Stina Bäckström (Stockholm/Leipzig): Is habit knowledge?

In this talk I will consider what might seem like an ill-formed question: Is habit knowledge? Habit, it might seem, is just a mindless tendency created by repetition. If we are lucky, the pattern serves us well. But if we are unlucky, the habit is bad and does us disservice. The question might get some traction, however, if we consider the idea – reaching back to Aristotle – that the virtues are formed by habituation. If the virtues are habits, then perhaps the thought isn't so far fetched that at least some habits are knowledge – namely the good ones, the ones that serve us well, or enable us to live well. Assuming, that is, that virtue is a kind of (practical) knowledge. But how can it be that some habits are knowledge and some are not? 

What I will argue for in this talk is that our thinking about habit should start from a simple affirmative answer to the question "Is habit knowledge?". This is the right way of making sense of the thought that virtue is habit. Habituation allows us to inhabit a world, make it our own and make ourselves at home in it, and as such it allows us to inhabit a conception of what it means to live well. The bad habits tend to be more present to us, they show up in our experience and they force us to think. Nevertheless, they cannot form the basis of our thoughts about habit. When we take habit as knowledge as our starting point, it will, to the contrary, emerge that the bad habits are not simply defective with respect to some standard external to their status as habits, they are defective considered as habits. 

Stina Bäckström is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for studies in practical knowledge, Södertörn University College, Stockholm. 2024-2026 she is a Humboldt Fellow at the Institut für Philosophie, Universität Leipzig.