ABSTRACT
“learning to play the piano is learning to reason with your muscles” --Jeremy Denk
In this talk, I submit that it is the controlled part of skilled action; that is, that part of an action that accounts for the exact, nuanced ways in which a skilled performer modifies, adjusts and guides her performance for which we must account, if we are to have an adequate, philosophical account of skill. My claim is that control is at the heart of skilled action because the particular way in which a skill is instantiated is precisely what defines how skillful that action is. That is, the level of skill that one possesses is in direct proportion to the amount of control that one exerts over the performance of one’s own actions. Control is what constitutes the difference between a gold medal performance and a bronze medal one, and between the elite athlete and the novice one. It is control that is learned through practice and control that allows us to gasp at the beauty, elegance, and perfection of a skilled performance.
One may be unsurprised to learn that when it comes to a philosophical account of skill, both Intellectualists of the Stanley variety and Anti-intellectualists of the Dreyfus sort forego a satisfactory account of control. One may be surprised, however, to learn that both Stanley and Dreyfus forgo such an account for precisely the same reason: each reduce control to a brute, passive, unintelligent, automatic process, which then prevents them from producing a substantive account of how such processes are flexible, manipulable, subject to learning and improvement, responsive to intentional contents at the personal-level, and holistically integrated with both cognitive and motor states. Stanley and Dreyfus make the same mistake for very different reasons, but in making it, they both lose control. In this talk, I will review the reasons for their mistakes and illustrate what kinds of control both leave out.