A Habit Ontology for Cognitive and Social Sciences: Methodological Individualism, Pragmatist Interactionism, and 4E Cognition

In this article I highlight the role that a pragmatic approach to cognition and action inspired by classical pragmatism, when appropriately understood, could play first in revealing deep affinities between what is separately happening in contemporary cognitive sciences and social sciences. In order to do so, a suitable pragmatist model should be offered that could re-describe in a shared language what is happening in each of these fields. The pragmatist approach that I will present will be based on a reconstruction of some basic ideas of John Dewey’s thought. In particular, I will argue that the core of such a pragmatist approach is an ontological framework based on the notion of habit. My thesis will be that a habit ontology could deploy a conceptual basis from which both social sciences and cognitive sciences could benefit from within their respective development. Moreover, such a pragmatist approach could also offer a unifying metatheoretical perspective for both enterprises, providing the first blocks of a common conceptual framework. A habit ontology could make available a promising, externalist alternative to approaches whose internalist framework tends to reduce human action and cognition to an essentially individual phenomenon located at the level of internal representational processes. The habit model, in fact, can account not only for the constitutive role of action for cognition but also for the interactive character of action. Moreover, it offers a thick and externalist account of action as being both embodied in individual organisms and embedded in social practices, and as something that cannot be reduced to the occurrence of intentional internal phenomena but that is extended in the natural and in the social world we interact with.