# The Shape of Agency: Control, Action, Skill, Knowledge  ## Metadata - Author: [[JOSHUA SHEPHERD]] - Full Title: The Shape of Agency: Control, Action, Skill, Knowledge - Category: #philosophy - Summary: The document entitled "The Shape of Agency: Control, Action, Skill, Knowledge" explores various aspects of agency, including control, intentional action, skill, and knowledge. The author emphasizes the importance of control in any activity that involves doing something rather than simply happening. They discuss the possession of control in relation to goals and plans, and the role of intentions and beliefs in intentional action. The document also examines different perspectives on knowledge of action, including the connection to perception and conscious awareness. Overall, the document delves into the complex nature of agency and the various factors that shape it. - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/138261380 - Source File: The Shape of Agency Control, Action, Skill, Knowledge by JOSHUA SHEPHERD.pdf ## Highlights - It should be uncontroversial that one can become skilled at Infinite Stairs. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw8sarknw216n5h86tdvqbh)) - (After all, I did it.) Other, previously practiced abilities, such as familiarity with a tablet’s buttons and with the focusing of attention, will be useful. But one has to structure these abilities in the right way. One has to generate novel visuomotor and visuospatial mappings. So there will be a period during which one is a novice, and then one will gradually improve until at some point, one has become skilled. This might not take very long. In my case, after about a month, the game began to get boring—there were small improve- ments I knew I could make, but they were very small. I was about as good as anyone should reasonably want to be. And I was about as good as I could be, absent, I don’t know, performing quick-twitch exercises with my thumbs. Other skills take much longer to develop, hold an agent’s interest for far longer than a month, and cover more complex territory. Consider the skilled chess player. In cognitive science, this type of person has often served as a paradigm for research into skill—or at least “cognitive” skill—with the result that we know a bit more about skill at chess than in some other areas. Of course, the best chess players in the world today are not humans, and are ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw8sd1dx3bc4wpe6t7mkx7p)) - It should be uncontroversial that one can become skilled at Infinite Stairs. (After all, I did it.) Other, previously practiced abilities, such as familiarity with a tablet’s buttons and with the focusing of attention, will be useful. But one has to structure these abilities in the right way. One has to generate novel visuomotor and visuospatial mappings. So there will be a period during which one is a novice, and then one will gradually improve until at some point, one has become skilled. This might not take very long. In my case, after about a month, the game began to get boring—there were small improve- ments I knew I could make, but they were very small. I was about as good as anyone should reasonably want to be. And I was about as good as I could be, absent, I don’t know, performing quick-twitch exercises with my thumbs. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw8v8k4d5k6ng06d13kteb0)) - Instead of fluid intelligence, or problem-solving ­ability more generally, chess skill may involve something more like the recogni- tional capacities we deploy when we recognize faces or features of faces (see Boggan et al. 2012). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw8yvfw49qnky3x0ywtsgtk)) - Skill at chess often results from the structuring of cognitive ability sets within the normal human range into skill at chess via the acquisition of chess-specific knowledge. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw90my1pg9hnk7ykfe060kr)) - The development of high levels of skill, or even of high levels of control with respect to small components of complex activities like basketball, or violin, or oil painting, can take years even for very advanced agents. One must not only develop a range of abilities and master a range of actions. One must become familiar with complex relationships between circum- stances, abilities, and success. Some activities require one to compete against highly intelligent opponents who anticipate one’s moves and plan counters. One must develop abilities to deploy these behaviors flexibly and appropriately across a range of challenging circumstance-types. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw9322r17gx2fr9t5msgg7p)) - If we are building a skill into some agent, where should we start? I suggest control. That’s because one clear element of all skills is control. One cannot ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw957m9p2zhsc1r1tntefa5)) - possess a skill S without possessing control over some sufficient range of behaviors involved in exercising S. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw95ad9gfrwxmbf0e9q1qd1)) - Normal talk is permissive about the boundaries of this something. Philosophers tend to talk of being skilled at an action-type. Indeed, most of the extant accounts of skill bound skill in exactly this way—an account of skill is an account of skill at A-ing, where A-ing is an action-type (e.g., Stanley and Williamson 2017). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw9b55zj8wzmkep7k84k10r)) - Assume juggling is a single action-type, with whatever sub-actional co ­mponents (tossing, catching) necessary to fill out the story. What is it to ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw9ck2518bsv5rk1yth4gbp)) - be skilled at juggling? I suggest that to be skilled at juggling is to possess s ­ufficiently high levels of control with respect to good plans to juggle. This would decompose into the possession of sufficiently high levels of control at sufficiently many of behavioral components of juggling. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw9cr58cb5cf60ykdkrg7eg)) - One’s level of skill at juggling increases along three dimensions. One dimension is completeness—the percentage of behavioral components with respect to which one has some very high degree of control. Another dimension is control—one’s success-rate at plans to juggle, or at the components of plans that have juggling as a key goal, where the successes occur in virtue of the control that one possesses (that is, occur non-deviantly). A third dimension is plan quality—the overall s ­uccess-conduciveness of the agent’s plan for action, given her dispositional structure. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw9dfbznwe9a3c6t5e7jv60)) - Reflection on skill’s variety suggests skills often run wider and deeper than talk of action-types alone can capture. A skilled debater is good at vari- ous kinds of reasoning, at listening, at a way of speaking, at synthesizing information, at presenting information. A skilled surgeon possesses a high degree of dexterity of hand and fingers, coupled with a refined understand- ing of the function of some part of the body, the ways this function may break down, the ways it may be repaired, as well as an ability to apply this understanding to a variety of case-types: to micro-differences in injury and damage and body-type. The skilled agent is typically skilled at clusters of action-types. These clusters tend to hang together in a structured way. In order to understand skill we have to understand the structure of these clusters—of what I call action domains. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw9ghm8gr37d3bgcedmb3hd)) - Consider the following four elements, common to more familiar action domains: [a] goal(s), [b] an ordering over the goals in terms of centrality-to-success, [c] restrictions on circumstance-types, [d] restrictions on behavior- (and action-)types. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw9nfjgrchvqfewwfw6kk2w)) - In some complex domains, one way to succeed is to develop sub-skills, or partial skill (as you like): e.g., to specialize at one important thing. In bas- ketball, for example, this may be ball-handling, shooting, or shot-blocking. If one is good enough at one thing, the absence of (high levels of) skill at other elements of basketball can be forgiven. But of course a better way to succeed as a basketball player, if one can manage it, is to develop interesting combinations of sub-skills. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw9r9kbqrt9gxqrj4kwdvat)) - What are the processes that bring the constituents of an action domain together? It seems foolhardy to try to identify some special class of pro- cesses. Examining the many types of domains we might implicitly have in mind when discussing skill (human or otherwise), it seems that a pluralism of processes may be at work in any given case. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw9tk9ktq5d2tdma5y50bb5)) - Less clean—and in that way probably more interesting—are the domains that many practices and professions set up. The practices of woodworking, painting, sculpture, and playing music set up various domains. So do the professions—legal, medical, educational, etc. Other domains may be broader than these, in the sense that the goals pro- prietary to them are largely given by biological needs and drives, and the circumstances are largely given by the contexts in which those needs and drives get expressed or find satisfaction. Additionally, it seems that agents may construct novel domains out of existing resources. Many sports and games begin in this way, but domain construction is not limited to sports and games. Some agents may chart new territory in the space of skill by combining atypically combined domains. The skilled politician, for ex­ample, ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw9vmxnsp65caq9px08x9fa)) - may represent a fusion of the skilled conversationalist, skilled salesperson, skilled self-promoter, skilled debater, and so on. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnw9vwn1673v2w8z8709frec)) - We need an account of what it is to be skilled at a domain. Here is mine. Skill at a domain essentially involves high success-rates at central goals. These high success-rates cannot be due to luck, or accidents. They must, then, be due in part to control. But not only control—at least not only con- trol with respect to the plans an agent may token. Remember Fish’s lesson. Good plans do not always come for free. Skill at a domain of much com- plexity must be due not only to control (that is, the capacity to execute plans), but also to the agent’s capacity to (flexibly, reliably) form good—that is, success-conducive—plans. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnwa0rz7706cygayqsx3s8v1)) - Now we focus on a particular agent. Now the massive space of behavioral routes is replaced by a space of available, at least partially executable plans. The notions of availability and executability are generous. These plans are concoctable by the agent—she could token these plans in the circumstance at hand. And the plans are not entirely unrealistic, in that she could execute at least parts of the plans she forms. Viewing this space, again a flow of pat- terns will begin to emerge. Some plans will seem more success-conducive than others. And we could toggle features of the agent—arousal levels, motivation levels, physical energy stores—and this would shift the success- conduciveness of the available plans. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnwa67153ghpm2t0j2793mnd)) - The space of available, partially executable plans does not characterize the agent’s skill. It may characterize something like her (raw) talent. Talent is associated with unrefined potentiality. It is coherent to say that one agent (Zion Williamson) is far more talented, while another (Julius Randle) is far more skilled. A ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hnwa7ceebe552xpa2mgn3bsj)) ## My Notes - If we think about [[Beauty in Use]] we can ask whether a good object makes it easy for users to come up with plans, or to execute those plans. - instinctively I think it is the latter which is more important. ## ChatGPT Conversations https://chat.openai.com/g/g-ZUi1ru9b6-the-philosophical-gerbil/c/1805560c-00c1-4a7e-8965-4892db4fc7ac ## ChatGPT Summary 1. **Introduction**: The chapter opens with an example of basketball player Pistol Pete Maravich, illustrating how his unique skills developed from unconventional training. It sets the context for understanding skill as a form of excellence in agency. 2. **Control**: The author argues that control is a fundamental aspect of all skills. To possess a skill (S), one must have control over a sufficient range of behaviors involved in exercising S. This section likely includes discussions about the nature of control and its relation to skill. 3. **Skill at Action**: Here, the focus is on being skilled at specific action-types. The example of juggling is used to illustrate this concept. Skill in action is tied to possessing high levels of control with respect to good plans for the action, and the idea that skill in juggling involves control over its behavioral components. 4. **Action Domains**: This part expands the concept of skill beyond individual actions to clusters of action-types, termed 'action domains.' The author discusses how skills often involve clusters of actions that are structured in a specific way. 5. **Skill at a Domain**: The author proposes that skill at a domain involves high success rates at central goals, not due to luck but control and the ability to form good plans. This definition moves beyond mere control, incorporating the capacity to devise successful strategies. 6. **The Gradability of Skill**: This section likely discusses how skill varies in degrees. It might cover how skill levels change based on different dimensions like completeness, control, and plan quality. 7. **How Agents Possess Skill: Skill for Free**: The final section probably addresses how agents acquire skills. It might contrast different ways of developing skills, such as through innate abilities versus deliberate practice and tuning. Throughout the chapter, Shepherd explores various aspects of skill, from its relationship with control and action to the construction of action domains and the gradability of skill. The chapter integrates examples from various fields, including sports and cognitive science, to illuminate the multifaceted nature of skill.