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.

A Tennis Story

I have been making a study of James Bond, reading the novels and watching the movies. I think I now know the Bond mind: principled, decisive, realistic, ingenious, effective, sometimes violent. I recently faced a Bond challenge over at the tennis courts, involving a shrub. I don’t think SMERSH was behind it, but still—it had to be dealt with. You see, when hitting against the wall the ball would sometimes go into the shrub and linger there so that you had to reach in to retrieve it. The trouble being that the shrub has pointy leaves and spiny stems, which menace the eyes and scratch the hands; more than once blood has been drawn. I mentioned this to the local bigwigs, but nothing was done. The ideal solution would be to remove the shrub, which would not be difficult. Do we have to wait till someone gets poked in the eye? Then I hit on my own solution: I took a pair of garden clippers over there and stealthily cut off the offending leaves, one by one. No longer do you have to reach inside the bush, shielding your eyes and risking the scratches—you just bend down and pick up the ball, no problem. Of course, the high-ups might disapprove, but the job got done. I stuffed the spiky leaves into the trashcan to be taken away in due course; I wonder what the organization will think of it. It will be a mystery to them. 007 has paid a visit (with a license to trim). A wrong has been righted, lives saved. Corners have been cut. Protocol has been set aside. Cue the James Bond theme.

A Causal Theory of Everything

Is language caused by reality? Is meaning caused by facts? Does the environment give rise to our talk about it? I want to say yes. Language is caused by what it is about, in conjunction with other causal factors. The explanation of the characteristic features of language is the world in which we live—our planet basically. We have the language we do because of the planet we live on. Language may be largely innate, but its ultimate cause is environmental. This is because everything about us is caused by our planetary environment. All animal life on Earth is caused by Earth; all aspects of life on Earth are causally explained by the physics (dynamics) of Earth. Life on other planets is caused by those planets, and any life created by some form of intelligence (divine or alien) is caused by that intelligence; but life as we know it on Earth is the causal upshot of our planet, including language. Its nature derives from the place from which it originated; it emerges from this particular celestial object with that object’s specific characteristics. We are what we are because it is what it is.

To see this, it helps to go back to the beginning. In some way we don’t yet fully understand, the first primitive life was caused by the conditions obtaining on Earth (perhaps thermal vents). The nature of this life was predictable from its earthly antecedents; you could infer the effect from the cause. The effect wasn’t some radically new entity or process. The elementary life form was like a book recording its causal history.[1] With the passage of time new life forms developed, also caused by earthly conditions—physical, chemical, geological, climatic. One thing led causally to another. Eventually bacteria evolved as a causal consequence of what existed before; we don’t know how or why exactly, but it happened. There was no infusion of help from outside. Whether to call this process “physical” is a moot point, depending on what that word is taken to mean; what is undeniable is that the process was insulated, internal to the planet on which it occurred. No miracles from on high, no extraterrestrial injections (save the odd meteor). In the fullness of time, plants and animals came along—life as we know it. Mutation and natural selection were the driving mechanisms, building on what went before. Bodies began, various and distinctive. Thus, living bodies were caused by planet Earth—by the terrestrial environment. This included other living bodies: each body existed in a world partly composed of other bodies. This fact shaped the production of new bodies: one body is as it is because other bodies are what they are. For example, the body of a predator is shaped by the bodies of its prey; the tiger’s body is as it is because the antelope’s body is as it is. That is what it chases, hunts, kills, and eats. Prey cause predators (and predators cause later prey by reciprocal interaction). The body of one animal comes to be like a book about another animal; you can infer predator from prey and prey from predator, down to fine detail (with some input from the bodies of other animals that prey on the predator or compete with them). The point is that it’s all causality working its magic (or non-magic): everything is ultimately an effect of antecedent planetary conditions. Everything is a reflection of something else. Nothing happens by chance or intentional design. Causality rules. Trees are caused by earth and light. Fish are caused by water and oxygen. Birds are caused by air and gravity. All animals are caused by space and time. The universe is one big causal machine lumbering along. Nothing exists but that it was caused by something. This is not a reductionist thesis but an historical thesis: history, including pre-history, is a causal process, obeying the laws of causality. Not chance, not divine intervention, but blind deterministic causation. Causality truly is the cement of the universe and its modus operandi (despite what some quantum theorists and mystics say). Surely, this is by now a truism.

The same goes for the organs of animal bodies: they too are caused and shaped by prior planetary conditions, slowly evolving over time. Hearts and kidneys are caused by the earth, rearranging planetary matter. Hydrodynamics and gravity play a role, as well as available biochemical components. They are literally parts of planet Earth. The brain is no exception: the earth caused the brain; the brain contains elements of the earth. The brain emerged from the earth, taking on its characteristics—shape, size, weight, chemical composition, water, electricity. It lies at one end of a long causal chain tracing back to rocks and H2O. The earth gave birth to the brain (its wrinkled baby) after a long gestation period. The brain is as much an effect of the earth as a volcanic rock formation, and it reflects its causal origins; its properties are derivable from earthly properties, though often mysteriously. Its study is part of earth science (“the extended earth”). The thinking organ might be physically different on other planets, being differently caused; but earthly brains have earthly causes. They have the earth written into them. They even look like the earth (round, hilly)!

What about the mind—is it too caused by the earth? Of course it is. It bears the marks of the earth, though this is less obvious. If panpsychism were true, it would be infused with earthly micro-minds. We don’t understand the causation involved (the mind-body problem), but it must have such a causal history. The earth caused our emotions, our thoughts, our knowledge—what else could cause these things? Not God, and they didn’t happen by chance. Geo-genesis is the correct doctrine. Somehow the laws of nature allowed the mind to emerge from the earth. Among the causal powers of the earth is the power to become mind. Other planets in our solar system lack this power and remain psychologically sterile, barren. Then what of language? One might well say that language is trivially caused by the earth, because it arose from it like bodies, brains, and minds—it had to. But we can ask a more interesting question: is there anything about language that resembles its cause? Specifically, does language resemble the part of the earth that constitutes its subject-matter? Does the external environment both cause language to exist and intricately shape its nature? If it does cause language, we might expect that it shapes its nature, though perhaps in transmuted form. Does the environment configure the brain and hence the brain’s linguistic contents? Is language in any way a record of the long causal history that led up to it? Is it a kind of fossil of the earth that produced it? Take sound: spoken language, as we have it, consists of sounds, but that is only possible because planet Earth permits the production of transmissible sounds in virtue of its atmosphere. Sound waves need a material medium through which they can propagate—such as air. No air, no sound. There also must be physical mechanisms that can cause sound waves—falling water, explosions, collisions. It’s a sound world. Thus, Earth contains the resources with which to create sounds; in a world without atmospheric disturbance there cannot be spoken language (though there could be a sign language made possible by light). Spoken language owes its existence to a naturally noisy environment (as sign language owes its existence to the sun’s light). We thus know that pre-linguistic earth was a sound earth, because we make sounds now. Phonology is a result of terrestrial sounds—the pushing around of air molecules.

But the influence of the earth goes deeper into the make-up of language; it forms language’s very structure and content. The world consists of objects and properties, the instantiation relation, events, processes, pluralities, facts, space, and time—all these are reflected in the architecture of language. To put it baldly, objects and properties cause (causally explain) subjects and predicates (nouns and adjectives), instantiation causes predication (“is”), events and processes cause verbs, facts cause propositions, space and time form the very framework of meaningful sounds and marks. The sentence “snow is white” means that snow is white (expresses that proposition) because it is a fact that snow is white (these things really exist on Earth). Ontology causes and forms semantics. Where else could meaning come from? You say the brain or the genes; true enough, but where do they come from? They come from the earth (and earlier from the cosmos more generally). The whole machinery of language is caused by antecedent states of the universe, going back to the Big Bang. But language on Earth (“Earth-Speak”) owes its existence to the planet itself—that unique celestial object in all its singularity. We will not find examples of spoken language like ours on planets in which life develops differently—a soundless planet made of pure light, say. Even a purely liquid or gaseous planet will not produce our kind of language; for that you need solid objects with persistent properties. Our linguistic scheme is constrained by our geological and biological environment, our world of rocks and plants and animals. Our language is partly shaped by the existence of living bodies; they cause it to mean what it does. Proper names exist because there are things to be named—persisting substantial things. Spatial terms exist because space exists. Mental vocabulary exists because minds exist. The environment must be thus and so in order that talk about it should exist. That environment incorporates the reality of planet Earth, which is both an instance of something more general and a unique planetary formation. Language is one of Earth’s many effects, along with mountains, plants, animal bodies, and minds. Earth is a potent cause; not every chunk of matter floating through space has its protean power. A world of formless gas lacks such powers; it creates no languages, no bodies, no minds. As far as we know, only planet Earth has the power to produce these (to us) familiar things, including the ability to talk about itself. Earth is the cause of its own story. We are the vehicles of this story. We are the book in which Earth tells its tall tale. It took a long time, but eventually it learned to speak, with us as its vocal apparatus. We are Earth’s mouthpiece. Evolution is the earth working out its causal potential. Life on Earth is Earth’s causal history.[2]

[1] See Richard Dawkins, The Genetic Book of the Dead (2024).

[2] It is worth reminding ourselves that what I say here would have been considered the height of blasphemy only a couple of centuries ago. The idea that the earth could be the cause of all things human and animal, and not a divine being, would seem preposterous—isn’t the earth mainly mud? But Darwin’s causal theory of species creation put paid to that point of view; yet it lingers on in our ordinary thinking. A “Humean” theory of causation as constant conjunction (not the actual Hume’s position) also makes it hard to see how the earth could be so causally fecund, since it denies the productivity of causation. We need to appreciate how creative (yet conservative) causation can be; the earth has remarkable constructive powers. We should treat it with the awe and respect it deserves. Earth, we salute you!