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The Intelligence of Virtue and Skill

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Notes

  1. See Michael Thompson, Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 158–9.

  2. The characterization of the manifestation of a disposition as a “jack-in-the-box” response comes from Saul Kripke’s important arguments against “dispositionalist” accounts of rule-following. See Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 22–37. Important connections between virtue and rule-following are drawn by John McDowell. See “Virtue and Reason,” The Monist 62 (1979): 331–350, cited as reprinted in John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 50–73.

  3. Christine Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. Korsgaard’s worry about the Good Dog conception of the virtuous agent is somewhat different from mine.

  4. McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” 51.

  5. Ibid., 50.

  6. See Gilbert Ryle, “Knowing How and Knowing That,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 46 (1946), cited as reprinted in Ryle, Collected Essays 1929-1968: Collected Papers Volume 2 (London: Routledge, 2009), 234; Ryle, “Teaching and Training,” in The Concept of Education, ed. R. S. Peters (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), cited as reprinted in Ryle, Collected Essays 1929-1968: Collected Papers Volume 2, 468; and G. H. von Wright, The Varieties of Goodness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), §VII.4.

  7. Questions concerning what kind of disposition a virtue is have arisen recently in the debate concerning the situationist challenge to virtue ethics. See e.g. Rachana Kamtekar, “Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character,” Ethics 114 (2004): 458–91.

  8. Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  9. Ibid., 169.

  10. Ibid., 8–9.

  11. Ibid., 8.

  12. Ibid., 12–13.

  13. Ibid., 14.

  14. Ibid., 15.

  15. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Routledge, 1949), where ch.2 argues that action is not made intelligent in virtue of being caused a piece of propositional knowledge (or its contemplation), ch.3 that action is not rendered intentional or voluntary in virtue of being caused by a volition, and ch.4 that action does not count as done for a reason or from a motive in virtue of being caused by a particular feeling or impulse.

  16. Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 54.

  17. Ibid., 42. For further discussion of Ryle, see Will Small, “Ryle on the Explanatory Role of Knowledge How,” Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 5, (2017): 57–76.

  18. Annas, Intelligent Virtue, 13.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 30–31, 129; Annas, Intelligent Virtue, 13–14.

  21. Annas, Intelligent Virtue, 14.

  22. See Annas, Intelligent Virtue, 13. While Annas says there that, though “[her] driving has become routine…this does not make it mindless: I am still at some level aware of where I am going, since I stop at red lights [etc.],” she goes on to say that “[t]he expert pianist plays in a way not dependent on conscious input, but the result is not mindless routine”—making it seem as if mere routine or habit is, as such, mindless. See Ryle, The Concept of Mind: “someone…doing something by pure or blind habit…does not exercise care, vigilance, or criticism,” whereas someone exercising a skill “thinks what he is doing” (30). This “thinking what he is doing” that characterizes the exercise of skill is not an act distinct from that to which the agent is paying heed: “what is being described is one operation with a special character and not two operations” (120).

  23. Annas also emphasizes some key non-intellectual differences between skill (and virtue) and habit, such as the characteristic enjoyment that an agent takes in skilled (and virtuous) activity, and the “flow experience” that occurs therein. See Annas, Intelligent Virtue, 70–73; Annas, “Practical Expertise,” in Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, ed. John Bengson and Marc A. Moffett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 106–108.

  24. Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 30–31.

  25. See Andrea Kern, Sources of Knowledge: On the Concept of a Rational Capacity for Knowledge, trans. Daniel Smyth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 145, and compare Stina Bäckström and Martin Gustafsson, “Skill, Drill, and Intelligent Performance: Ryle and Intellectualism,” Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 5, (2017); see also Ryle’s later discussion in his “Teaching and Training”.

  26. Annas, Intelligent Virtue, 20.

  27. For further discussion of the centrality of learning skills from teachers, see Will Small, “The Transmission of Skill,” Philosophical Topics 42, (2014): 85–111, and Kern, Sources of Knowledge, ch.10.

  28. Annas, “Practical Expertise,” 105. As long as a mere habit works, its bearer needn’t know (or care about knowing) how and why it works, or be interested in improving on it; and it doesn’t matter if she is happy to simply stick with doing the thing in question in the way she was shown. But not caring about such things—lacking the “drive to aspire”—would constitute defects in the bearer of a skill, on Annas’s view. See Terence Irwin, “Annas, Julia. Intelligent Virtue,” Ethics 123, (2013): 551, for dissent, however.

  29. Annas, Intelligent Virtue, 19.

  30. See Annas, “Practical Expertise,” 109.

  31. Ibid., 104.

  32. See e.g. Jason Stanley, Know How (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Jason Stanley and John W. Krakauer, “Motor Skill Depends on Knowledge of Facts,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (2013); Natalia Waights Hickman, “Knowing in the ‘Executive Way’: Knowing How, Rules, Methods, Principles and Criteria,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, (2018).

  33. See Small, “Ryle on the Explanatory Role of Knowledge How”; see also Michael Kremer, “Ryle’s ‘Intellectualist Legend’ in Historical Context,” Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 5, (2017).

  34. Annas, Intelligent Virtue, 28.

  35. Hubert Dreyfus, “The Return of the Myth of the Mental,” Inquiry 50, (2007): 353; ibid., 356; Dreyfus, “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 79, (2005): 61.

  36. Though for doubts about the Annas–Ryle conception of habit and routine, see §6 below and Will Small, “Practical Knowledge and Habits of Mind,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 54, (2020): 377–97.

  37. Annas, “Practical Expertise,” 110; see also Intelligent Virtue, 28.

  38. Annas, “Practical Expertise,” 110.

  39. Ibid., 111.

  40. Annas, Intelligent Virtue, 25.

  41. Ibid., 159–60, my emphasis.

  42. See ibid., 29–30; “Practical Expertise,” 110.

  43. See Eric Marcus, Rational Causation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 51–8; Thompson, Life and Action, Part I.

  44. See Kern, Sources of Knowledge, 163–76.

  45. See Martin Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), §§14b–15.

  46. See Kern, Sources of Knowledge, 176–81, and compare Ryle on the exercise of skill involving “thinking what one is doing” (see n.22 above). See also G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention (second edition, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963) on “the knowledge that a man has of his intentional actions,” §28.

  47. See Plato, Hippias Minor.

  48. See Tom Angier, Technê in Aristotle’s Ethics: Crafting the Moral Life (London: Continuum, 2010), ch.2.

  49. Philippa Foot, “Virtues and Vices,” in Virtues and Vices: And Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 8.

  50. Annas, Intelligent Virtue, 2.

  51. Annas—inspired by the Stoics—thinks that “performance and sporting skills” are better models for thinking about virtue than “productive skills,” ibid., 74.

  52. For the claim that skills are local, see ibid., 113. For the claim that virtue is a global skill, see Annas, “Virtue Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory, ed. David Copp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 518 and Annas, “Moral Knowledge as Practical Knowledge,” Social Philosophy and Policy 18, (2001), 246.

  53. Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind, 84.

  54. Thompson, Life and Action, 164.

  55. See Aristotle’s discussion of the hierarchy of technai in Nicomachean Ethics I.1.

  56. This is a difficult idea.

  57. Annas, Intelligent Virtue, 14.

  58. Annas, “Practical Expertise,” 104.

  59. On the contrast between “knowing how to φ” and “knowing to φ”, see David Wiggins, “Practical Knowledge: Knowing How to and Knowing That,” Mind 121 (2012): 110–13.

  60. For further discussion, see Small, “Practical Knowledge and Habits of Mind.”

  61. See Annas, Intelligent Virtue, 22: “We learn to be brave and loyal, then, in embedded contexts. What happens when we do? As with skill, we learn from a teacher or role model who shows us how to do something which we then try to copy for ourselves” (my emphases).

  62. Versions of this paper were presented at the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Universität Leipzig, the University of Chicago, and a Conference on Virtue, Skill, and Practical Reason at the University of Cape Town. Thanks to the participants for very helpful feedback.

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Small, W. The Intelligence of Virtue and Skill. J Value Inquiry 55, 229–249 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09813-1

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