habit

A habit is a tendency to act, think, or interpret in a particular way under particular circumstances. In Peirce’s philosophy, habit is not merely psychological but cosmological: it is the general form of regularity, the way the universe acquires its laws and the way signs acquire their meanings.

Peirce identified the ultimate logical interpretant — the final product of semiosis — as a habit-change: “the deliberately formed, self-analyzing habit — self-analyzing because formed by the aid of analysis of the exercises that nourished it — is the living definition, the veritable and final logical interpretant” (CP 5.491). An emotional interpretant is a feeling; an energetic interpretant is an action; a logical interpretant is a habit or a modification of a habit.

Habit-change is therefore the mechanism by which semiosis stabilizes. The open-ended chain of sign producing interpretant producing sign does not run forever in practice — it settles into habits of interpretation. These habits are not fixed: they are themselves subject to modification by further semiosis. Peirce’s “law of habit” extends this beyond psychology to nature itself: all regularities are habits, and habits change by the habit of habit-change.

Habit belongs to Thirdness in Peirce’s categories — it is a general rule or tendency, not a particular feeling (Firstness) or brute reaction (Secondness).

Formal correspondence

In the semiotic universe construction, the modal closure operator $j$ formalizes habit-formation. An element $a$ of the meaning domain $H$ where $j(a) = a$ is a meaning that has become habitual — its interpretation no longer changes under further examination. The gap $j(a) > a$ marks meanings still undergoing semiosis, not yet settled into habit.

Related terms

• interpretant — the product of semiosis; habit is the ultimate logical interpretant
• semiosis — the process that habit stabilizes
• Peirce’s categories — habit as Thirdness
• abduction — the mode of inference that generates new hypotheses before habit stabilizes them

Source: Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. Harvard University Press, 1931-1958. See especially CP 5.476-5.491. See also Nöth, Winfried. “Habits, Habit Change, and the Habit of Habit Change According to Peirce.” In Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit, edited by West and Anderson. Springer, 2016.