Longer, smaller, faster, stronger: On skills and intelligence

ABSTRACT

How does practice change our behaviors such that they go from being awkward, unskilled actions to elegant, skilled performances? This is the question that I wish to explore in this paper. In the first section of the paper, I will defend the tight connection between practice and skill and then go on to make precise how we ought to construe the concept of practice. In the second section, I will suggest that practice contributes to skill by structuring and automatizing the motor routines constitutive of skilled actions. I will cite how this fact about skilled action has misled many philosophers to conclude that skills are mindless or bodily. In the third section of the paper, I will challenge this common misconception about automaticity by appealing to empirical evidence of motor chunking. This evidence reveals that there are two opposing processes involved in the automaticity of skilled action: one process that is largely associative, which I will call “concatenation,” and a second which is a controlled cognitive process, which I will call “segmentation.” As a result of this evidence, we will be in a position to see clearly why skills are minded and intelligent not merely during their acquisition and not simply in virtue of their connection to intentional states but, rather, in their very nature. I will end by reflecting on some theoretical reasons for why this is exactly what we should expect to be the case when it comes to skilled action.

KEYWORDS:

• Skill
• practice
• automaticity
• motor chunking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For instance, see Matt Stichter’s (2007) defense of Aristotle’s view of skill as “empiricist”: He claims that holding that skills are learned through practice puts Aristotle’s view in line with the accounts of Isocrates and the rhetoricians.

2. See Aristotle Physics II 3 and Metaphysics V 2 for a discussion of the four causes.

3. See Millikan (2000), Section 4.3, for a discussion of the ways in which abilities can succeed and be improved.

4. See, for instance, Anderson (1982) and H. Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986).

5. For a defense of this notion of practice and consideration of its significance for understanding human cognition, see Fridland (2013, 2014a) and Fridland and Moore (2014b).

6. This is an important point to recognize if we want to tie skill learning to human cognition, generally, and to imitation, in particular. This is because imitation is often thought to have the functional, evolutionary role of allowing humans to learn skills. What the studies on imitation and especially on overimitation show clearly is that humans have a particular obsession not only with the goals of a task (that is, humans don’t just emulate) but with the fine-grained, detailed strategy with which a task is performed (i.e., they imitate). For more on this, see, for instance, (Call, Carpenter, and Tomasello (2005); Fridland and Moore (2014b); Horner and Whiten (2005); Over and Carpenter (2012); Tomasello (1996, 1999)).

7. See Fridland and Moore (2014b) and Fridland (2018) for a defense of the uniqueness of the technique-centered orientation to humans. See also Sterelny (2012) for more on the distinction between human and non-human primate skill learning.

8. I don’t take this to be a comprehensive list of features of automaticity, and, in fact, I don’t think such a feature list is possible. I’ve argued so much in [removed]. Rather, I take it that I am pointing to several features of automaticity that are relevant to this discussion.

9. See, for instance Logan (1979); Posner and Snyder (1975a, 1975b).

10. I don’t mean to suggest that all philosophers fall into this trap. There are notable exceptions, especially by those who work on embodied cognition, but, still, the tendency is real.

11. See Fridland (2017) for several examples of philosophers equating being automatic with being unintelligent.

12. See Logan (1985) for more on skill, control, and automaticity.

13. See Fridland (2015) for more on the relationship between intelligence and learning, and, more specifically, on the relationship between intelligence and flexibility, transferability, manipulability, and appropriateness. See also Levy (2015) and Mandelbaum (2015) for more on the connection between flexibility and intelligence.

14. See Fridland (2012) for an explicit argument for this view.

15. There is some controversy over how many elements can be stored in working memory. Almost everyone agrees that at least three to five elements can be stored in working memory (e.g., Bo & Seidler, 2009; Pammi et al., 2012), but recent studies suggest that working memory can store as many as seven to ten elements (Kennerley et al., 2004; Sakai et al., 2003) and maybe more (Ericsson et al., 1980).

16. It may be worth noting that I take representations to be informational states of a system. Sometimes representations are involved in carrying information in subpersonal, modular systems that are informationally encapsulated. In this way, representations are not necessarily conceptual or propositional, and they are not necessarily responsive to conceptual, propositional content.

17. See, for instance, Rosenthal (1986) and Chalmers (1995) for more on mentality and cognitive function without consciousness.

18. A related question is whether non-human primates are capable of and/or inclined to engage in this kind of parsing of behavioral repertoires. Work by Byrne (2003) suggests that non-human primates represent complex behaviors as sequences or what they call behavioral programs, but it isn’t, at this point, known if non-human primates ever take those behavioral elements as intentional objects to refine, improve, or recombine, as humans do in practice and teaching. That is, it is not clear if they function as genuine sequences. See Sterelny (2012) and Fridland (2014a) for related considerations.

19. See, for instance Hall and Magill (1995); Lee, Magill, and Weeks (1985); Moxley (1979); Schmidt (1975); and Schmidt and Bjork (1992) for more on the effects of variability in practice on skill learning.

20. For more on the connection between the technique-centered orientation, high-fidelity transmission of skills, and teaching, see Fridland (2018).

21. This point is very much in the same spirit as much recent philosophical and scientific work claiming that the motor representations and motor processing involved in intentional or skillful behaviors are intelligent. See, for instance Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese, and Rizzolatti (2000); Rossetti (2001); Metzinger and Gallese (2003); Stevens (2005); Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia (2008); Pacherie (2011); Nanay (2013); Butterfill and Sinigaglia (2014); Sinigaglia and Butterfill (2015); Lex, Schütz, Knoblauch, and Schack (2015); Pavese (2015), Pavese (2017); Mylopoulos and Pacherie (2017); Brozzo (2017); and Levy (2017).

22. To put it provocatively, if we are to have dispositions that are going to track knowledge, that is, dispositions that will allow us to know what to do, when and where to do it, and with how much, then those dispositions themselves must be structured in an intelligent fashion. This is provocative relative to Stanley and Williamson (2016) view of skill.

23. See Shepherd (2014) for a similar way of conceptualizing control as connected to flexible execution.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ellen Fridland

Ellen Fridland is a philosopher at King's College London. She works primarily on skill and the intelligence characteristic of automatic,immediate cognitive processes.