Abstract

While much of skilled action happens ‘under the radar’ it is important to acknowledge that a significant portion of skill also involves good old-fashioned thinking. For instance, there is no way to be a skilled tennis player, if you don’t know that you have to, e.g., pick up the racket and swing it towards a ball. But not all personal-level knowledge about skill is of this kind. In this talk, I’ll argue that skills are organized and structured by embodied, strategic, personal-level intentions that guide skill instantiations. These intentional structures, on my account, are action schemas that function both to represent and guide skilled action. Relying on the mental practice literature, I’ll maintain that skilled agents uniquely possess strategic, practical, organizing intentions that guide their skilled actions in appropriate and effective ways. It follows that skilled agents are better than novices not only at implementing the intentions that they have but also at forming the right intentions. That is, skilled agents have strategic control.