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Anton Killin, Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind, The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 59, Issue 1, January 2019, Pages 95–98, https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayx035
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Barbara Gail Montero’s Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind is an important contribution to the philosophy of expertise and a rewarding read. The main purpose of the book is to undermine three commonplace assumptions about a subclass of skilled individuals that Montero refers to as ‘experts’. These assumptions are (i) that, when performing well, expert performers across a wide array of domains (from professional arts performers to sports elites to chess grandmasters) ‘just do it’, automatically and effortlessly, without deliberate thought; (ii) that if experts were to think while performing, it would interfere with their performance; (iii) so they should not, at least when all is going well. These assumptions form the ‘just do it’ principle, spelled out in Chapters 1 and 2, which Montero takes as the primary foil to her own view, ‘cognition in action’.
The just-do-it principle: For experts, when all is going well, optimal or near-optimal performance proceeds without any of the following mental processes: self-reflective thinking, planning, predicting, deliberation, attention to or monitoring of their actions, conceptualizing their actions, conscious control, trying, effort, having a sense of the self, or acting for a reason. Moreover, when all is going well, such processes interfere with expert performance and should be avoided. (35)
