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Wax On, Wax Off! Habits, Sport Skills, and Motor Intentionality

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Abstract

What role does habit formation play in the development of sport skills? We argue that motor habits are both necessary for and constitutive of sensorimotor skill as they support an automatic, yet inherently intelligent and flexible, form of action control. Intellectualists about skills generally assume that what makes action intelligent and flexible is its intentionality, and that intentionality must be necessarily cognitive in nature to allow for both deliberation and explicit goal-representation. Against Intellectualism we argue that the habitual behaviours that compose skilful action are accompanied by their specific, non-cognitive form of intentionality: this is motor intentionality, which is purposive and adaptive while involving no explicit deliberation or goal representation. Our account of habit based on Motor Intentionality explains why the formation of motor habits can sometimes act as the sole basis of skilful acquisition: Motor Intentionality is inherently purposeful because it is an embodied source of sensorimotor anticipation, pre-reflective motivation, and pragmatic know-how. Skill development through exercise always builds on a motor intentional component even when it is guided by Deliberate Practice to the point that, pace Intellectualism, Deliberate Practice is disclosed, not constrained, by habit formation. As suggested by the fact that repetitive exercises can play a major role in the development of flexible and intelligent sport skills, automatism is not a drawback for strategic control and improvisation but rather their pragmatic foundation.

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Notes

  1. The argument by poverty of the stimulus is one of the oldest used by cognitivism and is often invoked to demonstrate that internal, offline models (representations) are necessary to compensate for the alleged inability of on-line processes to generate sufficient criteria for perceptual decision.

  2. Due to spatial limitations, we will not discuss existing proposals to appropriate Merleau-Ponty’s concept of MI into representational models of the mind (e.g. Butterfill and Sinigaglia 2012; Pacherie 2018; Mylopoulos and Pacherie 2019), limiting ourselves to mention that the attempts to explain skillful action in terms of representations or contentful states have raised conceptual objections by the theorists of embodiment and enaction (Gallagher 2017; Hutto and Sanchez-Garcia 2015).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project ‘Minds in Skilled Performance’ [DP170102987].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering and Information Technology, University of New South Wales Canberra, Canberra, Australia

    Massimiliano Lorenzo Cappuccio

  2. United Arab Emirates University, AI & Robotics Lab, Al Ain, UAE

    Massimiliano Lorenzo Cappuccio

  3. Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience (CHAIN), Hokkaido University, Hokkaido, Japan

    Katsunori Miyahara

  4. Department of Philosophy, Linfield University, McMinnville, OR, USA

    Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza

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  1. Massimiliano Lorenzo Cappuccio
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  2. Katsunori Miyahara
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  3. Jesús Ilundáin-Agurruza
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Correspondence to Massimiliano Lorenzo Cappuccio.

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Cappuccio, M.L., Miyahara, K. & Ilundáin-Agurruza, J. Wax On, Wax Off! Habits, Sport Skills, and Motor Intentionality. Topoi 40, 609–622 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-020-09720-3

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