Skill: Making, Embodied Cognition, Neuroscience - Simon Penny

This book challenges the conventional binary skill vs intelligence and seeks to revalue skill as part of cognition. It seeks an explanation of skill that is experientially, philosophically, and scientifically satisfactory, arguing that skill is a form of intelligence rooted in embodied, sensorimotor experience rather than abstract mental processes. Questioning the basic tenets of the Western Enlightenment world view, it is stubbornly interdisciplinary, drawing upon philosophy, psychology, anthropology, cognitive science, and neuroscience among other fields.

The book begins with a philosophical historiography revealing the culturally contingent and historically constructed nature of conventional philosophical ideas of skill - Cartesian dualism, notions of mind, consciousness, cognition, and mental capacities. It then uses contemporary neuroscience and cognitive anthropology to develop an alternative: a holistic, non-dualist understanding of cognition that places skilled bodily practice at its center. Armed with this theorisation of skill, an exploration of artisanal and other skilled practice is pursued, drawing upon situated, distributed, embodied and enactive approaches to cognition which focus on the role of tools, structured spaces and cognitive ecologies. This leads into a discussion of pedagogies for skilled practices and the place of skilled practices in broader pedagogical contexts. Finally, it applies this framework to digital environments and artificial intelligence, questioning dominant narratives about cognition and technology.

Grounded in a lifetime of embodied practice and interdisciplinary inquiry, this work introduces the concept of neurophysiological holism and offers a new way of understanding skill. It is a must read for students and researchers from all backgrounds interested in expanding their knowledge of embodied approaches to cognition.