Abstract
Building on the landmark O’Regan and Noë (Behav Brain Sci 24:939–973, 2001) that introduced us to the sensorimotor theory of perception, Alva Noë has continued to develop and defend a highly influential enactivist account of perception. Said account takes perceptual experience to be mediated by sensorimotor knowledge (knowledge of the law-like relations that hold between bodily movements and sensory changes). In recent work, Noë has argued that we should construe sensorimotor knowledge as a kind of conceptual knowledge. One significant theoretical advantage of his account, he contends, is that it allows us to better characterize our embodied coping skills by way of showing how they are manifestations of a conceptual-and-yet-not-representational kind of understanding. He argues that both intellectualist and anti-intellectualist accounts of skill alike assume that conceptual understanding must be wedded to explicit judgement, and therefore have failed to correctly characterize the role of understanding in skilled performance. This paper argues against Noë’s contention that skilled action is always permeated with understanding. It argues additionally that Noë’s of unorthodox notion of conceptual understanding is unstable and, if it were adopted, would over-intellectualize the role of perception in action. The paper concludes by arguing that doing so frees us up to take more seriously the enactivist options for understanding skilled performance without introducing notions of conceptual understanding at all.
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Notes
Noë sometimes refers to SKE as ‘actionism’ in order to emphasise the importance the position places on the role of sensorimotor action in generating perceptual experience (e.g., 2012, 2015, 2021). In this paper, I will not engage with the thorny theoretical issue of whether sensorimotor knowledge enactivism is plausibly construed as a version of what Varela et al. (2017) termed ‘enactivism’ in their seminal monograph The Embodied Mind (see Ward et al. (2017) for thoroughgoing comparison between SKE and other positions that use the ‘enactivism’ label).
Some philosophers have criticised SKE’s central contention that perception is a species of embodied engagement by way of denying that sensorimotor movement is a necessary condition of seeing (see e.g., Cavedon-Taylor, 2013).
Gallagher (2008) criticises Noë for failing to fully consider the importance of intersubjectivity for perceptual experience. He argues that Noë devotes too much attention to the way that a subject will perceive an object (such as an apple) as accessible in virtue of her knowledge of her own individual sensorimotor contingencies, at the expense of neglecting the way that our perception of objects might also be determined and shaped by the way that we are attuned to how other subjects might interact with them (Gallagher, 2008, p. 175). Gallagher pulls no punches when he suggests that Noë threatens to create a “lonely world” for the enactive perceiver (p. 172)—one that fails to recognise research in contemporary developmental psychology demonstrating the importance of shared attentional processes in explaining how we learn how to interact with objects (see also Di Paolo et al., 2017 pp. 246–249).
More specifically, McDowell (1996) requires that agents capable of perceptual experience must have conceptual capacities that can potentially be exploited in self-critical thinking (p. 49). The rationality required for knowledge, for McDowell (following Sellars), involves occupying a point in the space of reasons such that one can recognise reasons that justify one’s own beliefs. McDowell often attempts to assuage the possible concern that his conceptualism, in virtue of disqualifying animals from perceptual experience, somehow demonstrates a “human chauvinism” (2011, p. 11; see also McDowell, 2018). Indeed, in his afterward to Mind and World, he is emphatic that animals are sentient and allows that they are capable of being, “in their ways, clever, resourceful, inquisitive, friendly, and so forth” (McDowell, 1994, p. 182; see also pp. 114–119). As Gaynesford (1996) notes, however, some will deny that McDowell can licence such ascriptions of intelligence to non-human animals while also denying them rational faculties (p. 507). In more recent work, McDowell (2011) has allowed that there might be certain forms of knowledge that non-human animals are capable of possessing (p. 15). Dreyfus (2013) argues that animals do not pose so much of a problem to McDowell’s conceptualism as do young children, since he takes there to be problems with how McDowell addresses the question of how children eventually develop the linguistic and conceptual capacities required for perceptual experience (p. 24).
As Noë (2021) puts it, the knowledge that, on SKE, mediates perception, is “meant to be available to non-linguistic animals” (p. 959).
Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s (1980) stages of skill development are novice, competence, proficiency, expertise, and mastery. In their famous Mind Over Machine, however, they present an updated five-stage model, having added an “advanced beginner” stage into the mix and apparently collapsed the category of mastery into that of expertise. In the advanced beginner stage, beginners will increasingly use more sophisticated rules to guide their development (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1988, p. 22; see also Rousse and Dreyfus, 2021, p. 18). Dreyfus and Dreyfus (2008; Rousse and Dreyfus, 2021) reintroduce mastery into their model, expanding it to six stages. They claim that only a small quantity of experts will ever become masters in their respective fields of endeavour (and that non-human animals cannot become masters). A thoroughgoing analysis of the distinct stages of the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model need not concern us here, since, as will become clear, Noë’s objections to Dreyfus do not rest on such details.
Often, Hebbian learning is paraphrased in Carla Shatz’s (1992) memorable rhyme “what fires together, wires together” (1992, p. 60). But since Hebbian theory dictates that a neuron must repeatedly causally participate in the firing of another neuron in order to increase the synaptic strength between them, Hebbian learning does not concern neurons that fire simultaneously (Keysers and Gazzola, 2014).
Clark (2002) argues that we should conceive of such attractor states as internal, “action-oriented” representations (see also Clark, 2015; Wheeler, 2005). He notes that several of the arguments that Dreyfus offers against construing such states to be representational seem to depend on the idea that propositionally-formatted representations are not fine-grained enough to guide context-sensitive action (Clark, 2002, p. 386; see also Dreyfus, 2002, p. 381). Clark argues that action-oriented representations do not face such objections, since their content is determined by the sensorimotor capacities of the agent in such a way as cannot be captured by a general context-insensitive structure (2002, p. 387). As such, argues Clark, action-oriented representations “serve not to passively encode information but to control and structure our active engagements” (2002, p. 386). Elsewhere, however, Dreyfus appeals to the frame problem in criticising the notion of appealing to action-oriented representations in explaining skilled action. In sum, he claims that such an appeal mandates explanation as to how the cognitive system has the capacity to produce just the right representation at just the correct time so as to respond to the intricate situational demands the agent absorbed in skilled coping faces (Dreyfus, 2006, 2007b; see also Wheeler, 2005). The frame problem also forms the basis of the criticisms he famously levelled against AI research in the 1980s (Dreyfus, 1992; see also Wilks, 1972). Hutto and Myin, 2013 (see also Hutto, 2013) criticise action-orientated representations on the basis that it is hard see how—on the action-oriented account—content qua content could make an explanatory contribution (p. 59; et passim).
More recently, philosophers working from within the enactivist tradition of cognitive science have argued that contemporary models of neural function derived from Karl Friston’s (2005) free energy principle provide a plausible basis for the contention that intelligent human action can be geared around obtaining an optimum grip in such a way as does not implicate representations (Bruineberg et al., 2018; Downey, 2018; Kirchhoff, 2015; see also Kirchhoff and Robertson, 2018; Robertson and Kirchhoff, 2019).
Noë (2015) summarises the SC account as follows: “Reasons, principles, and explicit knowledge guide perception and activity, according to Dreyfus, but only in the case of the novice. The expert, in contrast, is one who is engaged, in the flow. The expert, having mastered the rules and the concepts, has no further use for them” (p. 9). It is worth noting, though, that Dreyfus claims that even experts and masters will occupy flow states very infrequently. An expert, for Dreyfus, will—as Noë notes—usually be engaged in skilled coping such that she will not need to consciously reflect on the environmental solicitations by which she acts (nor consult any rules), but she is only in a state of flow—of fully absorbed coping—when she entirely stops monitoring her performance. She will even, for Dreyfus, lack an “awareness that things are going well” (2007, n. 5), although presumably the flow will soon cease if her performance—for whatever reason—begins to deteriorate. Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) thus write as follows: “There are rare moments, however, when all monitoring ceases. We are referring to those brief periods of what is sometimes called “flow,” when performance, accompanied by a feeling of euphoria, reaches its peak” (p. 40; emphasis added; see also Dreyfus, 2013, p. 28; Rousse and Dreyfus, 2021, p. 18). Dreyfus does not deny that “conceptual activity is required for some kinds of perceiving and acting” (2013, p. 15). In fact, he takes said claim to be “obviously true” (Dreyfus, 2013, p. 15). For Dreyfus, when experts are engaged in the flow, the ego—and, along with it, any sense of “I”—disappears (e.g. 2007, p. 373; see also Sartre, 1957, pp. 48–49). Consult Kreing and Ilundáin-Agurruza (2014) for comparison between Dreyfus's notion of flow and the concept of mushin found often in traditional martial arts works (see also Miyahara, 2021).
As Dreyfus (2005) puts it, phronesis is “a kind of understanding that makes possible an immediate response to the full concrete situation” (2005, p. 51). Gallagher (2020) argues that Dreyfus confuses Aristotle’s notion of phronesis with what he (Aristotle) referred to as a capacity for “cleverness” (2020, p. 257). Some Aristotelians, however, argue that Aristotle understood cleverness to be a constituent of phronesis (Athanassoulis, 2018). Finnigan (2015) too expresses doubt as to whether Dreyfus’s characterisation of phronesis as a perceptual capacity is plausibly consistent with Aristotle’s view.
Rousse and Dreyfus (2021) claim that the SC account is often caricatured. They note that some—such as Montero (2016)—have criticised the idea that experts tend to perform unreflectively. In response, they point out that the SC has always allowed that even experts will often, faced with unforeseen circumstances, need to break coping and engage in reflective thought (thereby oscillating back and forth through the various stages of skill development). The idea is that the expert will not need to reflect on their doings “when things are proceeding normally” (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1988, p. 31; Rousse and Dreyfus, 2021, p. 30). That said, Montero criticises the notion that in paradigmatically expert domains such as elite sports performance we can speak of things proceeding normally, since such experts are always faced with situational novelty. In this way, Montero criticises the idea that SC characterises high-level, professional expert endeavours as unfolding through the same kind of absorbed coping processes as do highly habituative, everyday doings, such as walking down a city street (2016, Chapter 2; see also Toner et al. 2022). Rousse and Dreyfus (2021), on the other hand, are emphatic that they take there to be a “fundamental continuity between everyday skills and specialized (or “elite”) skills” that “lies in the tendency for experienced performers to develop an intuitive familiarity that guides them in coping with typical situations” (Rousse and Dreyfus, 2021, p. 3).
In this way, Dreyfus’s view on expert rule-following bares striking similarity to that of Gilbert Ryle. Ryle (1949/2009) describes a skilled performer gaining competence while simultaneously becoming less able to explicitly follow rules in the following terms: “But very soon he comes to observe the rules without thinking of them. He makes the permitted moves and avoids the forbidden ones; he notices and protests when his opponent breaks the rules. But he no longer cites to himself or to the room the formulae in which the bans and permissions are declared. It has become second nature to him to do what is allowed and to avoid what is forbidden. At this stage he might even have lost his former ability to cite the rules” (p. 29; see Waights-Hickman, 2019 for discussion of Ryle’s views on the relationship between rules and know-how).
Noë (2015, n. 9) likens this appeal to demonstratives to the way McDowell uses to demonstratives in supporting his contention that perceptual content is exclusively conceptual against the possible objection that we often seem to experience things that one cannot linguistically describe and therefore seem to “transcend our conceptual powers” (McDowell 1994, p. 56). McDowell appeals to the idea that we can linguistically describe even highly intricate facets of our experience—such as a rich and unfamiliar shade of colour—by invoking demonstratives. Some have objected to McDowell’s line here on the basis that it presumably rests on the idea that the demonstrative concept, say, of a colour, is fixed by the subject perceptually experiencing that colour, but that it is unclear that McDowell can licence such a move, since the concept of the colour cannot then be part of the perceptual experience (Heck, 2000).
As Noë (2015) notes, Dreyfus (e.g., 2006) often offers lightning chess players as an example of experts who perform without conscious deliberation or reflection. For Dreyfus, lightning chess masters lack the time required (at least when they are performing optimally) to engage in calculations about what move to make (or to consult rules), but instead are able to rely on their perceptual capacities in order to see what move would be appropriate (2006, p. 47). The master’s perceptual capacities in this regard (honed through many hours of practice) allows her “to respond to subtle differences in the appearance of perhaps hundreds of thousands of situations” (2006, p. 48). Montero (2019) has argued against Dreyfus’s claims about lightning chess masters, contending that even lightning chess players engage in conscious deliberation about their moves. She conducted a series of trials in which four accomplished chess players were instructed to verbalize the thoughts they had while playing 1-min chess games online. On the basis that there was no significant loss in ability amongst participants, Montero took her experiment to suggest that even accomplished lightning chess players can consciously deliberate about their moves as they make them (2019, p. 381). Notice, however, that even if we accept that conscious deliberation and reflection is more involved in skills such as lightning chess than Dreyfus is willing to accept, this does not show that he has gone wrong in holding the Intellectualist Assumption. One could readily accept the Intellectualist Assumption that judgement is the only mode of conceptual understanding and yet take Dreyfus underestimating how important judgement is even in highly immersive action.
Dreyfus and Taylor (2015) refer to skilled coping as “a preconceptual engagement […] which involves understanding” (p. 72). While McDowell adopts the Kantian term “spontaneity” to refer to processes that involve conceptual capacities, Dreyfus contrastingly argues that spontaneity is involved in the nonconceptual engagement with the world that he takes to be characteristic of expert coping. The absorbed expert, Dreyfus contends, can be said to “make sense” of his surroundings and exercise spontaneity in virtue of actively engaging with them in such a way as to make the affordances that are most relevant to his performance salient to him. He offers Merleau-Ponty’s example of a football player engaging with “the field before him, articulating it into vectors of vulnerability where the other can break through” (Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015, p. 88). As such, Dreyfus and Taylor allow that “spontaneity is “rational” because it is not just arbitrary, but is directed to make sense of our world, to getting it right” (p. 77).
See McCauley and Henrich (2006) for discussion of how susceptibility to the illusion changes across cultures.
In fact, Stanley (2011) claims that “genuinely skilled action requires being directly guided by one’s propositional knowledge—being guided automatically and without reflection” (2011 p. 24 emphasis added).
One might, for example, take having propositional knowledge that w is a way to φ to involve understanding that w is a way to φ. They might, in turn, take understanding that w is a way to φ to necessarily involve—for example—knowing how to explain why w is a way to φ. In such a case, the intellectualist will argue that this know-how is propositional.
As Michaelian and Sant’Anna (2021) have recently put it, RE is " an increasingly influential approach to cognition in general” (p. S307). It has in recent years been deployed as a theoretical framework for investigating basic emotions (Hutto et al., 2018), predictive and probabilistic views of cognition (Kirchhoff and Robertson, 2018; Robertson and Kirchhoff, 2019), perceptual illusions (Gallagher et al., 2022), habits (Hutto and Robertson 2020; Miyahara and Robertson, 2021), autism (Hipólito et al., 2020), skilled action (Merritt, 2015; Ilundain-Agurruza, 2015; Krein and Ilundain-Agurruza, 2017; Carmona, 2021), and a range of other cognitive phenomena.
Others have criticised RE on the basis that it supposedly does not warrant its “radical” label. Gärtner and Clowes (2017), for example, deny that RE is radical because anti-representational views have a venerable lineage (one that goes through the likes of Stich, the Churchlands, and others) in contemporary philosophy of mind (p. 78). Although I am not here concerned with how radical RE is, these sorts of objections seem to conflate a position being radical with its being original. RE seems to possess radical credentials within analytic philosophy to the extent that mainstream cognitivist conceptions of cognition as always and everywhere involving the manipulation of representational content remain the status quo.
In fact, in criticising Hutto and Myin for “conceding to the establishment” that certain kinds of language-involving thought can be representational Noë writes as follows: “Representationalism is wrongheaded, I would say, no less when it comes to language than when it comes to perceiving or other more “elementary” modes of thought and awareness” (2021, p. 962). Perhaps Noë is happy for representationalism to be criticised but takes Hutto and Myin to lack any affirmative argument against construing experience as representational beyond “mere insistence”. Since their work is positively replete with such affirmative arguments, however, this would not be a fair criticism.
Bengson (2020) defends the view that the practical understanding required for skilled action involves “grasp of method—in particular, conceptual grasp of ways of acting” (p. 216).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Daniel Hutto, Michael Kirchhoff and Deb Marber. The research for this paper was supported by the Australian Discovery Project “Minds in Skilled Performance” (DP170102987).
Funding
Funding was provided by Australian Research Council (Grant Number DP170102987).
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Robertson, I. The unbearable rightness of seeing? Conceptualism, enactivism, and skilled engagement. Synthese 202, 173 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04385-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04385-y