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Virtue and Embodied Skill: Refining the Virtue-Skill Analogy

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Notes

  1. See Annas, Julia. Intelligent Virtue. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 20.

  2. Ibid, p. 18 note 3.

  3. See, e.g., Lumiere Children’s Therapy, “Occupational Therapy: Shoe Laces.” <https://www.lumierechild.com/lumiere-childrens-therapy/2018/01/22/occupational-therapy-shoe-laces>.

  4. See ibid, p. 16.

  5. Ibid, p. 27.

  6. Ibid, p. 18.

  7. See ibid, p. 174.

  8. Ibid, p. 175.

  9. See ibid, p. 19.

  10. See Fitts, Paul Morris, and Michael I. Posner. Human Performance. Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing, 1967, and Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Stuart E. Dreyfus. Mind over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer. New York: Free Press, 1986.

  11. See Montero, Barbara. Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 15 and 33.

  12. See Dreyfus, Hubert L. "The Return of the Myth of the Mental." Inquiry 50, no. 4 (2007), p. 355.

  13. Fridland, Ellen. "Skill and Motor Control: Intelligence All the Way Down." Philosophical Studies 174 (2017), p. 1540.

  14. Montero, op. cit., p. 38.

  15. Christensen, Wayne, John Sutton, and Doris McIlwain. "Cognition in Skilled Action: Meshed Control and the Varieties of Skill Experience." Mind and Language 31, no. 1 (2016), p. 43 and 44.

  16. See Sutton, John. "Batting, Habit, and Memory: The Embodied Mind and the Nature of Skill." Sport in Society 10, no. 5 (2007), p. 76 n. 5, and Poulton, E.C. "On Prediction in Skilled Movements." Psychological Bulletin 54, no. 6 (1957), pp. 467-78.

  17. Poulton, op. cit., p. 472.

  18. See Sutton, John, Doris McIlwain, Wayne Christensen, and Andrew Geeves. "Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes: Embodied Skills and Habits between Dreyfus and Descartes." Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42, no. 1 (2011), p. 80.

  19. Sutton, op. cit., p. 770.

  20. Sutton et. al, op. cit., p. 79.

  21. Sutton, op. cit., p. 776.

  22. Ibid, p. 775 and 779.

  23. Ibid, p. 775.

  24. See Christensen, Wayne, Kath Bicknell, Doris McIlwain, and John Sutton. "The Sense of Agency and Its Role in Strategic Control for Expert Mountain Bikers." Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 2, no. 3 (2015), pp. 340-53.

  25. See Christensen, Wayne, John Sutton, and Doris McIlwain. "Cognition in Skilled Action: Meshed Control and the Varieties of Skill Experience." Mind and Language 31, no. 1 (2016), pp. 37-66.

  26. See, e.g., Flanagan, Owen J. Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, Doris, John M. "Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics." Nous 32, no. 4 (1998), pp. 504-30, Doris, John M. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, Harman, Gilbert. "The Nonexistence of Character Traits." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000), pp. 223-26, Harman, Gilbert. "Skepticism About Character Traits." Journal of Ethics 13, no. 2-3 (2009), pp. 235-42.

  27. See Annas, Julia. "Comments on John Doris' 'Lack of Character'." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71, no. 3 (2005), pp. 636-42, Russell, Daniel C. Practical Intelligence and the Virtues. New York: Clarendon Press, 2009, Snow, Nancy E. Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory. New York: Routledge, 2010.

  28. Swanton, Christine. "A Virtue Ethical Account of Right Action." Ethics 112, no. 1 (2001), pp. 38-39.

  29. See Swanton, Christine. Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 20.

  30. Russell, op.cit., p. 171, see also p. 131.

  31. Swanton 2003, op. cit., p. 288.

  32. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), 1115b17.

  33. See Annas 2011, op. cit., pp.16-20.

  34. See ibid, p. 17.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Ibid, p. 18.

  37. Ibid.

  38. See Christensen et. al. 2015, op. cit.

  39. See Aristotle, op. cit., 1180a1-3.

  40. Russell, op. cit., p. 229.

  41. See Christensen et. al. 2016, op. cit., p. 52.

  42. See Ericsson, K. Anders. "Deliberate Practice and Acquisition of Expert Performance: A General Overview." Academic Emergency Medicine 15 (2008), pp. 988-94, discussed by Montero, op. cit., p. 84.

  43. Sutton, op. cit., p. 773.

  44. Sutton and McIlwain, op. cit., p. 97.

  45. Sutton, op. cit., p. 779.

  46. See Annas 2011, op. cit., p. 19.

  47. Ibid, p. 29.

  48. See ibid, p. 29 note 16.

  49. See Montero, op. cit., p. 48.

  50. See Sutton and McIlwain, op. cit., p. 103.

  51. See Sutton, op. cit., pp. 773-774.

  52. Ibid, p. 774.

  53. See ibid., pp. 773-774.

  54. See, e.g., Paumgarten, Nick. "Confidence Game." The New Yorker 93, no. 38 (November 27, 2017), pp. 36-45.

  55. See Sutton, op. cit., p. 766.

  56. See Aristotle, op. cit., 1094b28-1095a10, 1095b5-6, 1179b25, and McDowell, John. "Virtue and Reason." In Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 50-73; see also Burnyeat, M.F. "Aristotle on Learning to Be Good." In Aristotle's Ethics: Critical Essays, edited by Nancy Sherman. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, pp. 218-219, Hursthouse, Rosalind. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 163-166, Vasiliou, Iakovos. "The Role of Good Upbringing in Aristotle's Ethics." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56, no. 4 (1996), pp. 771-97, and Vasiliou, Iakovos. "Virtue and Argument in Aristotle's Ethics." In Moral Psychology (Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and Humanities, Vol. 94), edited by Sergio Tenenbaum. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2007, pp. 37-78.

  57. See Aristotle, op. cit., 1080a30-33.

  58. Moss, Jessica. "'Virtue Makes the Goal Right': Virtue and Phronesis in Aristotle's Ethics." Phronesis 56, no. 3 (2011), p. 234.

  59. See Annas 2011, op. cit., p. 3 n. 1.

  60. See Fridland, Ellen. "They've Lost Control: Reflections on Skill." Synthese 91, no. 12 (2014), pp. 2729-50, and Stanley, Jason, and John W. Krakauer. "Motor Skill Depends on Knowledge of Facts." Frontiers of Human Neuroscience 7 (2013), article 503.

  61. See Shmuelof, L., John W. Krakauer, and P Mazzoni. "How Is a Motor Skill Learned? Change and Invariance at the Levels of Task Success and Trajectory Control." Journal of Neurophysiology 108, no. 2 (2012), pp. 578-94, cited by Fridland 2017, op. cit., p. 1542 n. 10.

  62. See Yarrow, Kielan, Peter Brown, and John W. Krakauer. "Inside the Brain of an Elite Athlete: The Neural Processes That Support High Achievement in Sports." Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10 (2009), pp. 585-96.

  63. See Sutton and McIlwain, op. cit., pp. 101-102.

  64. See Sutton, op. cit., p. 770.

  65. Ibid, citing Land, Michael F., and Peter McLeod. "From Eye Movements to Actions: How Batsmen Hit the Ball." Nature Neuroscience 3, no. 12 (2000), pp. 1340-45.

  66. See MacMahon, C., and S. L. McPherson. "Knowledge Base as a Mechanism for Perceptual-Cognitive Tasks: Skill Is in the Details!" International Journal of Sport Psychology 40 (2009), pp. 565-79, and Roca, A., P. R. Ford, A. P. McRobert, and A. M. Williams. "Perceptual-Cognitive Skills and Their Interaction as a Function of Task Constraints in Soccer." Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology 35 (2013), pp. 144-55.

  67. Sutton and McIlwain, op. cit., p. 97.

  68. Shapiro, Lawrence, and Shannon Spaulding. "Embodied Cognition and Sport." In Handbook of Embodied Cognition and Sport Psychology, edited by Massimiliano Cappuccio. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019, p. 16.

  69. See Sutton and McIlwain, op. cit., p. 101.

  70. See French, K. E., and S. L. McPherson. "Development of Expertise in Sport." In Developmental Sport and Exercise Psychology: A Lifespan Perspective, edited by M. R. Weiss, Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology, 2004, pp. 403-23.

  71. See, e.g., Blackburn, Simon. Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, and Baxley, Anne Margaret. "The Price of Virtue." Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 88 (2007), pp. 403-423.

  72. See, e.g., McDowell, op. cit., pp. 55-56, 69.

  73. See Vigani, Denise. "Virtuous Construal: In Defense of Silencing." Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5, no. 2 (2019), pp. 229-245.

  74. See Mischel, Walter. "Toward a Cognitive Social Learning Reconceptualization of Personality." Psychological Review 80, no. 4 (1973), pp. 267-268.

  75. Annas, 2011, op. cit., p. 175.

  76. See, e.g., McDowell, John. “Deliberation and Moral Development in Aristotle’s Ethics.” In The Engaged Intellect, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 41-58.

  77. See Aristotle, op. cit., 1105a30-34.

  78. See Aristotle, op. cit., 1117a18-24.

  79. See Broadie, Sarah. “Philosophical Introduction.” In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, edited by Sarah Broadie and Christopher Rowe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 87, note 234.

  80. See Finnigan, Bronwyn. "Phronesis in Aristotle: Reconciling Deliberation with Spontaneity." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research XCI, no. 3 (2015), pp. 674-697.

  81. Russell, op. cit., p. 82.

  82. McDowell, 2009, op. cit., p. 49.

  83. See Finnigan, op. cit., p. 685. See also Aristotle, op. cit., p. 322.

  84. McDowell, 2009, op. cit., p. 49.

  85. Aristotle, op. cit., 1111b10.

  86. McDowell, 2009, op. cit., p. 49, note 11.

  87. See, e.g., Sutton, op. cit., p. 764.

  88. See The Aspen Institute. "Project Play: Encourages Sport Sampling." <http://youthreport.projectplay.us/the-8-plays/encourage-sport-sampling>.

  89. See Spilbeler, Brian. "30 of 32 Nfl Draft 1st Round Picks Were Multiple Sport Athletes in High School." <https://www.trackingfootball.com/blog/30-32-nfl-draft-1st-round-picks-multiple-sport-athletes-high-school/>.

  90. Ginsburg, Richard D., Nicole Danforth, T. Atilla Ceranoglu, Stephen A. Durant, Lucy Robin, Steven R. Smith, Hayley Kamin, Rebecca Babcock, and Bruce Masek. "Patterns of Specialization in Professional Baseball Players." Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology 8, no. 3 (2014), p. 261.

  91. See American Medical Society for Sports Medicine. "Effectiveness of Early Sport Specialization Limited in Most Sports, Sport Diversification May Be Better Approach at Young Ages." <https://www.amssm.org/News-Release-Article.php?NewsID=69>.

  92. See Ski Racing Magazine. "A Fine Balance: Juggling Fall Sports with Ski Training." <https://www.skiracing.com/stories/fine-balance-juggling-fall-sports-ski-training>.

  93. See Swanton 2003, op. cit., p. 21.

  94. See Aristotle, op. cit, II 7.

  95. Thanks to Joan Heaton and Jim Vigani for introducing me to the distinction between open and closed skills. Thanks to Iakovos Vasiliou, John Sutton, Robert Mayhew, Katherine Tullmann, and the audience at the Virtue, Skill, and Practical Reasoning conference, especially Rachel Barney, Jennifer Rothschild, Bill Hasselberger, and Will Small, as well as an anonymous reviewer for feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

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Vigani, D. Virtue and Embodied Skill: Refining the Virtue-Skill Analogy. J Value Inquiry 55, 251–268 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09814-0

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