Chapter 11: This chapter surveys intersections between views of acting and paradigms of science, and addresses views of the human. The chapter begins with a brief historical overview, starting with Plato and Aristotle and proceeding to early twentieth-century scientists such as Pavlov and Freud. The focus is on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century cognitive sciences and neuroscience, which provide the actor with concrete, material information about how body and brain work. This helps to eliminate misapprehensions about how different aspects of the self operate and offers insight into imagination, intellect, emotion, memory, and language, among other aspects of our experience. The discussion addresses the fact of actors as complex processes, inextricably connected to each other and their environments, and how the actor might utilize the findings of science.

In this introductory chapter we sketch the role that the notion of habit has played in the work of pragmatist authors such as James, Peirce and Dewey, and give an account of its ambivalent role in the development of psychology and cognitive sciences from James's introspectionism, through behaviorism and computationalism, up to 4E cognition and the rediscovery of a pragmatist action-oriented stance to cognition. We then investigate how the abandonment of the notion of habit in the second half of the twentieth century was paralleled by the adoption of a dualism between automatic routine and intelligent action and by an approach to cognition based on the notion of mental representation. We explore how habit formation has been investigated within contemporary neuroscience in a dynamic perspective based on the interplay between automatism and goal-oriented behavior. Subsequently we show that the adoption of the dualism between rational action and mechanical routines also influenced the development of twentieth-century sociological thought, and is nowadays being reconsidered by social theory. Finally, we provide an overview of the book and a chapter-by-chapter summary.

Ancient stone tools provide a unique source of empirical evidence for reconstructing the evolutionary origins of human culture, mind, and brain. As a key component of hominid adaptations throughout the Paleolithic, stone tools not only document human evolution but likely helped to shape it. Properly interpreting this evidence requires both “middle-range” theory linking archaeologically observable material remains to the behaviors that created them and high-level theory appropriate for placing these reconstructed behaviors in a broader evolutionary framework. An extended evolutionary perspective on Paleolithic toolmaking as embodied practice integrates levels of analysis by emphasizing the interaction of evolutionary and behavioral processes unfolding on multiple spatiotemporal scales. Although much work remains to be done, initial efforts toward an integrated evolutionary neuroscience of toolmaking are beginning to trace the evolution of a uniquely human technological niche rooted in a shared primate heritage of visuomotor coordination and dexterous manipulation.