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11 - Language, Habit, and the Future

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2020

By
Elena Clare Cuffari
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

Dewey's thought is central to the organicist tradition, which views habit as “‘a primary ontological phenomenon’, shaping the person as a whole and traversing a continuum from the individual to the social, from embodied intentionality to conscious reflection”. This view enjoys a mutually supportive relationship with the theory of linguistic bodies, a nonrepresentational, world-involving account of languaging as a type of embodied social agency. Everything that a linguistic body does and thinks is conditioned by her linguistic habits. Paradoxically, each unique life is built out of the sense-making acts of others. Through constitutive openness to others’ perspectives, habits that define linguistic bodies call forth certain futures. The future depends on which utterances a community privileges and with whom it dialogues. Considering the global climate emergency, I question how we can actually change our future by disrupting the habits that currently comprise what Dewey calls “the endless chain of humanity.”

Keywords

linguistic bodieshabitfutureclimate emergencysocial interaction
Type
Chapter
Information
Habits
Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory
 , pp. 245 - 263
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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