Anti-Intellectualism for the Learning and Employment of Skill
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Anti-Intellectualism for the Learning and Employment of Skill Daniel C. Burnston 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract I draw on empirical results from perceptual and motor learning to argue for an antiintellectualist position on skill. Anti-intellectualists claim that skill or know-how is nonpropositional. Recent proponents of the view have stressed the flexible but fine-grained nature of skilled control as supporting their position. However, they have left the nature of the mental representations underlying such control undertheorized. This leaves open several possible strategies for the intellectualist, particularly with regard to skill learning. Propositional knowledge may structure the inputs to sensorimotor learning, may constitute the outcomes of said learning, or may be needed for the employment of learned skill. I argue that sensorimotor learning produces multi-scale associational representations, and that these representations are of the right sort to underlie flexible and fine-grained control. I then suggest that their content is vitally indeterminate with regard to propositional content attribution, because they exhibit a kind of open-ended structure. I articulate this kind of structure, and use it to respond to the three intellectualist strategies. I then show how the perspective I advance offers insights for understanding both instruction and expert practice.
1 Introduction In this paper, I will argue in favor of anti-intellectualist views of skill, via analysis of perceptual and motor learning. Recent anti-intellectualist arguments have contended that the fine-grained and flexible nature of skillful control resists explanation in terms of propositional knowledge. However, they have left the nature of the mental representations involved in this kind of control undertheorized. As a result, intellectualists can respond in a number of ways, particularly regarding how skills are learned. Propositional knowledge can be vital for skill either as the input to learning, as the outcome of learning, or in the employment of learned abilities.
* Daniel C. Burnston [email protected]
1
Philosophy Department, Tulane Brain Institute, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA
Burnston D.C.
I will discuss the nature of the mental representations acquired during perceptual and motor learning, as a way of motivating the anti-intellectualist position. There are two key points about these representations: (i) their content outstrips any propositional knowledge agents have prior to learning (e.g., via instruction); and (ii) their contents are structured in a way that resists describing them as modes of presentation of propositional contents. I will argue that these kinds of representations are part and parcel of the “intelligent but non-propositional mechanisms responsible for skill” (Fridland 2014, p. 2736). In section 2, I lay out the dialectic in more detail. In section 3, I discuss the kinds of representations generated by perceptual and sensorimotor learning. Section 4 shows how analysis of these representatio
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