Thirdness as the Observer Observed: From Habit to Law by Way of Habitus (original) (raw)
Related papers
FROM HABIT TO HABITUESCENCE: 10 PEIRCE'S CONTINUUM OF IDEAS
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, in my view, have not 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.
How to account for the bearing of change and permanence in human identity? The article discusses Peirce’s contribution to solve a paradox: the certainty of human beings of being always themselves, always the same person, despite the overtly evolving nature of the self. Intriguingly, what epitomizes the regular and predictable nature of habit and of habit-taking centrally involves the incidence of the most volatile element in Peirce’s theory, namely, Orience (“free originality”), spontaneity. To describe the emergence of change in identity construed as a process of habit-taking, this chapter examines three decades of Peircean writings on habit (1878-1907). A conclusion of this study is how fundamental in his account is the role of the imagination when it comes to the shaping of habits. That elusive element in humanity bears tangible consequences, since imaginary considerations “will affect my real action should those circumstances be realized” (CP 2.148). Phaneroscopy provides an essential support to Peirce’s mature account of habit.
Action Habit as Imperative: Peirce’s Supreme Art
Southern Semiotic Review, 2019
Deictic Imaginings: Semiosis at Work and at Play, investigates the role of Index in the acquisition of demonstratives and personal pronouns. The impetus for the publication of her 2016 anthology: Consensus on Peirce's Concept of Habit: Before and Beyond Consciousness, derives from her longstanding fascination with how Peirce's concept of habit relies chiefly upon index's influence in event processing.
Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit
Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, 2016
About this Series Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics (SAPERE) publishes new developments and advances in all the fields of philosophy, epistemology, and ethics, bringing them together with a cluster of scientific disciplines and technological outcomes: from computer science to life sciences, from economics, law, and education to engineering, logic, and mathematics, from medicine to physics, human sciences, and politics. It aims at covering all the challenging philosophical and ethical themes of contemporary society, making them appropriately applicable to contemporary theoretical, methodological, and practical problems, impasses, controversies, and conflicts. The series includes monographs, lecture notes, selected contributions from specialized conferences and workshops as well as selected Ph.D. theses.
Infinite Pragmatics: Peirce, Deleuze, and the Habit of Things
Much of the discussion that compares the work of Deleuze and Peirce has focused upon Peirce's theory of signs. This is understandable given the emphasis Deleuze himself gives to Peirce's typology of firstness, secondness, and thirdness in his Cinema books, as well as the importance of a theory of signs in his Proust and Signs. In the following essay I will explore a more subtle but equally significant interplay between the work of Deleuze and Peirce by showing how they both come to use a concept of habit in order to account for the emergence of individuated, determinate identities; moreover, this account of the emergence of individuated identities by way of habits (or passive syntheses as Deleuze will argue) entails the necessary affirmation of the actual infinite, or the possibility of supertasks. 1
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 (1877) ; on the another hand, it is also described as an almost instinctual process that determines further reasonings, the element "by virtue of which an idea gives rise to another" (1873) [CP 7.354]. Stressing the apparently wide separation between these two traits of habit in the epistemic continuum between doubt and belief, we will be able to illustrate a) a knowledge-based kind of habit, for the analysis of which we will also exploit Gibson's concept of "affordance" , which also plays a pivotal role in the justification of the agent's own beliefs; and b) an ignorance-based kind of habit, which will be proved as necessary for the beginning of thought, and which is at the base of the ampliative reasoning, condensed in another Peircean key topic (often qualified as "instinctual" in his writings): abduction.