Chapter 2: The Scope of Skill

Chapter 2

The Scope of Skill

This is to be a descriptive chapter: I will enumerate and describe the many kinds of skill there are, noting their similarities and dissimilarities. The emphasis will be on the enormous variety of skills, along with their clear affinities. It is remarkable that we bring such variety under a single concept; the concept is encyclopedic, not to say promiscuous.  Perhaps the clearest examples—paradigm cases—are sports skills, though these too are extremely various. The skills of footballers are focused on the feet, though the head sometimes gets involved—kicking, dribbling, passing, scoring. If this were the only skill known to man, we would still be mightily impressive. Football clearly stems from primitive motor skills, though it develops into high-level skills that take years to master and perfect. Football skills can make you extremely rich and much idolized. It’s amazing what the human foot can do. No other animal has skilled feet like ours. It is made possible by our bipedal gait; quadrupedal footballers are a rare breed (maybe they exist on another planet). The use of a ball is essential and many sports follow suit. We take football for granted, but it illustrates our skillful sporting nature as a species. I won’t list all the endless other sports that depend on skill for their existence. As an ex-pole vaulter, I can attest to the level of skill demanded in sports, especially in hoisting the body up to clear the bar feet first. This is all obvious. It is common for people to say that it looks easier than it is, which is quite true; no one is born with pole vaulting skill, say. Some sports require more skill than others, but they all involve advanced skill of some sort (even shot put). Running is perhaps the least skilled sport. Sport is skill.

But elsewhere it becomes less obvious that skill is involved, though actually it is. Art involves skill, with pencil and paintbrush, chisel and hammer. It used to require more skill and less conceptualization, to the dismay of traditionalists. But the painter doesn’t look much like a footballer in practicing his craft—the bodily movements are very different in the two cases. Yet there is the same finesse, expertise, beauty of execution. Only at an abstract level does the kinship reveal itself; at first sight the activities have nothing much in common. The artist is a skilled operator too. Then we have science, which is largely intellectual: the skilled observer through microscope and telescope, the skillful experimenter, the adroit calculator. The scientist is not usually put in the same category as the athlete, but the affinity is there in the form of acquired skills—scientists aim for knowledge by deploying their scientific skills. They even “kick ideas around” and win prizes. Architects and builders are clearly skilled workers—stonemasons, carpenters, glaziers. They must learn their craft and practice it diligently and expertly. Chefs and cooks are skilled food producers, wise to the ways of food. Some are celebrities, like top footballers. They need to go to specialized schools to acquire the necessary skills. Then too, there are surgeons and chiropractors, masseurs and physical therapists. These are not unskilled workers; they need to be masters of the tricks of their trade. They may work with their hands, but their sophisticated manual skills are highly prized. They are part of the skill brotherhood.

Now we come to occupations and activities even further removed from the initial sporting paradigms. What about sex, professional or amateur? Isn’t it more or less skillful? We need not go into the gory details here, but we intuitively count sexual acts as falling under the concept of skill, despite their remoteness from football (but note the use of “score” in both cases). We are reliably informed that there are highly skilled lovers, though it is hard to see what superior techniques they may be masters of that the rest of us struggle to execute. These must be arcane bedroom skills requiring years of practice to master. Are there skilled comedians? Again, the idea seems somewhat stretched, though we might mention the skills of comedic timing. Impersonation requires skill, as does so-called physical comedy. Then we have writing, politics, morality, acting, singing, socializing, living. Some of these seem more skill-infused than others—acting more than morality, say. We readily speak of political skills and social skills, but not moral skills or living skills. Yet a case can be made that these locutions are not oxymoronic: can’t someone be skilled at weighing up a moral dispute or assigning praise and blame, and aren’t some people thought to be adept at living life? These don’t seem like meaningless phrases. Skill is closely related to know-how and that is present in many activities—a person knows how to live well or form a sound moral judgment. We have the notion of expertise in these areas. The moralist and the footballer may not be that far apart. True, the concept of skill arguably has its original home in the context of athletic activity, but it does seem extendable to a wider domain. Singing and playing an instrument seem more obviously skill-involving, because of the period of concentrated learning that is typically required. Parts of the body are involved, as football recruits the feet and head; and you must learn to deploy them carefully and adroitly. Writing is an interesting case, because it is multi-layered—from punctuation to profundity (or at least readability). I have always regarded it as a learnable skill requiring much study and practice (almost as taxing as tennis). In any case, skills vary in many ways, and it is surprising that we group them together as we do; yet it feels entirely natural to do so. Add to this the fact that people differ tremendously in what skills they take to—the concept is remarkably broad and somewhat puzzling. It is unitary yet multifarious.

Is it possible to devise a useful taxonomy of skill, hierarchically arranged? Some theorists like to distinguish “hard skills” from “soft skills”: the former include ordinary physical skills, while the latter include communication skills, leadership skills, and teamwork. I would call these physical skills and social skills, respectively. The distinction is real enough, though it would be a mistake to press it too hard, since the body is involved in both, as is the mind. We might also describe these as object skills and people skills. I think we should also distinguish constructive skills from competitive skills: skills of making and skills of winning. These can overlap, as when two people compete over who can bake the best cake. They are correlated with personality types. Third, we can distinguish work skills from leisure skills—what you do for money and what you do for fun. Some people do for a living what others do to amuse themselves—there are professional bowlers and darts players. The skill is essentially the same in both cases. It is tempting to distinguish “physical skills” from “mental skills”, but this is problematic for two reasons. One is that all skills are partly mental, even when very physical, because of the part played by perception, will, and thought; table tennis, say, is very mental. The other is that the category of purely mental skills is questionable, because such alleged skill is arguably not a genuine literal case of skill; it is only analogous to skill in the proper sense. For example, you can be a skillful debater in philosophy, but can you be a skillful thinker in philosophy? The body is not involved in this activity and hence bodily coordination and finesse. Can you be a skillful historian? Knowledge is not the same as skill; knowing-how is not the same as knowing-that. At the least, the basic cases of skill are bodily skill not intellectual skill (whatever that is exactly): to be intelligent or clever or smart or erudite is not have a bunch of skills in your head. Memory capacity isn’t a skill. A skill in the strict sense is an ability of the body—the embodied agent. To be a profound or creative thinker is not to have a bodily homunculus in your head behaving in a skillful manner. To have a lot of knowledge is not to have a lot of skills. Skill is about fine-tuned movements not deep thoughts, or even sensible ones. Common sense knowledge is not having shared skills. Hands and feet are not involved; nor is the head qua moving object. Thinking isn’t mental football.[1]

[1] People talk about the language of thought, but not the skill of thought. Skill has techniques, but thought doesn’t. You don’t need to practice having the same thought in order to get it right. You don’t sign up for thought lessons because you can’t execute your thoughts properly. No one tells you not to move your head while thinking. Etc.