This doctoral thesis is about the cognitive basis of skilled performance. More specifically, it questions what sort of understanding, or grasp, skilled performers have of the means and methods by which they perform their impressive endeavors. The thesis concludes that skilled action does not entail conceptual grasp of method on the part of the agent. In advancing its case for this conclusion, it presents a series of arguments in its various chapters in opposition to intellectualism, certain forms of anti-intellectualism, and other influential positions in the philosophy of mind. In addition, beyond this, it recommends that researchers should take seriously the possibility that, in the case of certain sorts of skilled engagement, the performer need not manifest any agential understanding, conceptual or nonconceptual.
An increasingly popular objection to anti-intellectualism about know-how is that there are clear cases where an agent having the dispositional ability to φ does not suffice for her knowing how to φ. Recently, Adam Carter has argued that anti-intellectualism can only rise to meet this sufficiency objection if it imposes additional constraints on know-how. He develops a revisionary anti-intellectualism, on which knowing how to φ not only entails that the agent possesses a reliable ability to φ, but also that she is equipped with certain kind of intellectual grasp of the method by which she is able to reliably φ. This paper argues that Carter's revisionary know-how does not constitute an improvement over the more standard version of anti-intellectualism. Moreover, it is argued that Carter's additional demands concede too much to the intellectualist, and, as a result, commit his revised anti-intellectualism to familiar problems facing the intellectualist account of know-how.
This paper will argue that intellectualism about skill the contention that skilled performance is without exception guided by proposition knowledge is fundamentally flawed. It exposes that intellectualists about skill run into intractable theoretical problems in explicating a role for their novel theoretical conceit of practical modes of presentation. It then examines a proposed solution by Carlotta Pavese which seeks to identify practical modes of presentation with motor representations that guide skilled sensorimotor action. We argue that this proposed identification is problematic on empirical and theoretical grounds, and as such it fails to deliver on its explanatory ambitions. In the final analysis, it will be argued that intellectualism about skill is, in any case, superfluous when it comes to accounting for the aspects of skilled performance it purports to explain.
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