Introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise

Abstract

The diverse and breathtaking intelligence of the human animal is often embodied in skills. People, throughout their lifetimes, acquire and refi ne 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, fl exibility, 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, scientifi c and medical skills, military and political skills, engineering skills, computer skills, business skills, etc. What's more, skill acquisition and refi nement occur throughout the human lifespan. Children work on skills from infancy and throughout development and adults will often continue to refi ne 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 fi gured 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 subfi elds 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 fi elds, 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,

Teachers' sources of information about climate change: A scoping review

“…Changes in pre‐service teachers' attitudes and behaviours were also found in response to mass media narratives and portrayals, and those with weaker subject knowledge and less certainty over environmental issues were affected most (Higde et al, 2017). There are glimpses of the processes through which information might be acted on, stored, processed, disseminated and transformed (Floridi, 2016), but the papers in this review give only hints into what this might involve for climate change education.…”

“…Our conceptualisation of information begins from an understanding of information as a ‘conceptual labyrinth’ (Floridi, 2013, p. 19), or, more technically, a ‘multifaceted and polyvalent concept’. Therefore, the question ‘“what is information?” is misleadingly simple’ (Floridi, 2016, p. 2). One representation of information is presented through its ‘life cycles’ (Figure 1).…”

The Role of Philosophers in Climate Change

“…As Carlotta Pavese (2021: §9.1) puts it, ‘by and large people take skills to manifest in purposeful and goal-directed activities and to be learnable and improvable through practice’. There is an active debate in philosophy about the nature of skill and about the extent to which features such as behavioral complexity, expression in intentional action, guidance by knowledge, and improvement through practice are required for something to count as a skill (see the contributions in Fridland and Pavese 2021). I am inclined to agree with Ellen Fridland (2021: 247) that ‘skills, in virtue of their peculiar learning histories, rely on control structures that give rise to characteristic, controlled, intelligent actions’.…”