Skill and motor control: intelligence all the way down

Abstract

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Skilled Action and the Double Life of Intention

“…One might think my emphasis on the contribution of explicit cognition to intelligent action runs counter to Fridland's () recent argument that motor control is intelligent “all the way down.” But I think our disagreement is minor. Fridland rejects five claims regarding motoric‐level action implementation: that it operates ballistically, that it operates invariantly, that it operates independently, that motor processes “blindly implement some general, pre‐planned trajectory” (1541), that they are insensitive to the semantic content of personal‐level goals, and that they are independent of intentional states (like intentions).…”

“…Neil Levy () argues that although motor representations are not propositionally structured, they operate in intelligent processes—i.e., processes that “flexibly adapt in an appropriate manner to environmental perturbations” (517)—and they “are representations in virtue of which agents possess knowledge” (522). Ellen Fridland () argues that “the motor control involved in skill is intelligent all the way down” (1540), where intelligence for Fridland means roughly what it does for Levy, and implies that motor control is more than “a brute‐causal, bottom‐up system that becomes tuned through simple repetition” (1557). And Chiara Brozzo () argues that some motor representations qualify as motor intentions , and as such are open to rational appraisal.…”

Intentions: The dynamic hierarchical model revisited

“…For example, while Burnston (2017) treats the view that Mylopoulos and Pacherie (2017) defend as a determination view, they maintain that proximal intentions activate corresponding motor schemas, which themselves contain open parameters that must be specified with the help of attention and context, which would seem to favor treating theirs as a biasing view instead. 7 As Fridland (2017) points out, the interface problem is also salient in recent hybrid accounts of skilled action that attempt to explain the intelligence of skill not merely by appeal to propositional knowledge or trained up dispositions, but rather by appeal to continuous interplay between control states and processes at both cognitive and motoric levels, with neither level being privileged as the locus of intelligence (e.g., Fridland, 2014Fridland, , 2017Levy, 2017;Christensen et al, 2016;Papineau, 2015). Such accounts posit various joints at which P-intentions and M-intentions fluidly coordinate throughout a skilled performance.…”

“…As Fridland (2017) points out, the interface problem is also salient in recent hybrid accounts of skilled action that attempt to explain the intelligence of skill not merely by appeal to propositional knowledge or trained up dispositions, but rather by appeal to continuous interplay between control states and processes at both cognitive and motoric levels, with neither level being privileged as the locus of intelligence (e.g., Fridland, , ; Levy, ; Christensen et al, ; Papineau, ). Such accounts posit various joints at which P‐intentions and M‐intentions fluidly coordinate throughout a skilled performance.…”

A Theory of Practical Meaning

“…Other philosophers have recently defended the need for motor representation, over and above the explicit representation of the subject's intentions, for a satisfactory explanation of motor behavior (Butterfill & Signigaglia 2014, Levy 2016, Fridland 2017). An exhaustive review of this literature is beyond the scope of this essay.…”