carlotta pavese

From artistic performances in the visual arts and in music to motor control in gymnastics, from tool use to chess and language, humans excel in a variety of skills. On the plausible assumption that skillful behavior is a visible manifestation of intelligence, a theory of intelligence—whether human or not—should be informed by a theory of skills. More controversial is the question as to whether, in order to theorize about intelligence, we should study certain skills in particular. My target is the view that only a particular class/kind of skill (i.e., ‘theoretical’, or ‘intellectual’ skills, versus ‘practical’, or ‘embodied’ skills) manifests intelligence, or especially does so. I call this view ‘Intelligence Elitism’. Intelligence Elitism is pervasive in popular culture, in academic culture, as well as in psychometrics. It has, arguably, a long pedigree in philosophy (though explicit arguments for it are rare). But it is a substantive view which, if false, can promote unfairness. In this talk, I defend Intelligence Socialism—the claim that intelligent behavior is everywhere skillful behavior is. I go on to isolate the best case for the further Elitist claim that, even if all skillful behavior is intelligent in some modest sense of ‘intelligence’, there is a principled difference in intelligence between theoretical, or intellectual, skills, on one side, and practical, or embodied skills, on the other, and I show it wanting.

Arguments and conditionals are powerful means language provides us to reason about possibilities and to reach conclusions from premises. These two kinds of constructions exhibit several affinities-e.g., they both come in different varieties depending on the mood; they share some of the same connectives (i.e., 'then'); they allow for similar patterns of modal subordination. In the light of these affinities, it is not surprising that prominent theories of conditionals-old and new suppositionalisms as well as dynamic theories of conditionals-as well as certain reductive theories of arguments tend to semantically assimilate conditionals and arguments. In this paper, I shall marshall some linguistic evidence as well as some theoretical considerations for thinking that, despite these similarities, arguments and conditionals should be given a different semantics and I shall lay out a framework that can capture at least some of their affinities while accounting for their outstanding differences.

In the recent literature, several authors have argued that the capacity to track factive mental states plays a role in explaining our ability to understand and predict people’s behavior (Nagel 2013; Nagel 2017; Phillips & Norby 2019; Phillips et al. 2020; Westra & Nagel 2021). The topic of this chapter is whether this capacity also enters into an explanation of our ability to track skilled and intentional actions.

In certain cases, people judge that agents bring about ends intentionally but also that they do not bring about the means that brought about those ends intentionally—even though bringing about the ends and means is just as likely. We call this difference in judgments the Kraemer effect. We offer a novel explanation for this effect: a perceived difference in the extent to which agents know how to bring about the means and the ends explains the Kraemer effect. In several experiments, we replicate the Kraemer effect in a variety of non-moral and moral scenarios, and we find support for our new account. This work accords with a burgeoning area of action theory that identifies an important connection between know-how and intentionality.

Epistemologists have long believed that epistemic luck undermines propositional knowledge. Action theorists have long believed that agentive luck undermines intentional action. But is there a relationship between agentive luck and epistemic luck? While agentive luck and epistemic luck have been widely thought to be independent phenomena, we argue that agentive luck has an epistemic dimension. We present several thought experiments where epistemic luck seems to undermine both knowledge-how and intentional action and we report experimental results that corroborate these judgments. These findings have implications for the role of knowledge in a theory of intentional action and for debates about the nature of knowledge-how and the significance of knowledge representation in folk psychology. 1 We would like to thank Cornell College of Arts and Sciences for funding this work through Carlotta Pavese's research account. Many have helped with this project. Particular thanks go to Joshua Knobe for providing essential advice at several stages. We also would like to thank Jennifer Nagel, Shaun Nichols, and Joshua Alexander for generous and illuminating comments on initial drafts.

Orthodoxy has it that knowledge is absolute—that is, it cannot come in degrees (absolutism about propositional knowledge). On the other hand, there seems to be strong evidence for the gradability of know-how. Ascriptions of know-how are gradable, as when we say that one knows in part how to do something, or that one knows how to do something better than somebody else. When coupled with absolutism, the gradability of ascriptions of know-how can be used to mount a powerful argument against intellectualism about know-how—the view that know-how is a species of propositional knowledge. This essay defends intellectualism from the argument of gradability. It is argued that the gradability of ascriptions of know-how should be discounted as a rather superficial linguistic phenomenon, one that can be explained in a way compatible with the absoluteness of the state reported.

This idea that what is distinctive of intentional performances is one’s practical knowledge in it —i.e., knowledge of what one is doing while doing it— famously traces back to Anscombe ([]1963] 2000). While many philosophers have theorized about Anscombe’s notion of practical knowledge (e.g., Setiya (2008), Thompson et al. (2011), Schwenkler (2019), O’Brien (2007)), there is a wide disagreement about how to understand it. This paper investigates how best to understand practical knowledge for it to play the desired explanatory role in a reductive theory of intentional action, of intention-in-action, and of control-in-action.  I argue that practical knowledge ought to be construed as a dynamic knowledge state and that structured practical senses are needed to model it.

It is a platitude that when we reason, we often take things for granted, sometimes even justifiably so. The chemist might reason from the fact that a substance turns litmus paper red to that substance being an acid. In so doing, they take for granted, reasonably enough, that this test for acidity is valid.  Although it is a platitude that we often take things for granted when we reason—whether justifiably or not—one might think that we do not have to. In fact, it is a natural expectation that were we not pressed by time, lack of energy or focus, we could always in principle make explicit in the form of premises every single presupposition we make in the course of our reasoning. In other words, it is natural to expect it to be true that presuppositionless reasoning is possible. In this essay, I argue that it is false: presuppositionless reasoning is impossible. Indeed, I think this is one of the lessons of a long-standing paradox about inference and reasoning known as Lewis Carroll’s (1985) regress of the premises. Many philosophers agree that Carroll’s regress teaches us something foundational about reasoning. I part ways about what it is that it teaches us. What it teaches us is that the structure of reasoning is constitutively presuppositional.

This paper reexamines the case for mentality --- the thesis that knowledge is a mental state in its own right, and not only derivatively, simply by virtue of being composed out of mental states or by virtue of being a property of mental states --- and explores a novel argument for it. I argue that a certain property singled out by psychologists and philosophers of cognitive science as distinctive of skillful behavior (agentive control) is best understood in terms of knowledge. While psychological theories of agentive control that appeal to monitoring mechanisms, such as attention, have been proposed, these theories cannot account for the full scope of controlled action. By contrast, I argue that an epistemic theory of agentive control that invokes knowledge is extensionally adequate. It is when it comes to understanding the hallmarks of skillful performance that the theoretical benefits of thinking of knowledge as mental can be fully appreciated.

Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. But little attention has been paid to arguments as a distinctive kind of discourse, with its own semantics and pragmatics. The goal of this essay is to study the mechanisms by means of which we make arguments in discourse, starting from the semantics of argument connectives such as 'therefore'. While some proposals have been made in the literature, they fail to account for the distinctive anaphoric behavior of 'therefore', as well as uses of argument connectives in complex arguments, suppositional arguments, arguments with non-declarative conclusions, as well as arguments with parenthetical remarks. A comprehensive account of arguments requires imposing a distinctive tree-like structure on contexts. We show how to extend our account to accommodate modal subordination and and different flavors of 'therefore'.

This paper advances a unified theory of skillful and intentional action. According to our theory, the distinguishing feature of both skillful and intentional actions is that they are guided by the agent's knowledge of the means of performing the task at hand. This theory leads naturally to an intellectualist view of skills, according to which skills are propositional knowledge states. We show that this view enjoys a number of explanatory advantages over more familiar dispositional accounts of skills.

Can we think of a task in a distinctively practical way? Can there be practical concepts? In recent years, epistemologists, philosophers of mind, as well as philosophers of psychology have appealed to practical concepts in characterizing the content of know-how or in explaining certain features of skillful action. However, reasons for positing practical concepts are rarely discussed in a systematic fashion. This paper advances a novel argument for the psychological reality of practical concepts that relies on evidence for a distinctively productive kind of reasoning.

This chapter discusses recent attempts to clarify the notion of practical representation and its theoretical fruitfulness. The ultimate goal is not just to show that intellectualists are on good grounds when they appeal to practical representation in their theories of know-how. Rather, it is to argue that ​ any plausible theory of skill and know-how has to appeal to the notion of practical representation developed here. §1 explains the notion of a mode of presentation and introduces practical modes of presentation. §2 illustrates practical representation by discussing models of motor control in current theories of sensori-motor psychology; §3 puts forward an argument for positing practical representation. §4 goes from practical non-conceptual representations to practical
conceptual representations — to practical concepts. §5 concludes.

One can intentionally do something only if one knows what one is doing while they are doing it. For example, one can intentionally kill one’s neighbor by opening their gas stove overnight only if one knows that the gas is likely to kill the neighbor in their sleep. One can intentionally sabotage the victory of one’s rival by putting sleeping drugs in their drink only if one knows that sleeping drugs will harm the rival’s performance. And so on. In a slogan: Intentional action is action guided by knowledge. 
This essay reviews some motivations for a ‘knowledge-centered psychology’ — a psychology where knowledge enters center stage in an explanation of intentional action (§2). Then it outlines a novel argument for the claim that knowledge is required for intentional action (§3) and discusses some of its consequences  (§§4-5)

This chapter overviews recent work on the semantics and pragmatics
of argumentative discourse, with particular attention to work on the se-
mantics of argument connectives such as `therefore' in discourse coherence
theory and in dynamic semantics as well as on modal analyses of `there-
fore'.. In the nal section, I overview some issues that arise on the pragmatics of arguments, such as how we are to characterize the distinctive utterance force of arguments versus explanations.

According to a standard assumption in epistemology, if one only partially believes that p ,
then one cannot thereby have knowledge that p. For example, if one only partially
believes that that it is raining outside, one cannot know that it is raining outside; and if
one only partially believes that it is likely that it will rain outside, one cannot know that it
is likely that it will rain outside. Many epistemologists will agree that epistemic agents
are capable of partial beliefs in addition to full beliefs and that partial beliefs can be
epistemically assessed along some dimensions. However, it has been generally assumed
that such doxastic attitudes cannot possibly amount to knowledge. In  Probabilistic Knowledge,  Moss challenges this standard assumption and provides a formidable defense of the claim that probabilistic beliefs—a class of doxastic attitudes including credences and degrees of beliefs—can amount to knowledge too. Call this the  probabilistic knowledge claim . Throughout the book, Moss goes to great lengths to show that probabilistic knowledge can be fruitfully applied to a variety of debates in epistemology and beyond. My goal in this essay is to explore a further application for probabilistic knowledge. I want to look at the role of probabilistic knowledge within a “knowledge-centered” psychology—a kind of psychology that assigns knowledge a central stage in explanations of intentional behavior. My suggestion is that Moss’s notion of probabilistic knowledge considerably helps further both a knowledge-centered psychology and a broadly intellectualist picture of action and know-how that naturally goes along with it. At the same time, though, it raises some interesting issues about the notion of explanation afforded by the resulting psychology.

We represent the world in a variety of ways: through percepts, concepts, propositional attitudes, words, numerals, recordings, musical scores, photographs, diagrams, mimetic paintings, etc. Some of these representations are mental. It is customary for philosophers to distinguish two main kinds of mental representations:  perceptual representation  (e.g., vision, auditory, tactile) and  conceptual representation . This essay presupposes a version of this dichotomy and explores the way in which a  further  kind of representation — procedural representation  — represent. It is argued that, in some important respects, procedural representations represent differently from both purely conceptual representations and from purely perceptual representations. Although procedural representations, just like conceptual representation and perceptual representations, involve modes of presentation, their modes of presentation are, in a sense to be clarified, distinctively practical. It is argued that an understanding of this sort of practical representation has important consequences for the debate on the nature of know-how.

A good surgeon knows how to perform a surgery; a good architect knows how to design a house. We value their know-how. We ordinarily look for it. What makes it so valuable?  A natural response is that know-how is valuable because it explains success. A surgeon’s know-how explains their success at performing a surgery. And an architect’s know-how explains their success at designing houses that stand up. We value know-how because of its special explanatory link to success. But in virtue of what is know-how explanatorily linked to success?
This essay provides a novel argument for the thesis that know-how’s special link to success is to be explained at least in part in terms of its being, or involving, a doxastic attitude that is epistemically alike propositional knowledge. It is argued that the role played by know-how in explaining intentional success shows that the epistemic differences between know-how and knowledge, if any, are less than usually thought; and that "revisionary intellectualism", the view that know-how is true belief that might well fall short of knowledge, is not really a stable position. If its explanatory link to success is what makes know-how valuable, an upshot of my argument is that the value of know-how is due, to a considerable extent, to its being, or involving, a kind of propositional knowledge.

Orthodoxy has it that knowledge is absolute—that is, it cannot come in degrees (absolutism about propositional knowledge). On the other hand, there seems to be strong evidence for the gradability of know-how. Ascriptions of know-how are gradable, as when we say that one knows in part how to do something, or that one knows how to do something better than somebody else. When coupled with absolutism, the gradability of ascriptions of know-how can be used to mount a powerful argument against intellectualism about know-how—the view that know-how is a species of propositional knowledge. This essay defends intellectualism from the argument of gradability. It is argued that the gradability of ascriptions of know-how should be discounted as a rather superficial linguistic phenomenon, one that can be explained in a way compatible with the absoluteness of the state reported.

I argue for an analysis of 'therefore' as presupposition trigger against the more standard conventional implicature story originally put forward by Grice (1975). I propose that we model the relevant presupposition as " testing " the context in a way that is similar to how, according to Veltman (1996), epistemic 'must' tests the context. But whereas the presupposition analysis is plausible for 'therefore', 'must' is not plausibly a presupposition trigger. Moreover, whereas 'must' can naturally occur under a supposition, the same is not true for 'therefore'. In the light of these differences, I suggest we distinguish between different sorts of tests on the basis of the mechanisms whereby these expressions test the context (whether through a presupposition or through their core content) and on the basis of whether they can operate only on categorical contexts or on both categorical and hypothetical contexts.

This essay is divided into two parts. In the first part (§2), I introduce the idea of practical meaning by looking at a certain kind of procedural systems — the motor system — that play a central role in computational explanations of motor behavior. I argue that in order to give a satisfactory account of the content of the representations computed by motor systems (motor commands), we need to appeal to a distinctively practical kind of meaning. Defending the explanatory relevance of semantic properties in a computationalist explanation of motor behavior, my argument concludes that practical meanings play a central role in an adequate psychological theory of motor skill. In the second part of this essay (§3), I generalize and clarify the notion of practical meaning, and I defend the intelligibility of practical meanings against an important objection.

The prequel to this paper has discussed the relation between knowledge and skill and introduced the topic of the relationship between skill and know how. This sequel continues the discussion. First, I survey the recent debate on intellectualism about knowing how (§1-3). Then, I tackle the question as to whether intellectualism (and anti-intellectualism) about skill and intellectualism (and anti-intellectualism) about know how fall or stand together (§4-5).

Knowledge and skill are intimately connected. In this essay, I discuss the question of their relationship and of which (if any) is prior to which in the order of explanation. I review some of the answers that have been given thus far in the literature, with a particular focus on the many foundational issues in epistemology that intersect with the philosophy of skill.

In their theories of know how, proponents of Intellectualism routinely appeal to ‘practical modes of presentation’. But what are practical modes of presentation?  And what makes them distinctively practical? In this essay, I develop a Fregean account of practical modes of presentation: I argue that there are such things as practical senses and I give a theory of what they are. One of the challenges facing the proponent of a distinctively Fregean construal of practical modes of presentation is to provide an account of their nature on which they are plausible qua Fregean senses. I take up this challenge, arguing that we find examples of practical senses in the semantic values assigned to programs by operational semantics for programming languages. By looking at a species of practical senses, we will have taken one important step towards legitimizing the genus. In particular, I show that certain features of operational semantic values can be generalized towards a comprehensive theory of practical senses. The upshot is a full-fledged account of what practical senses are, which can be put to use in an explanatory theory of know how.

Intellectualism about know how is the view that knowing how to φ, for some task φ-ing, is a matter of knowing a proposition that answers the question ‘How could one φ?’. Recent proponents of Intellectualism have motivated their view primarily on the basis of linguistic considerations concerning how know how is ascribed in English. Many have, however, expressed concerns about such linguistic methodology. Others yet have objected that linguistic considerations do not clearly support Propositionalist Cognitivism over ‘Non-propositionalist’ Cognitivism—the view that know how is a full-blooded cognitive state, but one with a non-propositional content. Finally, there seem to be independent strong philosophical reasons to resist identifying the content of such cognitive state with a proposition: one might think, especially upon consideration of Lewis Carroll’s regress, that know how must have as its content something non-propositional—such as a rule. The view that know how is a cognitive state of sort but one with a non-propositional  content is increasingly popular in philosophical quarters. A defense of Intellectualism must explain why know how cannot consist in a cognitive state with a non-propositional content. Preferably, it should do so without appealing to controversial assumptions about the semantics of know how ascriptions. It must, finally, address Carroll’s regress. That is what I undertake to do in this essay.

The diverse and breathtaking intelligence of the human animal is often embodied in skills. People, throughout their lifetimes, acquire and refine a vast number of skills. And there seems to be no upper limit to the creativity and beauty expressed by them. Think, for instance, of Olympic gymnastics: the amount of strength, flexibility, and control required to perform even a simple beam routine amazes, startles, and delights. In addition to the sheer beauty of skill, performances at the pinnacle of expertise often display a kind of brilliance or genius. We observe an intelligence that saturates the body. The unity of physicality and intellect, mind and body, meshed and melded. Apart from sports, people develop a host of other skills, including musical and artistic skills, linguistic and social skills, scientific and medical skills, military and political skills, engineering skills, computer skills, business skills, etc. What's more, skill acquisition and refinement occurs throughout the human lifespan. Children work on skills from infancy and throughout development and adults will often continue to refine skills through old age. The variety, ubiquity, and centrality of skills in the lives of humans is quite simply remarkable. Although notions of skill and expertise have always figured prominently in a variety of philosophical discussions, the last couple of decades have seen an explosion of direct interest in skill and practical expertise.  Crucially, debates about know-how and virtue epistemology have fueled interest in the notion of skill and practical knowledge in areas such as epistemology, ethics, and action theory. Also, philosophers of cognitive science, as well as neuroscientists and psychologists, have become increasingly interested in issues concerning the nature of embodied expertise, motor skill, motor representation, and bodily control. As a result, across a variety of subfields from ancient and eastern philosophy, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, philosophy of perception, epistemology, action theory, ethics, political and social philosophy, and aesthetics, the debate concerning skill and practical intelligence is growing and thriving.

It is the aim of this Handbook to collect and systematize the most relevant positions in these burgeoning areas of philosophy and cognitive science. Contained within are 39 chapters written by leaders in their fields, addressing the role of skill in the history of philosophy both east and west, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, and various areas of the cognitive sciences, including perception, imagination, emotion, motor control, language, and social cognition. The chapters offer both accessible overviews of the most relevant, current debates in their respective areas and, in many cases, also develop novel, substantive positions.

It should be noted that questions of skill and expertise are important not only for our particular, theoretical understanding of these specific notions but, more broadly, for our understanding of intelligence, cognition, and practical knowledge, full stop. That is, in thinking seriously about skill and expertise, we develop a fuller, richer picture of the nature of human cognition: moral, social, political and embodied. This understanding, rooted in both theoretical and empirical views, provides us with the opportunity to properly and substantively conceptualize the nature of practical intelligence. This, in turn, allows and sometimes forces us to reformulate our current understanding of more familiar notions, such as knowledge, action, intention, virtue, perception, imagination, emotion, and even mental representation and intelligence. In all, then, questions concerning skill are significant in and of themselves, but also highly relevant for our overall understanding of the human mind.

Below, we introduce and contextualize the sections and chapters covered by this Handbook.


In the Introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Skill and Expertise, we introduce and contextualize the various chapters that compose the Handbook. Before providing substantive overviews of each chapter, we also discuss the topic of skill in general and its importance for various areas of philosophy. Chapters are organized into six sections: 1. Skill in the history of philosophy (East & West), 2. Skill in Epistemology, 3. Skill, Intelligence, and Agency, 4. Skill in Perception, Imagination, and Emotion, 5. Skill, Language, and Social Cognition, and 6. Skill and Expertise in Normative Philosophy.

What makes an event an action rather than a mere happening? What makes us agents rather than non-agents? What does being in control amount to? And in virtue of what are our actions skilled? These are among the deepest and hardest questions in the philosophy of action. They are also particularly timely, as the field is revisiting them both in connection with a study of intentional action and with a renewed interest in skilled action. In The Shape of Agency, Joshua Shepherd aims to offer a novel, and mostly original, perspective on these questions. My discussion will cover three crucial components of Shepherd's views: his theory of controlled behavior (§1), his view of intentional action (§2) and his view of skills (§3).