: CP 4.157): “For to be contiguous means to be near in space at a time; and nothing can crowd a space for itself but an act of reaction”. Still, if all reactions are indeed contiguities, the opposite does not seem to be necessarily the case.
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Sonesson, G. (2016). Thirdness as the Observer Observed: From Habit to Law by Way of Habitus . 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_16
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