Chapter 1: What is Skill?

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.