Habit in context

Theorists in the embedded, embodied, and enactive traditions have frequently proposed habit as a model for much or all of cognition. These proposals typically depict habit as a pervasive phenomenon with unique explanatory benefits. This paper contends, however, that the concept of habit, as applied in these debates, is more effectively understood not as a general principle explaining cognitive processes, but as an evocative picture of the mind that reorients our thinking. By examining popular self-improvement books on habits, we show that philosophical applications of ‘habit’ heavily rely on common everyday understandings of the term. We argue that this dependence casts doubt on its status as a unifying explanans. We further demonstrate that insufficient recognition of this dependence promotes a mistaken view of habits as constituting the grounds of mentality. In our conclusion, we discuss the implications of moving beyond a uniform explanatory framework for cognition, advocating for a greater emphasis on the contextual embedding of mental phenomena instead.