Happening at the Centre

People often show maladaptive behavior in daily life and psychopathology. Traditional dual-process theories explain this via a default-interventionist model, where stimulus-driven habits dominate unless overridden by goal-directed control. This view attributes maladaptive behavior to insufficient correction by executive control. I propose an alternative parallel-competitive model in which stimulus-driven and goal-directed processes operate simultaneously, with the latter often determining behavior. This goal-directed process involves detecting discrepancies and selecting actions based on expected utility. Maladaptive behavior can reflect hidden goals or biases within this process, linked to discrepancies, values, expectancies, and salience. Identifying these biases improves understanding and supports targeted interventions.

The aim of my presentation is to argue that the notion of habit in human agency is best understood through the lens of theories of practical knowledge, insofar as the nature of habit depends on the role it plays in the agent’s practical reasoning.

To this end, I will first argue that it is not possible to determine the notion of habit in an objective manner, that is, independently of the agent’s representation. Habit is an inherently indeterminate concept if the criterion is the temporal persistence of certain behaviors or practices. For instance, it may be habitual to use shampoo in the morning, but it may also be habitual to pay taxes once a year over several years. However, in the latter case, we would not say that there is the same level of awareness as in the former. Thus, in this first step, I aim to argue that the notion of habit depends on the way in which the subject understands their own actions. This, of course, does not imply that from a third-person perspective one cannot attribute a given habit to an action or point out the subject’s mistake in thinking her habitual action; rather, in all such cases, the appeal is to a mode of description that is structurally that of the first person deliberation (see Anscombe, 2000, p. 84; Lavin, 2015, p. 622). This shifts the philosophical approach: rather than identifying which mental states are relevant to the explanation of habitual action, the focus turns to the normativity that emerges from the role this notion plays in the agent’s practical reasoning.

Building on this, I will then argue that the idea of habit in action always arises as an explanation of one’s own action; and, following Anton Ford, the explanation always arises on the basis of the absence of mutual consent with the third person —or with oneself when reflecting on one’s own past action— which seeks an explanation through the question “why?” (Ford, 2017, P. 229). That is, habit in action always emerges in the face of doubt about that which is to be explained. In this sense, my central thesis is that the fact that habit can play a role in the explanation of action stems precisely from the fact that the action it explains initially appears “rationally defective” and it is precisely the notion of habit that allows it to be incorporated into the space of reasons. However, this is not merely a move that affects the explained action; rather, following Thompson, I will attempt to show that the very fact that habit can function as an answer to the question “why?” structures it within practical reasoning as a rational element: “an intentional action is itself a certain sort of account or ground—an explanans, not an explanandum” (Thompson, 2008, P. 112).

Action slips are cases in which agents act against their own intentions through inattentiveness rather than motivational conflict. In action theory, they have been discussed primarily as counterexamples to the causal theory of action (CTA), since they are actions without the agent having a desire or intention to perform them. Little attention has been paid to whether Anscombe's account of intentional action fares better than CTA in accommodating action slips. I argue that it does. On an Anscombean view, slips are best understood as failures of practical knowledge. I distinguish two forms of failure: practical amnesia, in which the agent loses sight of the wider practical context of her action, and blatantly mistaken practical reasoning. This account explains how slips remain genuine intentional actions while also being mistakes by the agent's own lights.

There are broadly two traditions in which people think about habit. In one, mast-headed by Kant and Ryle, they are taken to be brute, untintelligent dispositions to rote activity. In another, they are taken to be more intimately connected to our lives as rational agents, such that habits figure in rationalising explanations of why we do things. The latter tradition is often associated with Aristotle, and with the the thought that virtues are kinds of habits. Since virtue is also often said to be a kind of knowledge, this makes some habits kinds of knowledge too. Is this right? I will argue that it is not: no habits are identical to any bits of knowledge, and this casts doubt on identifying any virtues with any habits. However, I will argue that there is a tight connection between habit and knowledge, since I will argue that habitual actions are motivated by the feeling of familiarity with a course of action, and familiarity is itself a form of knowledge by acquaintance. My overall aim is to contribute to defending the idea that habits are much more tightly connected to our lives as rational agents than is often thought.

Causal theories of action take individual intentional acts as paradigmatic. They struggle, therefore, to account for a familiar phenomenon: how institutional realities are sustained not despite but through agentic “doing” that is habitual. In this presentation, I propose that accounting for this phenomenon requires reconceiving agency by attending to two registers of habitual action. The first is a receptive-active register, which foregrounds how habits are actively “held”. The second is a collective register, which foregrounds agentic “doing” at interpersonal and institutional scales through what I call institutional habits.

Re-working Merleau-Ponty's account of the habitual body (1945), critical phenomenologists such as Sara Ahmed and Helen Ngo have richly articulated the receptive-active register. Drawing on this work, I consider how accumulation of embodied habits (including habits of perception) mediates the dynamic interplay between bodies and worlds. Ngo’s (2017) re-framing of sedimentation is central here: habits are not merely repeated, they are actively “held”. This reading of habit in a receptive-active register opens possibilities of assigning responsibility for uninterrogated and unchallenged embodied habits (p. 42). Ahmed (2021) puts it sharply: “not doing is an action, not simply inaction” (p. 81). Habitual non-perception – of inequality, of privilege, and of the part one plays in sustaining either – is a mode of agentic “doing”, not its absence.

I extend this re-framing to a collective register. Bringing phenomenological accounts of habit into conversation with new and feminist institutionalist theory, I introduce institutional habits as the collective effect of agentic “doing” through which institutional realities become and remain given (Author 2025). Through such collective habitual action – shaping and shaped by interpersonal relations – what becomes imaginable, doable, and legitimate is sedimented in the fabric of organizations. I also draw on empirical engagement with change agents – such as practitioners tasked with diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) work – who encounter institutional habits as vehicles of both continuity and the possibility of change. When DEI practitioners come up against institutional habits as barriers, they acquire a critical orientation (Ahmed 2012) that is itself a form of practical knowledge. Such practical knowledge can be used to push for change in slow, incremental, and endogenous ways by intervening in and shifting collective habitual action. I argue that attending to change agents’ encounters with institutional habits offers a privileged vantage point on the phenomenon introduced at the outset: how institutional realities are sustained through agentic “doing” and “not doing” alike.

Taken together, these moves challenge causal-voluntarist conceptualizations of agency on two fronts. First, attending to a receptive-active register of habitual action extends agency (and responsibility) beyond discrete intentional acts, to “held” habits including habitual non-perception and “not doing” as habitual action. Second, attending to a collective register foregrounds agentic “doing” at interpersonal and institutional scales, irreducible to the sum of individual intentional acts. I hope this re-framing can contribute to the workshop’s project of fostering constructive exchange between philosophical, interdisciplinary, and situated perspectives committed to the centrality of habitual action in understanding human agency.

In recent years, several scholars have aimed to understand habitual actions by means of Anscombe’s philosophy of action. Some argue that the answer to Anscombe’s “Why?” question (1963, sections 17-18) could perfectly well be ‘habit’ (Hutto & Roberston, 2020; Miyahara & Robertson, 2021), while others emphasize that actions do not require deliberation preceding the action to be done for reasons (Kalis & Ometto, 2019).

Both approaches lead to questions, however. Firstly, ‘out of habit’ does not seem to be the reason for or point of the action, which is what Anscombe’s “Why?” question is supposed to target. Secondly, if we adopt Kalis and Ometto’s (2019) approach, the question is how and whether habitual actions are still a distinct category. If deliberation preceding the action is irrelevant for characterizing actions (done for reasons), that suggests that there is nothing distinct about habitual actions anymore.

In my talk, recognizing that habits are not a clearly demarcated phenomenon (see Schoute & Myin, 2025), I propose an alternative way to think about habitual actions. In connection to Anscombe’s desirability characterization (1963, sections 37-38), I argue that one overlooked hallmark of habitual actions is that the agent’s conception of the good and pleasant is no longer part of the rational structure of the action, but that the agent takes the action to be desirable in itself. Think of habitually taking a shower at the same time every night (cf. Morelli, 2025): at some point you may have acted as such because of its goodness or pleasantness, but as soon it has become a habit, you no longer have or require practical knowledge of the further reason for taking a shower at night anymore. ‘Taking a shower at night’ has become good or pleasant in itself; the sequence of questions “Why?” terminates there. It has become the reason for doing other things, for example leaving a party earlier.

The interesting thing about this proposal is that rather than simply starting from some accepted characteristics of habit and reflecting on what this means for acting for reasons, the nature of habitual action itself explains why it has the characteristics it has. Habitual actions are rational because the action has Anscombe’s rational structure, but it can be irrational because the connection with the good and pleasant is no longer inherent to the action, making it so that we act as such even if it is out of line with the wider context, for example putting on your running shoes even though you have an injury (cf. Kalis & Ometto, 2019). Moreover, it explains why we no longer need to deliberate and can act automatically, and why habitual actions are taken to be a direct response to cues and the result of regularity. Finally, in line with Wittgenstein, it explains the function of ‘habit’ in our language games (Schoute & Myin, 2025, p. 43) and the connection of habit to normative training and practices (Morelli, 2025).

 According to the pragmatists, habit is a set of socially-shaped dispositions to particular forms of activity, or as Dewey puts it: modes of response to the environment (1922, pp. 14–15). This paper investigates where habit can be found in skilled action viewed from an enactive perspective. The key proposal is that skilled action consists in a complex of tasks together with a mechanism for task switching. Each task is a coupling between normed action and a coordinating variable in the environment. This variable is a Peircean index sign. Being a sign rather than a mere stimulus implies that the agent has some freedom in its interpretation. The proposal is that tasks, so conceived, possess many of the features traditionally attributed to habits. They are sedimented through repetition, they are socially constituted, they are highly contextual, and they are processual - they possess a kind of process identity that can be called upon by the agent when circumstances demand. Thus, the smooth actions of the expert sportsperson, musician or even the experienced motorist can be regarded as a set of habits strung together with the right kind of coordination.

The more detailed proposal is that the emergence of tasks (and therefore habits) involves 5 processes that run more or less concurrently: (1) the reduction of the degrees of freedom in the trajectory of the action (2) the coupling of this behavioural trajectory to a stigmergic sign in the environment that coordinates the action (3) the creation of significance of the sign for the agent over time - sense-making - the sign becomes salient and stands out from other environmental variables (4) the management of attention towards signs that are relevant to the action and (5) the acquisition of normativity - the action becomes a task - there are better or worse ways of performing it. There are of course features of skilled action that are not habitual and these largely concern the high-level control of task performance involving the switching between different tasks. I argue that such task-switching may itself be a task that is coupled to signs, but I do not rule out the possibility that distal intentions may play a role in priming the relevant signs for a related complex of tasks – whether or not these intentions are taken to be contentful representations. The paper tries out these ideas on some standard cases in the literature including conditions such as ADHD and utilisation behaviour. It ends with a comparison of this approach to that of ecological psychology. While the proposed framework is undoubtedly ecological it is probably closer to the psychology of Brunswik than that of Gibson. ‘It is ecological but not as we know it, Jim!’.

Habits play an important role not only in the practical navigation of everyday life but they also contribute to one’s personal identity. Recent philosophical and psychological work highlights the role of habits as objects of nostalgic remembering and thus as autobiographically relevant. Habits, however, comprise a variety of repeated actions. Some authors distinguish routines from habits and suggest that only the former appear meaningful in retrospect, while the latter are mainly context-dependent automatic responses. This is arguably a stark opposition that glosses over the flexibility of habits. One does not need to subscribe to this opposition, however, to recognize routines as a subtype of habits. But what could give routines autobiographical relevance in hindsight?

One thesis is that routines appear meaningful in retrospect because their repeated performance provides structure to people’s everyday lives. The repeated segmentation of events in one’s life may support memory consolidation by condensing longer stretches of time into a prototypical episode that can be easily retrieved in nostalgic remembering. However, also ‘quasi-automatic’ and context-dependent habits can fulfill this structuring function.

I therefore suggest focusing on the specific way in which routines structure people’s lives. My main claim is that routines serve framing function that links them more closely to a sense of control than other forms of habits.

Framing and framing effects are well-known concepts in sociology and psychology, where they are understood as schemas that bias interpretations, social interactions, and decision-making. Similarly, routines are action schemas and offload behavioral decisions to protocols. Yet, routines are frames that are set or perceived as having been set by others (e.g., in organizations). In other words: When people establish, maintain, or change routines, they are actively framing their lives. Such framing simultaneously means that people exercise control over the structure of their own, social, or collective lives. Unlike other forms of habits, routines thus define the context in which habits are performed. In contrast to rituals or customs, routines are more malleable as they depend on whether they maintain individuals’ sense of control. This function of routines, setting frames of control, I suggest, is what makes them memorable, especially in situations, in which one might not feel unsettled or uncertain, such as in situations that often evoke feelings of nostalgia.

I argue for this function of routines by first disambiguating the different uses of ‘routine’ in philosophy of action and social philosophy. I will then address key aspects of routines: their intentionality, changeability, effortfulness, and repetitiveness. Even though not all of these aspects appear compatible at first glance, I argue that they are if we view routines as frames of control. To this end, I introduce the notion of ‘frames’ and argue that routines, as frames, imply a sense of control. Finally, I discuss how this can explain the tendency to recall routines rather than other forms of habits in nostalgia.

My question: what is the place of the habitual in an account of creative agency? Answering this question requires triangulation not just between habit and creativity, but also triangulation amongst a number of interesting notions, including intentional action, control, reason-responsiveness, automaticity, expertise, and spontaneity. Without offering a full account of the place of the habitual in creative agency in one talk, I will articulate a perspective on these notions and discuss interesting relationships between habit, association, automaticity, skill, and creativity.

This paper advances a non-reductive account of how habits shape agency and why they can ground responsibility ascriptions in their own right. The central claim is twofold. First, habits shape agency through their distinct responsiveness to reasons. They are not reducible to embedded intentions or policies but can guide actions ecologically, that is, by giving them a sense of fittingness – beyond mere familiarity – with both shared practices and personal stories. Second, habitual actions not only respond to reasons that are already present in such practices and stories but also help constitute them as local spaces of reasons.

The argument proceeds in three steps. First, it demonstrates why causal theories of action cannot account for the distinct normative force of habits: they treat them as mere reasons “why” that can explain only such conduct as slips or inadvertent omissions but not actions done for a reason. Second, it develops the idea of a constitutive asymmetry between fitting and unfitting yet functional habits in response to scaffolds within agents’ material and social environments, scaffolds that may become obsolete or result from hostile design. Third, it challenges the categorical distinction between routine habits developed through mere repetition and intelligent habits such as skills and know-how. The challenge is developed through analysing the relationship between certain uses of generative AI, entrenched habits of busyness, and the treatment of time saving as a self-evident reason for action.

The upshot is that a familiar difficulty – how groups and individuals can be responsible for patterns of conduct that do not figure in their self-understanding as practically reasoning agents – arises from equating responsiveness to reasons with intention. This difficulty can be addressed by recognising the distinct, ecological responsiveness to reasons of habits as active processes of habituation. Responsibility here attaches to agents in virtue of their situated participation in these processes, making it imperative to consider collective and individual dimensions of responsibility in tandem.