Chapter 7: Philosophy and Skill

Chapter 7

Philosophy and Skill

Skill hasn’t played much of a part in the history of philosophy; one would think it doesn’t exist. Let’s rectify that omission. We can start with the explanation of action: what factors contribute to a person’s action? A standard answer is belief and desire: people act because they have desires and beliefs about how to satisfy them. I desire to play a game of tennis, and I believe there are tennis courts at the Biltmore, so I pop over to the Biltmore; if you like, my desires and beliefs cause my actions. But I must be able to execute the popping or no popping will occur. Typically, I must have the necessary skills so to act—riding a bike, driving a car. These are complex skills that took a certain amount of learning. We act within the confines of our skills; we act because of our skills (they are a causal factor). Our skills combine with our desires and beliefs to bring about our actions. The desires and beliefs are powerless without them. But philosophers of action never mention this; they take background skills for granted. Take the action of hitting a tennis ball over the net and into the opposite court: it is explained partly by the fact that the player has the necessary skills so to act; he couldn’t do it without them. Skilled behavior is explained by—what else?—skills. Skills are states of the agent, ultimately of his brain—real causally operative states. No philosophy of action is complete without them. A belief-desire psychology is a belief-desire-skill psychology.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge and related concepts. But knowledge includes practical knowledge—knowing-how. We acquire propositional knowledge in the course of normal human learning, but we also acquire practical knowledge about how to act—skill knowledge. Remember learning how to tie your shoelaces or tie a tie? An enormous amount of learning is skill learning not fact learning. Epistemology therefore needs to include knowledge of skills; and these skills are of many kinds. Yet traditional theory of knowledge is silent on the subject. Is skill knowledge deemed too proletarian to be worthy of discussion? Or is it just hard to understand? It clearly involves the body not just the detached rational mind, and also tools wielded by the body. It is knowledge enmeshed in flesh and bone—muscular knowledge. People talk about muscle memory; well, there is also muscle knowledge. It is as if the muscles know stuff—not just the intellect or soul. We need a motor epistemology. Such knowledge is not true justified belief but something else entirely. But what? Here matters turn murky; serious philosophy (and psychology) needs to be done. Our theories start to look incomplete at best, wrongheaded at worst.

One consequence of this shift of perspective is that consciousness loses its pride of place in epistemology and philosophy in general. Philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have stressed the role of the body and the unconscious in the acquisition and exercise of skill. At first, the process of acquisition is laborious and fully conscious, but after a while it starts to occur without conscious reflection; it slips underground. The knowledge exists in the unconscious mind not the conscious mind. It becomes almost reflexive. It comes to exist in the body somehow (hence “muscle memory”). Actually, it exists in the brain, in the motor cortex, not literally in the muscles (still less the bones); so, the brain stores skills in an unconscious form. See how different this picture is from traditional conceptions: skill knowledge is not lodged in the disembodied thinking soul of the knower, nor in the passive perceptual faculties (“experience”), but in secret compartments of the unconscious mind. Thus, rationalist epistemology is incomplete at best, and so is empiricist epistemology: they are too focused on consciousness as the zone of all knowledge. Consciousness is peripheral to practical knowledge of this kind; zombies could have it. Knowledge doesn’t exist wholly on the mind side of the traditional mind-body dichotomy; it takes in the body and its unconscious operations. This is to demote Reason as the repository of knowledge; skill knowledge is located elsewhere. We must not intellectualize all knowledge or regard it as necessarily an affair of consciousness. And this means that the knowing subject is not a disembodied and detached entity loosely attached to the corporeal body; the body knows. Or rather: the whole human (or animal) subject knows. As we might say, we are the skillful ape: a certain animal (us) is equipped with the things we call skills—let’s not talk about body and mind at all. These are philosophers’ abstractions; better to think in terms of kinds of living creature. Skills return us to our creaturely status—a certain sort of biological entity.

Thus, we are led to consider the nature of persons: a person isn’t a being detached from the living body, defined by his rational soul or intellect. In skill we see the person as an integrated whole not a cobbled together duality: it is I that exercises these skills—the same thing that thinks and acts. It is a solecism to say that my body is skilled (not my mind); it is both, or neither. It is the creature that I am. Dualism and skill do not go happily together. Descartes ignored skilled action in his metaphysics of persons, and so did Locke; they were too enamored of conscious reason, the disembodied intellect, seeing not doing. In fact, human nature is defined (partly) by our skill set—our can-do profile. We are the result of dedicated skill cultivation. Freud thought we were (largely) defined by our sexual unconscious, but we are really defined by our skill unconscious. This is not the result of repression but simply relegation—we relegate skills to the unconscious part of ourselves. This frees up space for consciousness, and anyway the unconscious seems better at skill than the conscious. As we might say, mindless action is better than minded action. My knife throwing is better when I don’t have to think about it. The skillful self is largely unconscious, hidden away in there, secretive in its ways.

A word on the ontology of skill—what kind of thing it is. Philosophers have become infatuated with dispositions; they view dispositions as the key to understanding what they can’t otherwise understand. Thus, a belief is a disposition to assent to a sentence, or a pain is a disposition to cry out—that type of baloney. In line with this it might be held that a skill is a disposition to do such-and-such: to have the skill of bowling is to have a disposition to make strikes. But this can’t be right simply because you can have a skill but have no disposition to exercise it—you might not be in the mood to bowl, or you have been bribed to bowl badly, or you have hurt your wrist from too much bowling. Dispositions come about in all sorts of ways not all of which correspond to a skill; a skill is only one factor in creating an overall disposition. A skill is what it is—a certain sort of ability (one acquired by practice directed to a specific goal). It is what it is and not some other thing. It is not reducible to some other ontological category. No doubt it is rooted in the brain, like everything else about our minds; and it is shaped by the physical body. But skills are sui generis traits or features or facts. We can’t even say they are all cases of rule-following, because they are not (e.g., catching a ball). Maybe they all involve computations of some sort, or assemblies of reflexes, or neural connectivity; whatever, they are what they are. Let’s not get all eliminative or reductive about them. We can happily quantify over skills, count them, and name them. They are entities in good standing, part of the furniture of the universe.[1]

[1] Could we go Platonist about skills, picturing them as sublime entities in Plato’s heaven? I don’t see why not if we are attracted to Platonism about universals. Next to the form of the Good we have the form of Tennis skills, Knife Throwing sills, and Bowling skills. They are certainly not like empirical particulars.