In this paper, 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 an adequate, philosophical theory of skill must account. I will argue that neither Jason Stanley nor Hubert Dreyfus have an adequate account of control. Further, and perhaps surprisingly, I will argue that both Stanley and Dreyfus relinquish an account of (...) control for precisely the same reason: each reduce control to a passive, mechanistic, automatic process, which then prevents them from producing a substantive account of how controlled processes can be characterized by seemingly intelligent features and integrated with personal-level states. I will end by introducing three different kinds of control, which are constitutive of skilled action: strategic control, selective, top–down, automatic attention, and motor control. It will become clear that Dreyfus cannot account for any of these three kinds of control while Stanley has difficulty tackling the two latter kinds. (shrink)

One of the hallmarks of virtue is reliably acting well. Such reliable success presupposes that an agent is able to recognize the morally salient features of a situation, and the appropriate response to those features and is motivated to act on this knowledge without internal conflict. Furthermore, it is often claimed that the virtuous person can do this in a spontaneous or intuitive manner. While these claims represent an ideal of what it is to have a virtue, it is less (...) clear how to make good on them. That is, how is it actually possible to spontaneously and reliably act well? In this paper, we will lay out a framework for understanding how it is that one could reliably act well in an intuitive manner. We will do this by developing the concept of an action schema, which draws on the philosophical and psychological literature on skill acquisition and self-regulation. In short, we will give an account of how self-regulation, grounded in skillful structures, can allow for the accurate intuitions and flexible expertise required for virtue. While our primary goal in this paper is to provide a positive theory of how virtuous intuitions might be accounted for, we also take ourselves to be raising the bar for what counts as an explanation of reliable and intuitive action in general. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to articulate a distinction between habit and bodily skill as different ways of acting without deliberation. I start by elaborating on a distinction between habit and skill as different kinds of dispositions. Then I argue that this distinction has direct implications for the varieties of automaticity exhibited in habitual and skilful bodily acts. The argument suggests that paying close attention to the metaphysics of agency can help to articulate more precisely questions regarding the varieties (...) of automaticity exhibited in overt action. (shrink)

The present paper considers our ability to ‘shape our own mental lives’; more specifically, it considers the claim that subjects sometimes can and do engage in ‘mental self-regulation’, that is, that subjects sometimes can be, and are, actively involved with their own mental lives in a goal-directed way. This ability of mental self-regulation has been rather neglected by contemporary philosophers of mind, but I show why it deserves careful philosophical attention. In order to further our understanding of the nature of (...) the phenomenon of mental self-regulation and to locate it within the wider context of our everyday lives and the world we live in, I proceed to develop some conditions which need to be met in order for a subject to be able to engage in mental self-regulation. In developing those conditions we find that compared to the physical realm, our mental lives are a rather elusive domain in the face of attempts at intervention, and our ability to intervene in our own mental lives is rather fragile. We also find that our ability to regulate our own mental lives in many cases depends on our possession of mental skills and mental know-how. Both these observations in turn throw new light on our understanding of the nature of the human mind. (shrink)

In his recent book on skill and virtue, Matt Stichter provides an account based on work in empirical psychology, specifically on self-regulation. In this paper I wish to argue that while this account is novel and well informed, it falls short. I present several examples that I believe Stichter’s view cannot explain and I try to identify the reasons for that. I argue that while trying to avoid the completely anti-intellectualist account of skill especially when it comes to virtue, Stichter (...) may have inadvertently presented an account that is too intellectualist. To clarify my claims, I start with a brief explanation of Stichter’s account of skill as self-regulation, a quick discussion of how he sees this as applying to virtue and then I turn to objections. I present cases in which the skill one acquires was never set as a goal to be achieved as Stichter’s picture would suggest, but simply comes as a byproduct of either aiming at developing a different skill or behaving in ways that don’t involve any goals at all. To this end, I discuss cases with no set goal and cases of transferable skills both in the moral and non-moral domains. I conclude that by defining virtue as self-regulation with a specific moral standard, Stichter may have violated one of the original motivations for the return to virtue ethics, namely that other views tend to over-intellectualize our moral behavior. (shrink)

On an account of virtue as skill, virtues are acquired in the ways that skills are acquired. In this paper I focus on one implication of that account that is deserving of greater attention, which is that becoming more skillful requires learning from one’s failures, but that turns out to be especially challenging when dealing with moral failures. In skill acquisition, skills are improved by deliberate practice, where you strive to correct past mistakes and learn how to overcome your current (...) limitations. A similar story applies to virtue acquisition, as moral failures will be a part of anyone’s life, and we will all have to learn from these experiences. However, despite the importance of being able to learn from our mistakes, this is very difficult in practice, given that failure of any kind can be distressing, and especially so for moral failure. The distress created by a recognition of moral failure often prompts responses of anger, avoidance, or defensiveness; rather than attempts to make amends and when necessary to work on self-improvement. The most potentially distressing response to moral failure is shame, as it is often associated with defensiveness. It is here where emotion regulation will be important to manage that distress, and I focus on the skill of emotion differentiation. I argue that emotion differentiation is a promising strategy for distinguishing the emotions we may experience in the wake of failure, including shame, and to encourage those emotions that motivate self-improvement. Thus, emotion regulation is important for virtue acquisition. (shrink)

The acquisition of virtue can be conceptualized as a self-regulatory process in which deliberate practice results in increasingly higher levels of skillfulness in leading a virtuous life. This conceptualization resonates with philosophical virtue theories as much as it converges with psychological models about skill development, expertise, goal motivation, and self-regulation. Yet, the conceptualization of virtue as skill acquisition poses the crucial question of motivation: What motivates individuals to self-improvement over time so that they can learn from past experience, correct mistakes, (...) and expand their ethical knowledge to new and unfamiliar circumstances? In this paper, it is argued that the motivation to increase one’s level of skillfulness in leading a virtuous life is supported by a specific identity goal, namely the goal to be a moral person. However, this moral identity goal needs to carry specific goal characteristics in order to effectively provide this motivation. It needs to be sufficiently abstract, internally motivated and promotion- rather than prevention-oriented. Research in developmental psychology suggests that the moral identity of children is rather concrete, externally motivated, and prevention-oriented. With development, higher levels of abstraction, internal motivation, and promotion-orientation gain importance providing an important motivational basis for a self-regulated process of virtue acquisition. (shrink)

I argue that Merleau-Ponty is right to claim that some shift in an agent's perspective on the world is partly constitutive of their forming a habit, but that he is wrong about what this shift is because he wrongly conflates habit and skill. I defend an alternative: the perspectiival shift constitutive of habit-formation is that habitual courses of action come to be and seem familiar.

Among the many commonalities between memory and imagination is the fact that they can both be understood as skills. In this chapter, I aim to draw out some connections between the skill of memory and the skill of imagination in an effort to learn something about the nature of these activities and the connection between them. I start by considering the ways that one might work to cultivate these skills in the hope that we could learn something about imagination training (...) by reflection on memory training and vice versa. Interestingly, however, an initial look at the empirical research on the respective training regimens does not show much potential for this kind of crossover. Though there are some commonalities that can be found across the training regimens, these commonalities are nothing special over and above the kinds of commonalities one might find in training regimens for skills of any sort. Fortunately, however, the matter does not end there. When we think more deeply about the details of some of the training regimens for memory, we discover some important connections between the skill of memory and the skill of imagination. In particular, I argue that the two skills turn out to be interestingly intertwined. (shrink)

We often talk of people as being more or less imaginative than one another – as being better or worse at imagining – and we also compare various feats of imagination to one another in terms of how easy or hard they are. Facts such as these might be taken to suggest that imagination is often implicitly understood as a skill. This implicit understanding, however, has rarely (if ever) been made explicit in the philosophical literature. Such is the task of (...) this chapter. I first attempt to flesh out several conditions for an activity to count as a skill. I then attempt to show how imagination can meet such conditions. The chapter concludes with an attempt to answer various worries that might be raised to the claim that imagination should be thought of as a skill. (shrink)

IntroductionSporting skills divide contemporary theorists into two camps. Let us call them the habitualists and the intellectualists. The habitualists hold that thought is the enemy of sporting excellence. In their view, skilled performers need to let their bodies take over; cognitive effort only interferes with skill. The intellectualists retort that sporting performance depends crucially on mental control. As they see it, the exercise of skill is a matter of agency, not brute reflex; the tailoring of action to circumstance requires intelligent (...) conceptual guidance.On the habitualist side are Dreyfus, Beilock and ; intellectualism is defended in various ways by McDowell, Stanley, Sutton, Sutton et al., Montero and Fridland.I think that both sides are right, and that both are wrong. We need to distinguish different aspects of sporting performance. When we do so, we w. (shrink)

Many have thought that exercises of skill are intentional. The argument of the paper is that this thesis fails to account for important types of mistakes and errors. In what psychologists and linguists call “verbal slips with semantic bias”, a speaker mistakenly switches, reverses, or blends certain conceptual contents. Nevertheless, the speaker has successfully exercised an intellectual skill, insofar as her slip uses concepts in conformity to semantic and logical rules. To flesh out how one might successfully exercise skills without (...) doing so intentionally, the paper appeals to the idea of habit. Verbal slips thus show how human skillfulness has a considerably wider scope than is often supposed. (shrink)

Abilities, in contrast to mere dispositions, propensities, or tendencies, abilities seem to be features of agents that put the agent herself in control. But what is the distinguishing feature of abilities vis‐à‐vis other kinds of powers? Our aim in this paper is to point, in answer to this question, to a crucial feature of abilities that existing accounts have tended to neglect: their adaptivity. Adaptivity is a feature of how abilities are exercised. The main reason for its relative neglect has (...) been that most extant accounts have focused solely on whether abilities are exercised successfully in certain possible situations and have mostly understood the exercise of an ability in terms of complete successful performance. We begin by pointing out two aspects of abilities with regard to which current accounts seem (at best) incomplete: control and exercise. We then introduce adaptivity as we understand it, and end by putting it to work in developing a fuller understanding of abilities that does better than current accounts. (shrink)

According to David Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness consists of explaining how and why qualitative experience arises from physical states. Moreover, Chalmers argues that materialist and reductive explanations of mentality are incapable of addressing the hard problem. In this chapter, I suggest that Chalmers’ hard problem can be usefully distinguished into a ‘how question’ and ‘why question,’ and I argue that evolutionary biology has the resources to address the question of why qualitative experience arises from brain states. From this (...) perspective, I discuss the different kinds of evolutionary explanations (e.g., adaptationist, exaptationist, spandrel) that can explain the origins of the qualitative aspects of various conscious states. This argument is intended to clarify which parts of Chalmers’ hard problem are amenable to scientific analysis. (shrink)