Pierre Bourdieu's conception of habitus marks a theoretical step which no adequate understanding of social reality can ignore. By introducing habitus, Bourdieu is able both to integrate and to transcend major insights of the linguistic turn in philosophy, most prominently the idea that conscious intentional understanding necessarily relies on a host of implicit, practical, and holistic background assumptions which constitute meaning while being themselves unrepresented (Searle, 1989). The concept of habitus incorporates this idea since it shows that individual agency and its self-understanding are constituted by relying on an acquired social sense, the cognitive habitus, which defines how an agent understands, acts, and perceives itself and its environment. At the same time, it transcends the philosophical thematisation of a constitutive yet implicit background because it makes this hidden continent of pre-understanding susceptible to empirical-analytic social science.

This major step is hailed in traditional social theory as well as by Bourdieu himself as the mediation of agency and structure. It consists in reconstructing how specific social environments (that is, the structural conditions of agency) relate to and shape the internal sense of intentional agency (that is, the individual first-person dimension of agency) (Bourdieu, 1977 [1972]; 1990 [1980]). Habitus connects the two via a realm of pre-structured, schematised modes of understanding that define the specific cognitive accomplishments that any particular agent is capable of performing.