Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes: Embodied Skills and Habits between Dreyfus and Descartes

References

• Hubert L. Dreyfus, ‘Response to McDowell’, Inquiry, no. 50 (2007), 371–377, p.374, referring to Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego (New York: Noonday Press, 1957), 8–49.
   Google Scholar
• Dreyfus, ‘The Return of the Myth of the Mental’, Inquiry, no. 50 (2007), 352–365, p.353.
   Google Scholar
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (London and New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), especially 30–33, 49–54, 72–77.
   Google Scholar
• Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? S. Rand, trans, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5.
   Google Scholar
• Sian L. Beilock, Sarah A. Wierenga, and Thomas H. Carr, ‘Expertise, Attention, and Memory in Sensorimotor Skill Execution’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, no. 55 (2002), 1211–40, p.1236.
   Google Scholar
• Sean Müller & Bruce Abernethy, ‘Skill Learning from an Expertise Perspective: issues and implications for practice and coaching in cricket’, in J. Dosil (ed), The Sport Psychologist's Handbook (Chichester: John Wiley, 2006), 245–261; John Sutton, ‘Batting, Habit, and Memory: The Embodied Mind and the Nature of Skill’, Sport in Society, no. 10 (2007), 763–786.
   Google Scholar
• Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963 [first published 1949]), pp.41–50, 126–130. But for a sophisticated recent taxonomy in which habits are again deliberately yoked to innate propensities, see Tamar Szabo Gendler, ‘Alief in Action (and Reaction)’, Mind & Language, no. 23 (2008), 552–585.
   Google Scholar
• Nathan Brett, ‘Human Habits’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, no. 11 (1981), 357–376; Edward Casey, ‘The Ghost of Embodiment: On Bodily Habitudes and Schemata’, in D. Welton (ed.), Body and Flesh (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 207–225; Bill Pollard, ‘Explaining Actions with Habits’, American Philosophical Quarterly, no. 43 (2006), 57–68; Nancy Snow, ‘Habitual Virtuous Actions and Automaticity’, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, no. 9 (2006), 545–561; Ezio di Nucci, Mind Out of Action (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag, 2008); Clare Carlisle, ‘Between Freedom and Necessity: Félix Ravaisson on Habit and the Moral Life’, Inquiry, no. 53 (2010), 123–145. For Carlisle, ‘a person's habit—her posture, her walk, her gestures, the incline of her head; in short, the way she holds herself—may be what most approximates to her essence’: ‘Creatures of Habit: The Problem and the Practice of Liberation’, Continental Philosophy Review, no. 38 (2006), 19–39, p.22.
   Google Scholar
• Indeed, the terms of this debate reinforce the unfortunate implication that ‘mindedness’ or ‘mindfulness’ is some relatively unified domain. In contrast, we suggest that there are independent anthropological, historical, and conceptual grounds to deny that ‘mind’ or ‘mindedness’ is a useful category in such contexts. See for example Anna Wierzbicka, Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-specific Configurations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Paul S. Macdonald, History of the Concept of Mind: Speculations about Soul, Mind and Spirit from Homer to Hume (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Amelie Rorty, Mind in Action (Boston: Beacon, 1988), especially 5; Ian Hunter, ‘Mind Games and Body Techniques’, Southern Review: Literary and Interdisciplinary Essays, no. 26 (1993), 172–185.
   Google Scholar
• Andy Clark, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World together again (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997), 165.
   Google Scholar
• Susan Hurley, Consciousness in Action (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998), 2.
   Google Scholar
• F.C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 201–2. Compare Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, ‘Kinesthetic Memory’, Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, no. 7 (2003), 69–92, at 71: ‘a kinetic dynamics unfolds that is at once both familiar and yet quintessentially tailored kinetically to the particular situation at hand’ (the essay is reprinted in Sheets-Johnstone, The Corporeal Turn (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009), 253–277).
   Google Scholar
• Lynne Rudder Baker, review of The Body in Mind by Mark Rowlands, Mind, no. 109 (2000), 644–647, 646. This is what gave Clark's summary characterization, in Being There, of cognitive systems like us as being ‘good at Frisbee, bad at logic’ (60), its rhetorical force as cognitive scientists began to catch up with the phenomenology of embodiment.
   Google Scholar
• Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, ‘What Are We Naming?’, in The Corporeal Turn (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009), 328–349, [first published 2005]. For an effective critique of the thin and overly metaphorical conceptions of ‘embodiment’ in recent ‘enactivist’ philosophy of cognitive science, see also Sheets-Johnstone, ‘Animation: the fundamental, essential, and properly descriptive concept’, Continental Philosophy Review, no. 42 (2009), 375–400. While cultural stereotypes often depict the sportsperson or rock musician as inarticulate, both verbal and multimodal communication between expert practitioners can of course be much richer than either journalists or researchers can easily access. See also Sheets-Johnstone, ‘On the Challenge of Languaging Experience’, in The Corporeal Turn, 362–381.
   Google Scholar
• Natalie Sebanz, Harold Bekkering, & Günther Knoblich, ‘Joint Action: Bodies and Minds Moving together’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, no. 10 (2006), 70–76; Bruno Galantucci and Natalie Sebanz, ‘Joint Action: Current Perspectives’, Topics in Cognitive Science, no. 1 (2009), 255–259; R. Keith Sawyer, Group Creativity (Brighton: Psychology Press, 2003).
   Google Scholar
• On dance, Catherine Stevens et al., ‘Choreographic Cognition: The Time-course and Phenomenology of Creating a Dance’, Pragmatics and Cognition, no. 11 (2003), 299–329, and David Kirsh, ‘Thinking with the Body’, Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (2010), http://adrenaline.ucsd.edu/kirsh/articles/interaction/thinkingwithbody.pdf (accessed 6 November 2010); on music, Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994); Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation as Interaction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996); Harris M. Berger, Metal, Rock, and Jazz: Perception and the Phenomenology of Musical Experience (Middletown, CD: Wesleyan University Press, 1999); on embodied disciplines, Loïc Wacquant, Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Greg Downey, Learning Capoeira (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jaida Kim Samudra, ‘Memory in our Body: Thick Participation and the Translation of Kinesthetic Experience’, American Ethnologist, no. 35 (2008), 665–681.
   Google Scholar
• Charles Goodwin, ‘Professional Vision’, American Anthropologist, no. 96 (1994), 606–633; Jean-Pierre Warnier, ‘A Praxeological Approach to Subjectivation in a Material World’, Journal of Material Culture, no. 6 (2001), 5–24; Christina Grasseni, ‘Skilled Vision: An Apprenticeship in Breeding Aesthetics’, Social Anthropology, no. 12 (2004), 41–55; David Kirsh, ‘Distributed Cognition: A Methodological Note’, Pragmatics & Cognition, no. 14 (2006), 249–262; David de Leon, ‘The Cognitive Biographies of Things’, in A. Costall & O. Dreier (eds.), Doing Things with Things (Farnham: Ashgate, 2006), 113–130; Lambros Malafouris & Colin Renfrew (eds.), The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2010); Ed Hutchins and Saeko Nomura, ‘Collaborative Construction of Multimodal Utterances’, in J. Streeck, C. Goodwin, & C. LeBaron (eds.) Multimodality and Human Activity: Research on Human Behaviour, Action, and Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press).
   Google Scholar
• John McDowell, ‘Response to Dreyfus’, Inquiry, no. 50 (2007), 366–370, p.369; compare Dreyfus, ‘Response to McDowell’, 376.
   Google Scholar
• Carlisle, ‘Between Freedom and Necessity’, 131; Charles T. Wolfe, ‘De-ontologizing the Brain: From the Fictional Self to the Social Brain’, C-Theory, no. 30 (2007), http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=572 (accessed 10 November 2010).
   Google Scholar
• Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 38.
   Google Scholar
• Marjorie Grene, Descartes (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985), 52. Likewise, laments Jonathan Rée, Descartes made the body just another object in a world ‘not of meaning and love and laughter and tears…but of material particles going about their lonely business’: Rée, ‘Subjectivity in the Twentieth Century’, New Literary History, no. 26 (1995), 205–217.
   Google Scholar
• René Descartes, L'homme, in C. Adam & P. Tannery (eds), Oeuvres de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1996), vol. xi (abbreviated below as AT); T.S. Hall (trans.), René Descartes: Treatise of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). For more detail on this interpretation, and contrast with standard readings, see John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 50–106; Sutton, ‘The Body and the Brain’, in S. Gaukroger, J. Schuster, & J. Sutton (eds.), Descartes’ Natural Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000), 697–722. For other revisionary work in the same vein, see Desmond Clarke, Descartes’ Philosophy of Science (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1982); Richard B. Carter, Descartes’ Medical Philosophy: The Organic Solution to the Mind-Body Problem (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1983); T.M. Brown, ‘Descartes, Dualism, and Psychosomatic Medicine’, in W.F. Bynum, R. Porter, & M. Shepherd(eds.)., The Anatomy of Madness (London: Routledge, 1985), vol.1, 40–62; Peter Schouls, Descartes and the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989), 144–172; Amelie Rorty, ‘Descartes on Thinking with the Body’, in J. Cottingham (ed.), The Cambridge Compananion to Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 371–392; Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). A few other scholars see the depth and ramifications of Descartes’ reliance on self-organizing dynamical and non-linear feedback mechanisms in his biological, physiological, and medical psychology, but instead of jettisoning the assumption that he was aiming at a linear biophysics of barren matter, convict him of inconsistency: see especially Emily Grosholz, Cartesian Method and the Problem of Reduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Steven Shapin, ‘Descartes the Doctor: Rationalism and its Therapies’, British Journal for the History of Science, no. 33 (2000), 131–154; Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks: Machine and Organism in Descartes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).
   Google Scholar
• Owen Flanagan, The Science of the Mind, 2nd edition, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 3.
   Google Scholar
• Timothy J. Reiss, ‘Denying the Body? Memory and the Dilemmas of History in Descartes’, Journal of the History of Ideas, no. 57 (1996), 587–607, 604; compare Peter Dear, ‘A Mechanical Microcosm: Bodily Passions, Good Manners, and Cartesian Mechanism’, in C. Lawrence and S. Shapin, (eds.)., Science Incarnate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 51–82.
   Google Scholar
• AT xi. 177.
   Google Scholar
• AT xi. 178.
   Google Scholar
• AT xi. 178–9.
   Google Scholar
• Hall, René Descartes: Treatise of Man, 96, n. 145.
   Google Scholar
• AT xi. 185.
   Google Scholar
• AT xi. 185.
   Google Scholar
• Compare Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 70–72.
   Google Scholar
• Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 74–81.
   Google Scholar
• Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), especially 241–256 and 375–377; Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 83–97. On the holistic background in humoral materialism, see Gail Kern Paster, ‘Nervous Tension: Networks of Blood and Spirit in the Early Modern Body’, in D. Hillman & C. Mazzio (eds.), The Body in Parts (London: Routledge, 1997), 107–125; Paster, Humoring the Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004); Sutton, ‘Spongy Brains and Material Memories’, in M. Floyd-Wilson & G. Sullivan (eds.), Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 14–34.
   Google Scholar
• René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, AT xi, 394–5.
   Google Scholar
• John Cottingham, ‘The Self and the Body: Alienation and Integration in Cartesian Ethics’, Seventeenth-Century French Studies, no. 17 (1995), 1–13, p.11.
   Google Scholar
• See the entries for ‘disposition’ and ‘habitude’ in Stephen Voss’ outstanding lexicon, in his edition of The Passions of the Soul (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 138, 140; Sutton, ‘The Body and the Brain’, 712–714.
   Google Scholar
• See Reiss, ‘Denying the Body?’.
   Google Scholar
• Compare Adam Phillips, ‘Minds’, in Terrors and Experts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 93–104, p.99, on the Cartesian soul as ‘a kind of enraged bureaucrat, a master of circumstances’.
   Google Scholar
• Sutton, ‘The Body and the Brain’. For something of the subsequent uptake and history of related ideas in British philosophy, see Sutton, ‘Carelessness and Inattention: Mind-wandering and the Physiology of Fantasy from Locke to Hume’, in C.T. Wolfe & O. Gal (eds), The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science (Springer, 2010), 243–263.
   Google Scholar
• In arguing recently that we are now fulfilling a ‘Cartesian vision’ by which our bodies are ‘just machines in space’ and ‘something other than ourselves’, Ian Hacking discusses many intriguing cases of the apparent transferability and alienability of body parts, but not a single example of skilful embodied activity: see Hacking, ‘The Cartesian Vision Fulfilled: Analogue Bodies and Digital Minds’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, no. 30 (2005), 153–166, and ‘Our Neo-Cartesian Bodies in Parts’, Critical Inquiry 34 (2007), 78–105. Hacking's neo-Cartesian future, a reader of Malabou might note, is one in which mere flexibility has won out over the richer forms of plasticity which have resistance inbuilt.
   Google Scholar
• Compare Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 38.
   Google Scholar
• But here is one dramatic statement of intellectualism in practice: ‘Sir Isaac Newton laid the foundation for modern skiing with several basic laws of motion. Violations of these laws are the cause of problems. Anyone attempting to thoroughly understand skiing should know these laws and the terms used in their proper, intended meaning’, John Howe, Skiing Mechanics (Boulder, CO: Poudre Press, 1982), p.9, as quoted in Sigmund Loland, ‘The Mechanics and Meaning of Alpine Skiing: Methodological and Epistemological Notes on the Study of Sport Technique’, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, no. 19 [1992], 55–77, A particularly effective critique of such views is Hubert L. Dreyfus & Stuart E. Dreyfus, ‘Making a Mind versus Modelling the Brain’, in S.R. Graubard (ed.), The Artificial Intelligence Debate (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1988), 15–41. An influential defence of the priority of ‘knowing-that’ over ‘knowing-how’ in recent analytic philosophy is Jason Stanley & Timothy Williamson, ‘Knowing How’, Journal of Philosophy, no. 98 (2001), 411–444: for responses see Alva Noë, ‘Against Intellectualism’, Analysis, no. 65 (2005), 278–290, and Josefa Toribio, ‘How do we know how?’ Philosophical Explorations, no. 11 (2008), 39–52. It is harder to assess whether more moderate, empirically-anchored theoretical views in contemporary cognitive psychology remain recognizably intellectualist in these respects. We have previously put such charges to Roger Chaffin's impressive account of memory in music performance: see Geeves, Christensen, Sutton, & McIlwain, ‘Critical Review of Practicing Perfection’, Empirical Musicology Review, no. 3 (2008), 163–172. Likewise, dynamically-oriented sports psychologists charge Anders Ericsson's impressive ‘deliberate practice’ framework with residual intellectualism: see for example Bruce Abernethy, Damian Farrow, and Jason Berry, ‘Constraints and Issues in the Development of a General Theory of Expert Perceptual-Motor Performance’, in J.L. Starkes & K.A. Ericsson (eds.), Expert Performance in Sports (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2003).
   Google Scholar
• Pollard, ‘Explaining Actions with Habits’, 58, 67. See also Pollard, ‘The Rationality of Habitual Action’, Proceedings of the Durham-Bergen Philosophy Conference, no. 1 (2005), 39–50.
   Google Scholar
• Pollard, ‘Explaining Actions with Habits’, 67.
   Google Scholar
• Brett, ‘Human Habits’, 365–6.
   Google Scholar
• Sheets-Johnstone, ‘Kinesthetic Memory’, 75; ‘Animation’, 390–4.
   Google Scholar
• Brett, ‘Human Habits’, 369.
   Google Scholar
• Again, because we're not here doing detailed exegesis, our discussion here neglects important subtleties in and differences between these theories: in simplifying and highlighting certain key shared assumptions, however, we seek to capture recognizable views across these theorists.
   Google Scholar
• Dreyfus, ‘Refocusing the Question: can there be skillful coping without propositional representations or brain representations?’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, no. 1 (2002), 413–425.
   Google Scholar
• Dreyfus and Dreyfus, Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer (New York: Free Press, 1986), 32.
   Google Scholar
• Dreyfus, ‘Overcoming the Myth of the Mental’, Topoi, no. 25 (2006), 43–49, 47. Compare Dreyfus, ‘A Phenomenological Account of the Development of Ethical Expertise and Mastery’, in E. Jespersen (ed), Moving Bodies, no. 4 (2006), 15–30, especially 20: the genuine expert has gradually learned ‘to decompose…situations into subclasses, each of which share the same decision, single action, or tactic. This allows an immediate response to each situation’. In this and other more recent versions of his model of the stages of skill acquisition, Dreyfus does allow for further development beyond expertise, towards ‘mastery’ and ‘practical wisdom’, but the key points under discussion here are not affected.
   Google Scholar
• Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 87. I owe this quotation to the excellent critical discussion of the Dreyfus model by Evan M. Selinger and Robert P. Crease, ‘Dreyfus on Expertise: The Limits of Phenomenological Analysis’, Continental Philosophy Review, no. 35 (2002), 245–279.
   Google Scholar
• Dreyfus, ‘Intelligence without Representation: Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Mental Representation’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, no. 1 (2002), 367–383.
   Google Scholar
• Dreyfus and Dreyfus, Mind Over Machine, 30.
   Google Scholar
• Elizabeth Ennen, ‘Phenomenological Coping Skills and the Striatal Memory System’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, no. 2 (2003), 299–325.
   Google Scholar
• Ennen, ‘Phenomenological Coping Skills’, p.314, relying especially on Ann Graybiel, ‘The Basal Ganglia and Chunking of Action Repertoires’, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, no. 70 (1998), 119–136. There are difficult questions about the unity of the category of ‘memory’, given the unique properties of the procedural memory systems: see Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, ‘Wittgenstein and the Memory Debate’, New Ideas in Psychology, no. 27 (2009), 213–227; Kirk Michaelian, ‘Is Memory a Natural Kind?’, Memory Studies, no. 4 (in press). As we read it, however, recent neuroscientific research increasingly underlines the dynamic interactivity of procedural and declarative memory processes, to such an extent that the distinction might come under some pressure. See Graybiel, ‘The Basal Ganglia: Learning New Tricks and Loving it’, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, no. 15 (2005), 638–644; Henry H. Yin & Barbara J. Knowlton, ‘The Role of the Basal Ganglia in Habit Formation’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, no. 7 (2006), 464–476.
   Google Scholar
• Ennen, ‘Phenomenological Coping Skills’, 321, quoting Dreyfus. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 3.
   Google Scholar
• John Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 150. Searle goes on to say that the rules ‘recede into the Background’, which is a much harder doctrine to interpret: see especially the discussion of Searle's views on this point by Dreyfus in ‘Responses’, in M. Wrathall & J. Malpas (eds.), Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 324–6. But Dreyfus there accepts that he and Searle agree on the fact that the body takes over.
   Google Scholar
• Fred Dretske, ‘Where is the Mind when the Body Performs?’, Stanford Humanities Review, no. 6 (1998), URL: http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/6–2/html/dretske.html (accessed 6 November 2010). Dretske does, however, argue that even though consciousness is withdrawn, ‘intelligence’ is delegated or dispersed, and that the skilful routines thus delegated to the body ‘bear the marks of genuine intelligence’. We think that this last point is spot on, a version of our idea of applying intelligence to the reflexes. Dretske also does allow a range of roles for psychology in attending to higher-order objectives, although from our perspective he retains an unnecessarily hierarchical or managerial picture of the control of skilled action.
   Google Scholar
• In these respects, our critique of the phenomenologists’ response to intellectualism could be connected with a discussion of currently influential ‘dual process’ theories in psychology and moral philosophy, which also entrench such an extreme dichotomy between two entirely opposed modes of response. For the link to theories of memory see Eliot R. Smith and Jamie DeCoster, ‘Dual-Process Models in Social and Cognitive Psychology: Conceptual Integration and Links to Underlying Memory Systems’, Personality and Social Psychology Review, no. 4 (2000), 108–131, and for an entry into current controversies about dual process theories and social intuitionism in moral psychology see Joshua D. Greene, ‘Dual-Process Morality and the Personal/Impersonal Distinction: A Reply to McGuire, Langdon, Coltheart, and Mackenzie’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, no. 45 (2009), 581–584. We don't have space here to make the connections with theories of skilful coping more explicit. There are clear statements and critical evaluations of dual process theories in J. Evans and K. Frankish (eds.), In Two Minds: Dual Processes and Bbeyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
   Google Scholar
• Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking (London: Penguin, 2005), 18–47.
   Google Scholar
• The sporting quotations are from Ken Barrington and Sandy Gordon: for references and discussion see Sutton, ‘Batting, Habit, and Memory’, 767. Contemporary sports scientists are heavily influenced by J.J. Gibson's ecological psychology and by dynamical systems theories in cognitive science, in each case reinforcing the tendency to distrust mindedness: see for example Ian Renshaw, Keith Davids, Rick Shuttleworth and Jia Yi Chow, ‘Insights from Ecological Psychology and Dynamical Systems Theory Can Underpin a Philosophy of Coaching’, International Journal of Sport Psychology, no. 40 (2009), 580–602; Renshaw, Davids and Geert J.P. Savelsbergh (eds.), Motor Learning in Practice: A Constraints-led Approach (London: Routledge, 2010). For musicians’ assumptions and pedagogical traditions, see Roger Chaffin, Gabriela Imreh, and Mary Crawford, Practicing Perfection: Memory and Piano Performance (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002), especially xii-xiii and 26–65.
   Google Scholar
• Erik Rietveld and colleagues argue for an analogous pluralism in understanding embodied cognition and skilful action, with cognitive and abnormal psychology joining theories of affect and dynamical neuroscience to supplement phenomenological and philosophical investigations. While we draw on Rietveld's constructive theoretical proposals below, he does not canvas the kind of work with known groups in the cognitive neuroscience and psychology of dance and sport which we are recommending. On pluralism see Pim Klaassen, Erik Rietveld, and Julien Topal, ‘Inviting Complementary Perspectives on Situated Normativity in Everyday Life’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, no. 9 (2010), 53–73. Dreyfus, however, draws constructively neither on psychological research, stressing instead occasionally the anti-cognitivist neuroscience of Walter Freeman, nor on the sport sciences, which remain an enormous, often conceptually sophisticated, almost entirely untapped resource for philosophical exploration.
   Google Scholar
• Michael F. Land & Peter McLeod, ‘From Eye Movements to Actions: How Batsmen Hit the Ball’, Nature Neuroscience, no. 3 (2000), 1340–1345; Land & Benjamin W. Tatler, Looking and Acting: Vision and Eye Movements in Natural Behaviour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 153–160; see Sutton, ‘Batting, Habit, and Memory’, 770–4.
   Google Scholar
• We can briefly mention two further intriguing examples of the kind of research in dance and sport with which studies of absorbed coping and embodied skill could be dealing. Beatriz Calvo-Merino and colleagues argue that our response to dance sequences, for example in ballet or capoeira, is driven not by abstract knowledge of an action repertoire, but only on the basis of individual movement experience in a specific movement style: our understanding of action is by motor simulation and is tuned to an individual motor repertoire (B. Calvo-Merino, D.E. Glaser, J. Grezes, R.E. Passingham, & P. Haggard, ‘Action Observation and Acquired Motor Skills: An fMRI Study with Expert Dancers’, Cerebral Cortex, no. 15 (2005), 1243–1249). Meanwhile, Sian Beilock and colleagues suggest that expert performance in motor skills requires little attention, operates largely outside of working memory, and is substantially closed to introspection: therefore, they argue, highly-skilled practitioners in movement domains exhibit a surprising ‘expertise-induced amnesia’, by which their recollections of real-time performance are ‘impoverished’ compared to novices (Sian L. Beilock & Thomas H. Carr, ‘On the Fragility of Skilled Performance: What Governs Choking Under Pressure?’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, no. 130 (2001), 701–725; Sian L. Beilock, Sarah A. Wierenga, & Thomas H. Carr, ‘Memory and Expertise: What Do Experienced Athletes Remember?’, in Starkes & Ericsson (eds.), Expert Performance in Sports, especially 315–6). We discuss these lines of research and their relation to the phenomenological tradition in future work.
   Google Scholar
• Michael Wheeler, Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 120; Wheeler, ‘Cognition in Context: Phenomenology, Situated Robotics, and the Frame Problem’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 16 (2008), 323–349.
   Google Scholar
• Wheeler, Reconstructing the Cognitive World, 131–2; ‘Cognition in Context’, 338.
   Google Scholar
• Wheeler, Reconstructing the Cognitive World, 229.
   Google Scholar
• Wheeler, Reconstructing the Cognitive World, 139.
   Google Scholar
• Wheeler, Reconstructing the Cognitive World, 142–3. Dreyfus, in contrast, often appears somewhat uninterested in dimensions of variation within expert performance, or across distinctive expert domains: for recent critiques along these lines see for example Barbara Montero, ‘Does Bodily Awareness Interfere with Highly Skilled Movement?’, Inquiry, no. 53 (2010), 105–122; Jørgen W. Eriksen, ‘Mindless Coping in Competitive Sport: Some Implications and Consequences’, Sport, Ethics, & Philosophy, no. 4 (2010), 66–86. Dreyfus, meanwhile, accuses Wheeler of a ‘cognitivist misreading of Heidegger’: ‘Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing it Would Require Making it More Heideggerian’, Philosophical Psychology, no. 20 (2007), 247–268,.
   Google Scholar
• David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), from whom we borrow and extend the notion of ‘instructional nudges’.
   Google Scholar
• These interviews were conducted by Ed Cooke. Likewise, in a more formal study by Juanita Weissensteiner, one of the best Australian cricketers of recent times reports that his multimodal routine includes essential verbalized components: ‘Well, in the lead-up, I mark my crease, I turn towards the stumps, I mark my crease, I tap my right foot about three or four times on the toe, then I turn around and I tell myself to have my arms either as loose as possible or whatever I've actually been working on at the time…I get that right to start off, then I tell myself “play straight, play straight” or the other one I might use is “be sharp, be sharp”. I do this until it gets to the point of delivery where all my intention, all my focus goes on him letting go of the ball’: Juanita Weissensteiner, Bruce Abernethy, and Damian Farrow, ‘Towards the Development of a Conceptual Model of Expertise in Cricket Batting’, Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, no. 21 (2009), 276–292.
   Google Scholar
• On self-talk and the non-semantic looping roles of verbal tags and maxims, see Andy Clark, ‘Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation’, in P. Carruthers & J. Boucher (eds.), Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 162–183; Clark, ‘Material Symbols’, Philosophical Psychology, no. 19 (2006), 291–307; Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 129–133.
   Google Scholar
• Compare concert pianist Gabriela Imreh's comment, while learning Bach's extraordinarily demanding Italian Concerto (Presto) that ‘the practice I needed was in my head’: Roger Chaffin & Gabriela Imreh, ‘Practicing Perfection: Piano Performance as Expert Memory’, Psychological Science 13 (2002), 342–349.
   Google Scholar
• Elizabeth A. Behnke, ‘Edmund Husserl's Contribution to Phenomenology of the Body in Ideas II’, in T. Nenon & L.E. Embree (eds.), Issues in Husserl's Ideas II (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 135–160, 154. Behnke acknowledges the Sartrean mode of embodied experience which Dreyfus celebrates, the body ‘passed over in silence, transcended toward the task, pre-reflectively geared in with the situation,…utterly undisturbed either by the visibility of this comportment to others, or by one's own reflective glance; one is oblivious to oneself, completely caught up in whatever one is doing’: but she notes that this mode of bodily ‘self-effacement’ is for Sartre only one possible ontological dimension of the body, and identifies it as a potential ‘locus of crisis in need of a critique of corporeal experience’, to be supplemented (if not replaced) with other modes in which distinctive fields of experiential possibility can be accessed. See Behnke, ‘The Socially Shaped Body and the Critique of Corporeal Experience’, in K.J. Morris (ed.), Sartre on the Body (London: Palgrave, 2010), 231–255.
   Google Scholar
• Elizabeth A. Behnke, ‘Interkinaesthetic Affectivity: A Phenomenological Approach’, Continental Philosophy Review, no. 41 (2008), 143–161.
   Google Scholar
• Elizabeth A. Behnke, ‘Matching’, in D.H. Johnson (ed.), Bone, Breath, and Gesture (Berkley, CA.: North Atlantic Books, 1995), 317–337. (First published 1988).
   Google Scholar
• Elizabeth A. Behnke, ‘Contact Improvisation and the Lived World’, in M. Diaconu (ed.), Kunst und Wahrheit (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2003), 39–61.
   Google Scholar
• Elizabeth A. Behnke, ‘Ghost Gestures: Phenomenological Investigations of Bodily Micromovements and their Intercorporeal Implications’, Human Studies, no. 20 (1997), 181–201.
   Google Scholar
• Erik Rietveld, ‘The Skillful Body as a Concernful System of Possible Actions’, Theory & Psychology, no. 18 (2008), 341–363, especially 350–1.
   Google Scholar
• K. Anders Ericsson, ‘Development of Elite Performance and Deliberate Practice’, in Starkes & Ericsson (eds.), Expert Performance in Sports, 64–65.
   Google Scholar
• Jack Reynolds, ‘Dreyfus and Deleuze on l'habitude, Coping, and Trauma in Skill Acquisition’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, no. 14 (2006), 539–559.
   Google Scholar
• Ivar Hagendoorn, ‘Cognitive Dance Improvisation: How Study of the Motor System Can Inspire Dance (and vice versa)’, Leonardo, no. 36 (2003), 221–7.
   Google Scholar