Abstract
To gain insight into human nature philosophers often discuss the inferior performance that results from deficits such as blindsight or amnesia. Less often do they look at superior abilities. A notable exception is Herbert Dreyfus who has developed a theory of expertise according to which expert action generally proceeds automatically and unreflectively. We address one of Dreyfus’s primary examples of expertise: chess. At first glance, chess would seem an obvious counterexample to Dreyfus’s view since, clearly, chess experts are engaged in deep strategic thought. However, Dreyfus’s argument is subtle. He accepts that analysis and deliberation play a role in chess, yet he thinks that all such thought is predicated on intuitive, arational expert perception, and action. We argue that even the so-called “intuitive” aspect of chess is rational through and through.
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Notes
Though we restrict our discussion to chess here, we actually think that Dreyfus' account of absorbed coping incorrectly describes a wide range of top-level, professional abilities (see Montero 2010, forthcoming).
See Rietveld (2010) for an argument and discussion of how our everyday way of being involves, primarily, unreflective action.
Moreover, see Saariluoma and Kalakoski (1998) for an illustration of how the Brooks' letter task, which involves counting the corners on block letters, degrades chess performance.
Of course, there are a few exceptions. One rather amusing one is the case of the Dutch chess player Daniël Stellawgen. Stellawgen was an extremely strong player, already over 2300 when [the second author] met him at the World Youth Championships in Barcelona (both were 12 years old). Stellawgen loved music and always used to listen to it before his games, and sometimes (using a headset) during his games. [The second author] was curious as to why he did this and so asked him about it. He explained that during games, he played background classical music with neither a bass line nor a steady melody, and which he found impossible to get stuck in his head (or even remember). Before using the music he had a huge problem getting songs stuck in his head. So in this case, a player listened to music during games precisely to avoid getting music stuck in his head!
Though this is generally true, very modern, very young chess playing prodigies are sometimes so computer-driven that they never have to learn these rules. However, this is exceedingly rare. For a discussion of the use of how players rely on computers in contemporary chess, see Hartman (2008), especially his analysis of how the use of computers in pre-game preparations has led some chess theorists to describe chess as “rule-independent,” and based more on calculation (pp. 55–56 and fn 21).
We learned this rule from Larry Evans who learned it from Julio Kaplan in the 1970s, when Kaplan was training Evans for international play. Evans, who admittedly often can't remember what he has had for breakfast, has remembered this rule ever since.
Steve Blass made his Major League Baseball debut in 1964, and upheld a very strong strikeout record until the 1972 season when his pitching suddenly and inexplicably deteriorated. His game never recovered, and he retired from baseball in 1975. The expression, “Steve Blass disease,” has subsequently been used to refer to a major inexplicable change in a player's skill level.
In The Daily Texan, The Associated Press, published: Friday, August 6, 2004; updated: Friday, January 9, 2009. See also, the book Smart Baseball, in which the author describes the cause of “the thing” as unknown, but he also quotes his son, a player with the Colorado Rockies, who claims to have gotten over it by positing positive affirmations of his ability all around his home.
Though little is known about Steve Blass disease, there are numerous studies on how thinking about one's performance in action affects it. See [reference omitted], for a discussion of some of these. Though it would be beyond the scope of this paper to discuss these here, we would like to mention on particularly relevant study by Wilson and Schooler (1991) which suggests that deliberation may not affect professional level activities. It shows that when college students have to explain the reasons for preferring some brands of jam over others their rankings diverge greatly from one another as well as from both from the rankings of students who are were asked to simply rank their preferences without explaining them and from professional food critics' rankings. But professional food critics' rankings are not subject to a similar effect, for not only are they expert tasters but they are experts at describing what it is they are tasting and such description requires paying attention to the various aspects of what they are tasting.
Morozevich is probably the lone counterexample.
During the 2010 World Championship we witnessed: Grunfeld Exchange, Catalan, Slav, Catalan, Slav, Catalan, Slav, Catalan, Nimzo-Indian, Grunfeld, English, Lasker Defense. The only one of these that is not considered the absolute height of orthodox opening theory is the Grunfeld, and for this reason was considered a risky choice by Anand, even though it is still a perfectly respectable opening. However, when lightning time control is involved, you see a variety of unsound openings such as the Albin Counter-Gambit, hyper-aggressive lines in the Dutch, and a lot more speculative Sicilian variations. There are also a number of psychological studies supporting the idea that time pressure impedes performance (e.g. Chabris and Hearst 2003).
Personal communication.
Personal communication.
Actually, we don't quite agree on this. Cory Evans, the expert lightning player, thinks that even with half a second left, a player might deliberate extremely quickly. What explains Dreyfus's grandmaster’s comment? Cory thinks that he might just be using a turn of phrase or it might be that the deliberation, at least in part, is not conscious, or it might be that he is merely enacting a move he had planned out in advance. At any rate, the larger point is that even if there were rare cases that a player needs to move without thought, we would not need to take such moves as exemplary of typical chess expertise.
de Groot's (1978) protocol analysis of chess reveals similar tactical thinking during games.
Dreyfus also argues more generally against chess ability being a particularly analytic skill by suggesting that grandmaster chess players are not especially mathematical. He quotes his brother, who was the captain of the chess team at Harvard, who claims that his analytic approach to chess stymied his progress: “while students of mathematics and related topics predominate in the population of young people enthusiastic about chess, you are as likely to find a truck driver as a mathematician among the world's best players. You are more likely to find an amateur psychologist or a journalist” (p. 25). Is this correct? To be sure, the very best players are as likely to be mathematicians as truck drivers, since the very best players are invariably professional chess players and thus neither mathematicians nor truck drivers! Nonetheless, as de Groot's (1978) data suggests on the occupations grandmasters indicates, among the best players that do have careers outside of chess, many are attracted to mathematical careers (p. 364–366).
John Sutton mentioned the old BBC television program, “The Master Game,” where retrospective verbal reports by grandmasters would be edited and played back while showing the game on TV,” as an example of how such reports could not have illustrated what was going on in the player's mind, for they were to perfect. But just as the televised players may ware a bit of makeup to make them more telegenic, their thought processes might be recounted and edited so as to seem a bit more coherent.
This is not a case of memory for Drefyus since, as he sees it, expertise as nonminded.
Not only is the data mixed, but there is considerable disagreement as to how to interpret some of it. For example, query Gobet and Simon (1996) argue that because Kasporov's chess rating drops from 2,750 to 2,646 when playing a simul which restricted the amount of time he had on each move, limiting a players time for calculation has little effect on quality of play, as a 100-point decrease in rating is “slight.” However, van Harreveld et al. take the same decrease to be “a significant decrease,” pointing out that at the time they were writing the paper, such a drop in rating would place the then strongest player in the world at somewhere around 60th place. To put this in perspective, today a 2650 FIDE might be able to make about $40,000 a year playing chess; a 2750 player could easily make over $200,000 per year.
Beilock and Carr (2001) have done some interesting work on so-called “expert-induced amnesia,” which indicates that college golf-team players do not remember as much about the mechanisms of their movements as novices. However, they remembered many more higher-level aspects of their movements. Mapping this onto chess, we would not be surprised to find that novices recall thinking about the basic rules and basic heuristics much more than experts, who would recall thinking about the broader plans used in the game and any novel opening themes they encountered.
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Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Central European University Philosophy colloquium, the City University of New York Cognitive Science Workshop, and the College of Staten Island Philosophy Forum. We thank audience members at these venues for their comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank IM Larry D. Evans for sharing his keen insights at each stage of this paper, and John Sutton for his thoughtful suggestions, as well as GM Hikaru Nakamura, GM John Fedorowicz, GM Nick de Firmian and GM Michael Rohde for their helpful interviews and comments. The first author’s work on this paper was supported, in part, by a Charles A. Ryskamp fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
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Montero, B., Evans, C.D.A. Intuitions without concepts lose the game: mindedness in the art of chess. Phenom Cogn Sci 10, 175–194 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9192-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9192-9