Abstract
In this paper, I submit that it is the controlled part of skilled action, that is, that part of an action that accounts for the exact, nuanced ways in which a skilled performer modifies, adjusts and guides her performance for which an adequate, philosophical theory of skill must account. I will argue that neither Jason Stanley nor Hubert Dreyfus have an adequate account of control. Further, and perhaps surprisingly, I will argue that both Stanley and Dreyfus relinquish an account of control for precisely the same reason: each reduce control to a passive, mechanistic, automatic process, which then prevents them from producing a substantive account of how controlled processes can be characterized by seemingly intelligent features and integrated with personal-level states. I will end by introducing three different kinds of control, which are constitutive of skilled action: strategic control, selective, top–down, automatic attention, and motor control. It will become clear that Dreyfus cannot account for any of these three kinds of control while Stanley has difficulty tackling the two latter kinds.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Though seemingly beyond question, Dreyfus (2002) disagrees that skill is a species of intentional action.
See Kirsh (2013) for more on how incomplete or simplified actions like marking in dance serve to promote skill.
Stanley (2011b) has argued that knowledge how can be verbalized as a demonstrative. The boxer can utter, for instance, “This is the way I fight against a southpaw” (p. 161).
I should note that I am not begging any questions by construing the problem in this way. I am not committed to a propositional reading of “knowledge” and Dreyfus would agree that, e.g., an elite tennis player “knows how” to play tennis. Also, I am not claiming that the detail or nuance in the performance must be mirrored in or represented by the intention. Further, the Intellectualist explicitly endorses the difference between the knowledge required to explain or articulate how one performs one’s skills and the knowledge required to perform those skills (Stanley and Williamson 2001; Stanley 2011a, b; Stanley and Krakauer Stanley and Krakauer 2013).
It may seem that because gymnasts are not responding to other players or highly variable environmental circumstances then the control that I am highlighting here isn’t generalizable. However, I think this would be a shortsighted understanding of both gymnastics and various other sports. That is, though gymnast’s environments do not involve various opponents and teammates this does not entail that the gymnast’s environment is fixed or simple. The variations in the surface texture from one part of the beam to another, or the wiggle that the gymnast needs to overcome in different instantiations of her skill may seem small but they are nevertheless crucial variables for the gymnast. The gymnast is not just controlling her actions, she is responding to variables that she cannot control as well. Likewise, though in “open” sports like tennis, hockey or boxing, there is quite a bit of variability on behalf of the environment, one’s opponents and teammates, it would be an oversight not to notice the hours and hours of practice that athletes put into trying to hone and refine their technique in the absence of those variables. For these reasons, the control involved in gymnastics is not unique or specific to this sport.
Of course, there are a multitude of factors that can impact any performance at any one time. As such, this should be read as a ceteris paribus claim.
See Wallace (2006) “Federer as Religious Experience” for an unbeatable account of the awe that we sometimes experience when observing skills performed at the heights of expertise.
As Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986), write “competent performance is rational; proficient is transitional; experts act arationally.” (p. 36, emphasis in original).
See Rey (2002) for more on the methodological problems of this argument.
Please note that I am not conceding that phenomenology entails that experts are not following rules (unless, of course, rules are defined as conscious, propositional states—but such a move is a poorly-motivated, semantic, sleight of hand). In fact, the only thing that phenomenology entails is that it does not seem to us that we are following rules when we perform skills expertly.
Of course, Dreyfus would not admit that his account has this implication and would insist that he is characterizing skill on the non-representational but still intentional level. As such, this claim serves as a point of contention, which constitutes an objection to Dreyfus’s understanding of his own theory.
See also, Dreyfus (2002) where he writes that there are “at least two kinds of passive experience, one of which could in spite of its passivity be attributed to me as an agent...I am letting myself be moved by the gestalt tensions I experience on the court” (p. 380, emphasis in original).
Frankfurt (1978) has made a similar but much more reasonable claim: That we don’t always need to interfere in order to exert control. But, for Frankfurt, guiding is straightforwardly about intervening, modifying, and adjusting one’s actions when necessary. His point is only that that such active modification is not always necessary (as in the example of the car going down hill—to be in control the driver doesn’t have to constantly steer. Surely, however, there are many points at which the driver does, in fact, turn the wheel!).
See Christensen et al. (draft) for more on the role of goals, plans and strategies in skill.
See Sutton et al. (2011) for a similar objection to Dreyfus’s account.
For example, Ryle (1949) writes, “Certainly we often do not only reflect before we act but reflect in order to act properly. The chess player may require some time in order to plan his moves before he makes them” (p. 29).
S&K write that “motor skills have an acuity component that is directly analogous to perceptual acuity” (p. 16).
As S&K write, “Shmuelof et al. have recently coined the term “motor acuity” to describe the practice related reductions in movement variability and increases in movement smoothness.... Such adaptations are not the acquisition of something that is characteristically manifest in intentional action, i.e., they are not the acquisition of skills” (p. 15).
Following S&K, I am using “ability” and “acuity” interchangeably.
See a similar claim for motor acuity, where S&K cite evidence that adaptation of motor ability occurs contrary to the agent’s intentions (Mazzoni and Krakauer 2006) as being relevant for disqualifying such learning as knowledge (p. 15).
To note, this idea accords nicely with Fridland’s claim that skills are a special class of abilities. On my account, what differentiates ability from skill is not that latter develops or improves with experience while the former does not, but, rather, that skills develop and improve in a particular way. According to my, skills are “the sub-class of abilities, which are characterized by the fact that they are refined or developed as a result of effortful attention and control. As such, only if a subject develops an ability with explicit attention to that ability itself” should that subject qualify as possessing a skill (Fridland 2013a, p. 12)
Though it is not my main agenda in this paper to argue that propositional contents cannot account for motor control, in the cases mentioned here, we should notice that practicing agents know the proposition governing their actions. For instance, the practicing yogi knows that her knee should be at 90\(^{\circ }\). She can even put herself into the appropriate position at certain times (so, she can represent the proposition under a practical mode of presentation). The practice, however, is to refine this knowledge in order to make it more precise and more exact when instantiated. It seems to me that this is what improving one’s control requires and it isn’t at all obvious how knowing a (fairly general) proposition is going to account for the fine-grained improvements, developments and changes that result from attentive, effortful, intentional practice.
As a side note, I’ve always taken Ryle to be making a rather Wittgenstein (1953) point here—where there is no room for something to be false it makes no sense to say that it can be true. After all, Ryle says nothing about making these mistakes voluntarily, deliberately, or on purpose. For the purposes of the argument, however, nothing much hangs on the accurate historical interpretation of this quote. The S&K point is well taken regardless of whether Ryle was making a similar point or not.
In fact, this is exactly what Iyengar yoga teachers do.
In line with S&K’s account, “part of having the skill is having the knowledge of what to do to initiate the actions manifest in skill” (p. 8).
See Christensen et al. (in progress) for more on cognitive control.
Dreyfus (2007), now infamous, example of Chuck Knoblauch has highlighted this phenomenon, where thinking about what one is doing undermines the success of the action that one is performing.
See Papineau (2013) for more on the guiding intentions, which are involved in skillful action.
Also, see Christensen et al. (in progress) for more on this aspect of strategic control.
As Montero (2013) writes in a recent New York Times piece, “And improving, especially after you have acquired a high level of skill, typically requires an enormous amount of effort. Sometimes this effort is physical—and it certainly involves more physical effort than philosophy—yet it also involves concentration, thought, deliberation and will power.”
References
Adams, M. (2009). Empirical evidence and the knowledge-that/knowledge-how distinction. Synthese, 170, 97–114.
Berry, D., & Broadbent, D. (1984). On the relationship between task performance and associated verbalizable knowledge. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 36(A), 209–231.
Brewer, B. (1999). Perception and reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brehmer, B., Hagafors, R., & Johansson, R. (1980). Cognitive skills in judgment: Subjects’ ability to use information about weights, function forms, and organizing principles. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 26, 373–385.
Brown, J. (2013). Knowing-how: Linguistics and cognitive science. Analysis, 73(2), 220–227.
Chen, P. W. (1985). Restructuring versus automaticity: Alternate accounts of skill acquisition. Psychological Review, 92, 414–423.
Christensen, W., Sutton, J., & McIlwain, D. (in progress). Cognitive control in skilled action.
Devitt, M. (2011). Methodology and the nature of knowing how. Journal of Philosophy, 108, 205–218.
Dreyfus, H., & Dreyfus, S. (1986). Mind over machine. New York: The Free Press.
Dreyfus, H. (2002). Intelligence without representation: Merleau Ponty’s critique of representation. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1, 367–383.
Dreyfus, H. (2007). The return of the myth of the mental. Inquiry, 50(4), 352–365.
Ericsson, K. A., & Charness, N. (1994). Expert performance: Its structure and acquisition. American Psychologist, 49, 725–774.
Frankfurt, H. (1978). The problem of action. American Philosophical Quarterly, 15(2), 157–162.
Fridland, E. (2010). Perception and Skill: Theoretical Foundations for a Science of Perception. Dissertation, CUNY Graduate Center.
Fridland, E. (2012). Knowing how: Problems and considerations. European Journal of Philosophy. doi:10.1111/ejop.12000.
Fridland, E. (2013a). Skill learning and conceptual thought: Making our way through the wilderness. In B. Bashour & H. Muller (Eds.), Contemporary philosophical naturalism and its implications. London: Routledge.
Fridland, E. (2013b). Problems with intellectualism. Philosophical Studies, 165(3), 879-891.
Fodor, J. (1983). The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Kirsh, D. (2013) Embodied cognition and the magical future of interaction design. ACM Transactions on Computer–Human Interaction, 20(1), article 3.
LaBerge, D., & Samuels, S. J. (1974). Toward a theory of automatic information processing in reading. Cognitive Psychology, 6, 293–323.
Mazzoni, P., & Krakauer, J. (2006). An implicit plan overrides an explicit strategy during visuomotor adaptation. Journal of Neuroscience, 26(14), 3642–3645.
Montero, B. (2013). The myth of ‘just do it’. The stone, New York edition. New York: New York Times.
Noë, A. (2005). Against intellectualism. Analysis, 65(4), 278–290.
Papineau, D. (2013). In the zone. In A. O’Hear (Ed.), Philosophy and sport. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pylyshyn, Z. (2003). Seeing and visualizing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Reber, A., & Lewis, S. (1977). Implicit learning: An analysis of the form and structure of a body of tacit knowledge. Cognition, 5(1977), 333–361.
Reed, N., McLeod, P., & Dienes, Z. (2010). Implicit knowledge and motor skill: What people who know how to catch don’t know. Consciousness and Cognition, 19, 63–76.
Rey, G. (2002). Problems with Dreyfus’ dialectic. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1(4), 403–408.
Ryle, G. (1949). The concept of mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Saling, L., & Philips, J. G. (2007). Automatic behavior: Efficient not mindless. Brain Research Bulletin, 73, 1–20.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2003). Kinesthetic memory. Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, 7, 69–92.
Shmuelof, L., Krakauer, J. W., & Mazzoni, P. (2012). How is a motor skill learned? Change and invariance at the levels of task success and trajectory control. Journal of Neurophysiology, 108(2), 578–594.
Stanley, J., & Williamson, T. (2001). Knowing how. Journal of Philosophy, 98(August), 411–444.
Stanley, J. (2011a). Knowing (How). Noûs, 45(2), 207–238.
Stanley, J. (2011b). Know how. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stanley, J., & Krakauer, J. (2013). Motor skill depends on knowledge of facts. Frontiers of Human Neuroscience. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.00503.
Sutton, J., McIlwain, D., Christensen, W., & Geeves, A. (2011). Applying intelligence to the reflexes: Embodied skills and habits between Dreyfus and Descartes. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 42(1), 78–103.
Wallace, D. F. (2006). Federer as religious experience, Play Magazine, New York edition. New York: New York Times.
Wallis, C. (2008). Consciousness, context and know-how. Synthese, 160, 123–153.
Williams, J. N. (2008). Propositional knowledge and know-how. Synthese, 165, 107–125.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wu, W. (2014). Attention. London: Routledge.
Yarbus, A. (1967). Eye movements and vision. New York: Plenum Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Fridland, E. They’ve lost control: reflections on skill. Synthese 191, 2729–2750 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0411-8
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0411-8