Skill: Making, Embodied Cognition, Neuroscience

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