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10 - Habits, Meaning, and Intentionality

A Deweyan Reading

from Part II - The Enactment of Habits in Mind and World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2020

By
Pierre Steiner
Edited by
Fausto Caruana  and
Italo Testa
Fausto Caruana
Affiliation:
Institute of Neuroscience (Parma), Italian National Research Council
Italo Testa
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi, Parma
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Summary

Do nonrepresentational habits display intentionality, in the sense of aiming at, pointing to, or targeting some specific objects? I will here tackle this question from the resources of Dewey's pragmatism, and more precisely from his theory of habits and his functionalist theory of meaning. Meaning, for Dewey, is a normative phenomenon, only occurring in social and linguistic practices. The fact that utterances and thoughts can be about states of affairs does not require a specific mental property of pointing to or targeting for to be explained. Similarly, if behavior and habits can be described as being directed toward objects, this directedness is nothing before or beside the way our actions are normatively framed and organized in certain forms of organism–environment transactions, such as inquiry.

Keywords

adverbialismDeweyhabitsintentionalityobjectivation
Type
Chapter
Information
Habits
Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory
 , pp. 223 - 244
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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