Philosophical Psychology 30 (7):896-924 (2017)
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Abstract |
From our everyday commuting to the gold medalist’s world-class performance, skillful actions are characterized by fine-grained, online agentive control. What is the proper explanation of such control? There are two traditional candidates: intellectualism explains skillful agentive control by reference to the agent’s propositional mental states; anti-intellectualism holds that propositional mental states or reflective processes are unnecessary since skillful action is fully accounted for by automatic coping processes. I examine the evidence for three psychological phenomena recently held to support anti-intellectualism and argue that it supports neither traditional candidate, but an intermediate attention-control account, according to which the top-down, intention-directed control of attention is a necessary component of skillful action. Only this account recognizes both the role of automatic control in skilled action and the need for higher-order cognition to thread automatic processes together into a unified, skillful performance. This applies to bodily skillful action in general, from the world-class performance of experts to mundane, habitual action. The attention-control account stresses that, for intentions to play their role as top-down modulators of attention, agents must sustain the intention’s activation; hence, the need for reflecting throughout performance.
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Keywords | skill expertise habit attention automaticity utilization behavior dual process intention |
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DOI | 10.1080/09515089.2017.1325457 |
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References found in this work BETA
Dual-Process Theories of Higher Cognition Advancing the Debate.Jonathan Evans & Keith E. Stanovich - 2013 - Perspectives on Psychological Science 8 (3):223-241.
Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes: Embodied Skills and Habits Between Dreyfus and Descartes.John Sutton, Doris McIlwain, Wayne Christensen & Andrew Geeves - 2011 - Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42 (1):78-103.
View all 48 references / Add more references
Citations of this work BETA
Beyond Automaticity: The Psychological Complexity of Skill.Elisabeth Pacherie & Myrto Mylopoulos - 2020 - Topoi 40 (3):649-662.
Attention in Skilled Behavior: An Argument for Pluralism.Alex Dayer & Carolyn Dicey Jennings - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 12 (3):615-638.
The Spur of the Moment: What Jazz Improvisation Tells Cognitive Science.Steve Torrance & Frank Schumann - 2019 - AI and Society 34 (2):251-268.
Not Being There: An Analysis of Expertise‐Induced Amnesia.Simon Høffding & Barbara Gail Montero - 2020 - Mind and Language 35 (5):621-640.
View all 18 citations / Add more citations
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