Chapter 5

The Value of Skill

When G.E. Moore compiled his list of primary goods—pleasure, knowledge, friendship, and artistic appreciation—he didn’t include skill. He could have; he should have. Skill is a good thing. If you consult a thesaurus, you will find many rough synonyms for “skill” that are manifestly positive. We don’t say derisively of someone that he is so skilled (like clumsy, inept, stupid, depraved, vile). To assign skill is to compliment. But why—what is so good about skill? The obvious first thought is that exercising a skill is pleasurable; it gives rise to feelings of pleasure. It activates the pleasure centers. No doubt this is often true (though is it always true?), and no doubt pleasure is a good; but is skill only good because of the pleasure it affords? What if you could get the same feeling without having the skill? Possessing a skill is not intrinsically pleasurable—you don’t have sensations of pleasure all day just by possessing skills. Pleasure is just one effect of skill. I’m not knocking it, just pointing out that hedonism is not the only justification for valuing skill. So, what else makes skill valuable?

Another answer is that it confers status on a person—admiration, esteem, envy. We think well of the skillful individual, and we all like to be thought well of. Skills allow you to show off—strut your stuff, command awed attention. I don’t want to denigrate this motive; I think it should be encouraged (we need some motive to sustain us through all those hours of practice and failure). Status is desirable. If mastering skills can improve your status, it is pro tanto a good thing. And it does—more than money and good looks in many cases. Skill is like intelligence—a surefire route to admiration. Fine, but is that all? I think not: I think it does something much more profound and meaningful—it expands the self. The self is a wispy thing, hard to discern and limn; what the Dickens is it? It seems suspiciously empty considered in its primal state (the newborn baby)—hardly a thing at all. It cries out for expansion, augmentation; it wants to grow. The bigger the self the better. The more self you have the more valuable you become—to yourself and others. The humble seed must blossom into the great oak. The body needs to grow and so does the self within it. Knowledge helps with that: erudition is extension; learning is expansion. But this point applies as much to knowledge-how as knowledge-that, i.e., to skill acquisition. Instead of being a dull, little, inert dot you grow into a splendid fully formed action hero, equipped with superpowers. You become multi-dimensional, many-sided, deep. You become more godlike. Look how skillfully God created the universe—you could approximate to that. So, we need to add the personal expansion aspect of skill acquisition. In sum, the skilled person derives pleasure from his skills, gains status from them, and becomes larger and lovelier the more skilled he becomes (or she, of course). That sounds like a nice package of goods, does it not?

I just touched on an aspect of skill hitherto ignored—its aesthetic aspect. Skilled action looks good, indeed beautiful. Clumsy action looks ugly, hard on the eyes. Skillful action (think Roger Federer) is pleasing to the eye (and Roger is not that handsome). I rate this aspect very highly, because deep down I am a skill-aesthete—I like the way it looks. That is why I am glued to gymnastics on the TV, and ballroom dancing, and tennis matches. I enjoy the aesthetic spectacle. Moore could have included skill under artistic appreciation. It is hard to say why we appreciate this aspect of skilled movement, but we do. Perhaps it has to do with creating organized wholes—like painting and sculpture. Skill also incorporates knowledge, so it inherits that value also. And doesn’t it encourage friendship, social bonds, even love? Some of my best friends I met on a tennis court and admired their game—not the winning as such, but the grace and style. So, skills press the right buttons by all four measures, as well as possessing their own sui generis value—the value of skill itself. For skill is surely a good in its own right; its value is not reducible to other primary values. You valued skill before you even thought about its relation to pleasure, knowledge, friendship, and artistic appreciation. You just thought “That is so cool” and wished you could do it too. Skill value is a thing unto itself not just other values in disguise.

I happen to have written a book on disgust, a highly disagreeable emotion.[1] It is notable that we are never disgusted by skill, as we are never disgusted by moral virtue. It is as if we put skill and virtue into the same anti-disgust bag. We might be disgusted by the bodies of skilled practitioners (they are only human after all), but skill lifts these bodies into a realm beyond disgust. In heaven nothing is disgusting, so skill approximates to heaven; you never want to throw up watching a skilled tennis player hit the ball. Perhaps skill enables us to transcend our natural feelings of disgust at human bodies, our own and others. We are angels pro tempore (Simone Biles is an angel). In skilled action we undergo metamorphosis—from wriggling larva to soaring butterfly. The human imagination is nothing if not creative, and it yearns for elevation, transformation. Skill is transformative; you are not the messy animal you once were but a new and superior being. Jesus had the skill to walk on water—and he was never more divine.

And then we have the curse of mind-body division: the two do not always get along; the marriage is rocky. It starts off rocky and it stays that way. Skill is what reconciles the inharmonious parties; it brings them into alignment. In fact, it gives the lie to the traditional duality of mind and body (soul and flesh), because skill is psychophysical. Even that word does not do justice to the phenomenon—it is too dualistic. In skill the body is the mind in action, and the mind is the body made sublime. When we speak of throwing a ball, we don’t presuppose a duality of inner and outer; we use a single verb “throw” to capture an indissoluble unity. There is no sense in describing throwing a ball as either mental or physical; it is both and neither. It is a skilled action—period. This is valuable because it repairs what can seem like a forced marriage of opposites; it enables us to live with our given dual nature. We are not an immaterial soul loosely and mysteriously attached to a grossly material body; we are agents with skills. In skilled action we feel at one with ourselves. Perhaps this is a kind of illusion—the felt unity can be rudely interrupted—but it provides a break from the mind-body divorce. The mind and the body become engaged, on the same page, ready to commit; the rocky marriage is harmonious for the nonce. The romance holds strong; opposites can combine.

At this point we need something concrete to hang onto. I am going to describe a skill I invented, which I think could be a boon to humanity. It isn’t all theory and metaphysics in this text. I invented a new swim stroke I call the “frog-crawl”. You combine the leg motion of the breaststroke with the arm motion of the crawl. You thereby get the benefits of the more powerful leg thrust of the breaststroke and the extra oomph of the crawl’s arm action. I have tested this scientifically and indeed this stroke delivers more power than either the traditional breaststroke or the crawl. Mainly, it adds to the crawl’s arm motion the stronger action of the legs; the usual flapping of the feet in the crawl is feeble in comparison. Now it does take some time to master the new skill, especially if you are used to traditional strokes, but it is perfectly feasible (I mastered the basics in about ten minutes). After a few sessions in the pool, it became my go-to stroke, and I now only use this stroke. It greatly adds to my enjoyment of swimming (I am not a dedicated swimmer). It would be excellent for children, and it might lead to new swimming records (it took about two seconds off my time over a length of the pool—equivalent to about 10 feet). Likewise, the invention of tennis and table tennis (both invented for English aristocrats by English aristocrats) added tremendously to human happiness. I suggest you get in the pool and try to learn the frog-crawl; you will thank me.

I am also a believer in skill psychotherapy. I believe any skilled activity is good for the old psychic health and whatnot, but I specifically believe that song therapy works wonders in the well-being department. This is a valuable property of skill in general and singing skill in particular. I find tennis very therapeutic (especially where anger is concerned), but singing is positively soul cleansing. I advocate learning to sing a favorite song all the way through, focusing on technique and detail (good breathing, correct pitch, clear enunciation); a hundred times through should do it. You must work on it, practice daily (I recently learned the mighty and poignant “Mother” by John Lennon). Then, when you’ve got the technical details down, pile on the emotion as a separate task. It’s a good skill to have psychologically. It also impresses people (you can make them cry). As to knife throwing, this is also quite therapeutic, especially with regard to one’s more aggressive urges (enough said). It hearkens back to the first days of human skill evolution when skill was a survival necessity and violence common. You can pick your own skill and give it your all—I think you will see therapeutic benefits. It beats Freud.

How many skills should you possess? What is the optimal number? No idea, but don’t stint on the quantity and variety. Admittedly, I probably overdo it a bit; I am skill-restless and a touch skill-promiscuous (now table tennis, now bowling, now trampoline—all good value). You’re not trying to become world champion, so you don’t need exclusive focus on a single skill; you can afford to range widely. I reckon ten skills would be a reasonable number for an able-bodied person, though that would feel limiting to me (I’m thinking of taking up disc golf). Speaking of golf, I never had much interest in the game, especially the trudging around and the class of people you meet; but a few years ago, I decided to learn the golf stroke and bought some clubs to practice with (also a couple of golf books to study). I quite enjoyed it but wasn’t set on fire. I was interested to plumb the mysteries of the golf stroke and have the experience of whacking the golf ball, but I really don’t have the time to put in hours at the golf course. One must be realistic. I find tennis much more rewarding and I try to stay faithful to her (she has given me some excellent times).

I would like to end this chapter by praising skills to the sky, but that might seem shrill and silly, as well as boring. Instead, I will quote from the tennis chapter (chapter 20, Part Two) in Nabokov’s superbly skilled novel Lolita; he conveys the ecstasy better than I ever could. “Her tennis was the highest point to which I can imagine a young creature bringing the art of make-believe, although I daresay, for her it was the very geometry of basic reality. The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke. The ball when it entered her aura of control became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and the instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile and deliberate at the moment of clinging contact…I remember at the very first game I watched being drenched with an almost painful convulsion of beauty assimilation. My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second the vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip.” What more could you ask for? Could anything be more valuable?[2]

[1] The Meaning of Disgust (2011).

[2] Nabokov was an excellent tennis player himself and gave lessons; I suspect he was trying to put into words the ecstasy he felt on the tennis court. It isn’t easy. It must be experienced directly. You don’t know what it’s like till you experience it first-hand. The value is ineffable, though we try to eff it.

Chapter 3

Origins of Skill

Look around you at human society: you will see many people—almost everyone—equipped with one skill or the other, often with multiple skills. We are routinely classified as Homo sapiens, but we might as well be described as Homo skillians. Skill is our species characteristic, our zoological essence. That is, we are a species whose salient trait is expertise acquired by learning, practice, and training—as opposed to instinct or abstract rationality. Know-how and physical dexterity are our species hallmarks. We are amazingly good at tying shoelaces and plumbing, among other things. The question naturally arises as to how we got this way: how did skill as we know it evolve? What biological purpose does it serve? What made it possible? Why don’t other species match us in acquired dexterity?

First, we should not doubt that other animals possess skills—acquired, taught, useful skills. They learn how to hunt, forage, fight, raise infants, make nests, and so on. Parents teach offspring how to do these things. Some learn social skills, living in packs and groups. They may even learn mating skills. Skill isn’t unique to humans. But the extent of it is—the sheer amount of skill acquired by a normal human. We are ten times more skilled than our nearest rivals, monkeys and apes (though less hairy). A hundred times even. Why? How? We may not look like much, but we are excellent at getting stuff done, skillfully. Probably (certainly) our skill set is what enabled us to survive and prosper—to become the most dominant species on the planet. Skills are clearly useful and we have them in spades; we are collocations of skills. The survival of the skillfulist. Those among us with the best skills are the ones who live longer and reproduce more. We are genetically set up to acquire skills of many kinds; we have “the skill gene”. We are born that way. We are instinctual learners of skills. Our brains and bodies are designed to make skill acquisition possible. We were born to bowl (inter alia). Not that these individual skills are themselves innate, but our propensity to acquire them and our general capacity to perform them are genetically programmed. Empiricists think we are born to acquire ideas by perception (and not much else); their skill analogues think we are born to acquire skills (call them “skillists”). We have the skill instinct alongside the language instinct.[1]

But how did this come about? The answer is not far to seek and was anticipated by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man (1871). Our ancestors lived in the trees and spent their lives gripping, climbing, and brachiating. For this they needed suitable hands (try gripping without them). They already had quite skillful hands as a combination of innate endowment and individual learning. But then it became necessary to descend from the trees and make our living on earth, probably because of climate change. Luckily, we had hands to hand, and soon we were making tools. That was the turning point: we gradually developed skills centered on the hands. The feet were mainly used for locomotion, but the hands were relatively free and already adept enough at manipulation. Once up on two legs we were free to indulge our newfound predilection for manual activity—hand skills, hand jobs, hand hobbies. The fingers, in particular, demonstrated their utility by enabling us to perform delicate tasks, the thumb and forefinger being the stars of the show. We could out-skill each other in manual dexterity. It was a biological revolution, a momentous evolutionary discovery.[2] Skills thus evolved from hands, liberated from locomotion duties. Skilled brains came along for the ride, providing the necessary control machinery. If the brain is a computer, then its program is written in hand-skill-ese. Initially, the skilled hand-brain stuck to simple tasks, like picking things up or throwing and catching them, but in the fullness of time it went nuclear—it became a weapon in the fight for survival. Skilled hands made weapons and used them, leading up to nuclear weapons themselves. As an offshoot, they produced pianists and pool players, carpenters and tennis players. Skills are thus centered on the hand, though the feet too can get pretty handy-skilly (though markedly less so than the hands). Without the hands our ascent to our current transcendent skillfulness would have been cramped, if not precluded, but with them skill came into its own as an evolutionary development. They were the platform, the springboard.

We may suppose that hunting and fighting were among our first serious skills (not nose picking). If so, skill is steeped in blood and guts. Punching and strangling, poking and squeezing—these were our early skills. Also, stabbing and spearing, then dismembering and slicing up. Just think of the violence wrought by those skillful appendages! Mayhem and murder were among our earliest achievements as a skillful species (sadism came as a side benefit). The moral side of skill accordingly came into being. Our greatness as a species owes a lot to the dark side of skill; it isn’t all sweetness and light, patting and stroking. Skilled hands can help and comfort, but they can also destroy. We are right to fear skill in the wrong hands (so to speak). It is like this with most biological adaptations: they exist because of their destructive potential (teeth, talons, poison). Skilled hands are caught between good and evil, with evil right at the root. Still, skill chose the path of righteousness eventually (though partially); our skills enabled us to avoid extinction and flourish as a species. Skill produced human culture, art, science, sport, ballroom dancing, and music—not a bad record for something that began in violent crime.

It should be emphasized that skill acts as a separate evolutionary pathway. There aren’t just the body and the mind but also the skills that these two things permit. Bodies evolve by mutation and natural selection, and so do minds; but in addition, skills evolve by the same mechanisms. There are bodily traits, psychological traits, and that peculiar hybrid, skill traits. Just think of the throwing skill; it evolved from primitive beginnings to what we see today. First, chucking stones around aimlessly, then throwing spears in hunting, and finally all the types of throwing we observe today (discus, Frisby, darts). Can any species compare to us as expert throwers? Have you ever seen an ape throw a Frisby or a discus or a dart? We are a million times better at throwing than our animal brethren, wonderful as they are. Evolutionary biologists should reserve a special place for the evolution of skills.[3]

[1] See Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (1994).  Sex, skill, and language: the human instinctual package.

[2] See my Prehension: The Hand and the Emergence of Humanity (2015).

[3] It is a good question why skills are not overtly acknowledged in contemporary science (and philosophy). I think it is because they are perceived as shadowy pseudo-entities, proscribed by empiricism and positivism. I don’t share these prejudices, so I am happy to accept skills at face value. I might even accept a skill metaphysics (like process metaphysics).

Chapter 1

What is Skill?

The concept of skill is not simple. We use the word, but how well do we understand its denotation? The OED gives us “the ability to do something well; expertise or dexterity”, deriving from Old English scele meaning “knowledge”. AI gives us something fuller: “A skill is a learned ability to do an activity, job, or task well through practice, training, and experience”. I would offer: a skill is an ability to achieve a certain goal (telos) by means of a refined and effective technique, typically acquired by concentrated practice and instruction. It is a type of action instilled by prolonged learning, deemed valuable, and not easy to accomplish. The action typically involves the body, though the mind is also implicated; it is psychophysical in nature. Skills are often described as sensorimotor, i.e., involving both the senses and the muscles, but we must also include the will: intention, desire, choice, planning. For example, when hitting a ball in tennis the agent is aiming for a certain result and adopting a specific means of achieving it—say, to keep the ball deep but not go beyond the opponent’s baseline. He[1] swings his arm and moves his body so as to achieve this goal. The skill has a teleological structure—ends and means—and the body is moved in such a way that a desirable result is achieved. The senses play a crucial role in ensuring that the willed act is successful (keeping your eye on the ball). Skilled action is really “sensory-volitional-motor”. Perception, will, and bodily movement must be smoothly coordinated so as to achieve a given goal. Notice that this configuration is normatively described—that is, it is deemed desirable to act in this way. Skilled action is good—better than unskilled action. It isn’t value-neutral, like simply sitting down or spitting. To that extent skill is found admirable. To possess a skill is to have something worth possessing.

Not all actions are skilled; nor are all abilities skills. Raising your arm isn’t a skill; nor is the ability to digest a skill. Feeling and believing aren’t skills. Seeing isn’t generally a skill (you don’t have to take seeing lessons to see). Dreaming and imagining are not skills. Sweating isn’t, or blushing, or breathing. Clapping isn’t. Running and jumping are not skills either—because they require no special training. Walking is no more skillful than sitting down or twiddling your thumbs. To be a skill an action or ability must involve difficulty and efforts to overcome it; it is an achievement. It can’t be a given. There must be obstacles to be surmounted. In this sense it is a battle with reality—overcoming natural resistance. You can’t be skilled and lazy. Skills require work. There are no skilled blinkers or salivators. Many skills take years to develop, whole lifetimes even. That is why we speak of mastering a skill: mastery requires effort, determination, talent, practice, dedication. These are all good qualities, so skill is deeply intertwined with matters of esteem, admiration, praise. This is part of the definition of skill. You might object that the skilled torturer or assassin is not admirable, and you would be right—because his aim is bad, wrong, evil. But the skill in question is good for those wicked ends without being good tout court. The skill exhibited might well be admirable if transposed to another context—say, surgery or wood chopping. Boxing skill is not bad, though hitting old ladies is. The skill itself is always estimable, though the end it serves is sometimes dastardly. This is why we are so ambivalent about skilled thugs: they are good at something, but that something isn’t itself good.

Let’s be a touch technical: is the concept of skill a family resemblance concept, and is it subject to skeptical paradox? Wittgenstein famously claimed that the concept of a game is a family resemblance concept: games are so multiple and various that nothing unites them except family resemblance; they have no unitary definition. You might wonder whether the same is true of the concept of a skill: skills are also so various that nothing unites them except loose family resemblance—say, the skill of welding and the skill of dancing the polka. It is certainly true that skills come in many stripes, but it doesn’t follow that they have no common-factor definition; and we have already seen that they do. For a skill can be defined as mastery of a technique learned by assiduous practice. True, there can be borderline cases (is jumping over a fence a skill?), but there is an abstract schema that captures the essence of a skill. Actually, there is such a schema in the case of games too, as Bernard Suits convincingly demonstrated (Wittgenstein was wrong).[2] By all means let’s recognize the huge variety of skills (see the next chapter), but it is consistent with that to maintain that skills have an essence common and peculiar to them. There is a natural kind called “skill”, and we can inquire into its general form.

On the question of skeptical paradox, we can begin by observing that our knowledge of skill is not a kind of direct perceptual knowledge—you can’t see someone’s skill, your own or another’s. You can see the behavior that manifests a skill, but not the underlying skill itself. In this respect a skill is like a disposition: you can see the sugar dissolving in water but not the disposition so to dissolve. You can’t observe potentialities. What is this strange thing we call a potentiality? It isn’t the skilled behavior, because the skill goes beyond the behavior: the skill of being able to hit a topspin forehand in tennis applies to future and counterfactual situations as well as actual hits of the ball. This is a variant of the problem of induction: we infer future behavior from attributions of a general skill, but there is no logical entailment from past to future—maybe the player can’t execute the shot in places other than those he was brought up in. How do we knowthat he will hit the shot on the next occasion we observe him? Nor will his inner state of mind help to establish this, because it is compatible with all sorts of future behavior; no feeling he has will logically imply that he has the skill in question.[3] Nor is the skill a disposition to execute the shot correctly, because the player may not be disposed to hit the shot when asked to on account of feeling ill or lazy or tired. On reflection, the skill seems like an elusive I-know-not-what, rather than a solid known reality; it may even be doubted that it really exists (this is skepticism about skills). We will come back to this when we consider skills and philosophy in chapter 7. For now, I will be assuming realism about skills: they really exist as constituents of objective reality—they aren’t “logical fictions”.

Where do skills exist—in the brain, in behavior, or in the mind? Where are they located? A neuroscientist might say the brain, pointing to the motor cortex; a behavioral psychologist will reduce skills to skilled behavior; a cognitive scientist will locate them in an unconscious computational system. Maybe they are in all three! I would say they belong principally in the unconscious mind: once the skill is acquired it departs consciousness and exists at an unconscious level, ready to be drawn upon when needed. This unconscious mind has links to the brain and behavior; the skill is really a bundle of all three, tightly joined together. We see the skilled behavior, but there is an unseen machinery behind it, controlling it, constituting it. We sometimes sense the inner skill in ourselves as we hit the perfect shot. It is not exactly repressed like the Freudian unconscious, just tucked safely away, leaving the conscious mind free for other duties. If we ask whether skills are in the head, the answer is that they are also in the mind and body. Indeed, they can be said to exist outside the body too, as when an instrument is employed: the instrument becomes a functional part of the body, an extension of it. These divisions are alien to the concept of skill, and hence the ontology of skill. The tennis racket becomes an organ of the body, in effect. Skills are internal and external at the same time, from the depths of the brain to the tip of the instrument (compare the fingernails).

I would like to end this preparatory chapter with an instructive contrast that goes to the heart of the nature of skill: skill is not the same as strength. A bodybuilder or powerlifter is not really a skilled athlete: lifting weights hardly qualifies as a skill at all. I used to lift a lot of weights in the gyms of New York, but I was always aware that skill is minimal to non-existent in that activity. You are not working to acquire a skill—just big muscles. It’s not like learning to play tennis or billiards. Contrariwise, you can be skilled but not strong: billiards players are not usually terribly strong. Skill and strength are opposed categories: you can win a fight either way. Speed is part of skill, but not strength. A giant can be strong but clumsy. Elephants are not particularly skilled (excluding the trunk). The Cyclops was strong, but Odysseus was skilled. I am really a skills person not a strength person, despite all the weightlifting and pushups. I can perform a horizontal balance using only my arms (I learned it as a gymnast at age fifteen); it requires a fair amount of upper-body strength, but it is mainly a skill. That is what makes it impressive not powerful bulging muscles. Doing a lot of pushups is impressive, but not because of the skill involved. I think physical culture today has become too strength-oriented (Arnold, I’m talking to you); physical skill is more important (Simone, I have you in mind). In any case, we now have a workable idea of what a skill is; we can proceed to investigating the phenomenon from a number of different angles.[4]

[1] In this book when I say “he” I mean “he or she” (or “she or he”).

[2] See Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper (1978), and my Truth by Analysis (2012). The basic idea is that a game is an activity in which unnecessary obstacles are constructed or stipulated.

[3] See Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982).

[4] It is interesting to compare the volume of philosophical literature on knowledge with that on skill: massive to tiny. And yet skill is a type of knowledge—knowledge-how. In both cases we should not be too finicky about strict necessary and sufficient conditions.

In My Life

There are places I’ll remember all my life. I’m talking about departments I’ve been a member of, though some have changed. First, the psychology department at Manchester University, in which I was a student for four years. Then, Jesus College Oxford for two years, along with 10 Merton Street, as a philosophy graduate student. Next, University College London in Bedford Square for eleven years, teaching philosophy. After that, the psychology department at Oxford and Corpus Christi College for several years. During this time, I was a visiting professor at UCLA and USC for a total of ten months, and CUNY Graduate Center for a semester. Following that, I was in the philosophy department at Rutgers University for sixteen years. Latterly, I had six years at the University of Miami, ending badly (don’t ask me why). With people and things, lovers and friends. They each stick in my mind, making their mark, not forgotten. Now I am in no department at all, except my own in-home department of one. It’s nice, friendly, quiet, conducive to work. No problems. I think I love you more.