Habits and the Enculturated Mind
Joerg Fingerhut
Abstract
How do cultural artifacts influence the ways we experience and act? In this chapter I propose that cognition is cultural tout court and that habits provide a central link between human organisms and the sociocultural environment. I will defend an enactive account of habits that sees them as expansive in the temporal (they relate us to a history of sociocultural interactions) and spatial sense (they are co-constituted by our brains, bodies, and cultural artifacts). This account is based on Dewey's pragmatist–organicist concept of habits that rigorously anchors experience in culture. I will trace cultural factors in Dewey's philosophy and 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognitive science with a focus on pervasive artifacts – such as architecture, pictures, and moving images. Such artifacts have become part of our habits of perceiving. I finally situate artifactual habits within recent predictive processing theories that claim to provide the corresponding neuroscientific theory to our cultural minds.