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Activity Concepts and Expertise

MARK ADDIS

INTRODUCTION

Intellectualism encompasses a range of positions which all share a commitment to the view that all know-how can be rendered as know-that.1 Despite the recent growth of work in this tradition (such as Bengson and Moffett, 2012) know-how remains relatively under theorised. Luntley's work on the non-conceptual character of know-how in general, and skill in particular, importantly contributes to this strand of the intellectualist literature. His position has been developed in a series of papers which foreground the role which deixis plays in know-how and its manifestation in expert performance.

PHENOMENOLOGY OF EXPERTISE

The starting point for Luntley's account (2007, 2009, 2011) arises from his response to the highly influential Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986, 2005) phenomenological model of expertise which charts the path from novice to expert. According to the model, formal instruction starts with rules but they seem to give way to more flexible responses as one approaches expertise. Experience suggests that rules may be needed when learning but must eventually be set aside if one is to become an expert. To become expert one has to switch from detached rule-following to a more involved and situation-specific way of coping. Expertise involves the idea of articulating smooth coping non-deliberative behaviour along with its embodied character. Once one becomes sufficiently expert at something there is a sense in which it becomes natural. The model claims that expertise is a matter of discriminating perception which enables an appropriate response to the richness of the context thereby permitting the successful intuitive situational response that is the hallmark of expertise. For example, one manifestation of successful intuitive situational response is the development of professional intuition which instinctively senses quality and problems. Given sufficient experience with a variety of situations requiring different decisions the expert unconsciously gradually breaks these situations down into sub-groups each of which elicits a particular response. Expertise does not (primarily) require a repertoire of reasons at all and is not even implicitly rational in the sense of being responsive to reasons that have become habitual but which could be reconstructed if required. For an expert, features of a situation, although available to the perceptual system need not be consciously available. Furthermore, nameable situational features are irrelevant to the current state of mind of the expert when acting. In principle it is possible that one could name each situation or at least point to it but this does not provide a reason to think that one could name or point to what it is about a situation that makes it the type of situation that needs a certain expert response. Luntley claims that the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model of skill acquisition is fine as a first description of expertise but indicating that the expert has intuition which the novice lacks marks the difference between them rather than satisfactorily accounting for it (2007, p. 80). He derives what he terms the epistemic claim about expertise from the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model formulating it as:

'experts exploit a type of knowledge (tacit, implicit, intuitive) that is dependent on the way they are actively placed in the environment in which they work where this activity-dependence means the knowledge resists codification'(2009 p. 357).

Luntley proceeds to argue that a suitable philosophical account will both fill the gap in the Dreyfus and Dreyfus descriptions of expertise and appropriately characterise successful performance thus providing a philosophical explanation of what expertise consists in.

Before considering the account which Luntley offers, it is useful to consider the distinction between empirical and philosophical studies of expertise, and how this differentiation relates to his starting point of the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model. How Luntley and well established research in the psychology of expertise regard a number of relevant issues about expertise (as will be illustrated later on) varies markedly. This indicates the importance of examining methodologies for studying expertise within and across philosophy and other disciplines especially with respect to demarcating epistemological and empirical enquiry. In the course of developing his arguments Luntley insufficiently engages with the possibility that some evidence from this research is correct and so at least some of his general philosophical claims should either be rejected or revised in the light of it (particularly since he claims that there is empirical validation for his philosophical claims (Ainley and Luntley, 2007)). Although the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model of the hierarchy of expertise has clear roots in phenomenology it is an empirically testable model of the development of expertise. Given this it is reasonable to investigate whether there are any good reasons to be cautious about taking this empirical starting point as a foundation for the development of a philosophical account of expertise.

Some research in the psychology of expertise indicates there are several respects in which the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model2 is unsatisfactory. One problem is that it claims that novices rely on explicit knowledge whilst experts depend on implicit knowledge. However, there is evidence that much expert knowledge at all levels is implicitly learned (Reber, 1993) so a clear distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge begins to break down. For example, in a bakery, bread-making skills are best and indeed possibly only acquired by watching experts and repeating the bread-making process until the desired result is achieved with the learning being implicit learning (Lave and Wenger, 1991). Furthermore there is evidential support for the fact that experts do use explicit knowledge such as in the practice of certain professional competencies. Another difficulty is that the model maintains that growing expertise results in the way experts think becoming more concrete and less abstract. This is not the case for all areas of expertise since in certain fields abstract theoretical knowledge can be important for experts (such as in the case of physics: see Chi et al., 1981). A further disadvantage is that the model does not regard deliberate problem solving as being an important element of expertise. In contrast to this there is substantial evidence from psychology about the significance it has in certain areas such as chess (see for example Robbins et al., 1995). The fact that the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model is unsatisfactory with respect to this evidence from empirical psychology is significant for Luntley's epistemic claim which is derived from it (2009, p. 357). These problems with empirical psychology evidence in the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model have the consequence that his claim that experts exploit a type of knowledge which is resistant to codification is empirically inaccurate with respect to several well-established dimensions of expert learning and performance. The overall persuasiveness of Luntley's position is undermined by this lack of congruence with strongly justified evidence from empirical psychology as the basis of much of this account stems from his view of the Dreyfus and Dreyfus model and from the epistemic claim which he derives from it.

INTELLECTUALISM AND THE PROLIFERATION OF KNOWLEDGE

Luntley's approach (2009, 2011) to expertise is intellectualist as he explains know-how in terms of know-that in order to maintain the primacy of the latter. He claims that the propositional structures needed for the epistemological justification of know-that and know-how vary. Know that has straightforward justification relationships whilst know-how is a causal result of know-that and its conceptual content is contained within know-that. Before proceeding any further with Luntley's intellectualist account it is worth examining his characterisation of know-how:

'There is such a thing as know-how, its remit is limited to raw behavioural skills that figure in explaining performance but which are not relevant in assessing, justifying or reasoning about performance' (2011, p. 22).

Importantly Luntley is committed to a reductive conceptual characterisation of know-how which is both theoretical in nature and substantially at variance with the normal usage of the concept. An objection at this point is that if the characterisation of know-how which his account demands is so far from the usual usage of the concept then it is entirely possible that the difficulty lies with the account he is attempting to postulate rather than with the normal usage of the concept. It is also a concern that an account of expertise involves invoking a notion of know-how which does not align with how know-how is used and reported in expert performance. For example, expert bakers would not normally characterise their know-how as raw behavioural skills and nor would they claim this when instructing novices.

Due to Luntley's intellectualist perspective on the know-how and know-that relationship he argues that although it has been common to attempt to do justice to the phenomenology of expertise by claiming that the range and complexity of expert knowledge requires a proliferation of types of knowledge, postulating such proliferation would...