Yuki Kawauchi is a remarkable athlete. The winner of the 2018 Boston marathon – known in Japan as the ‘citizen runner’ – worked full-time at a school until April this year, when he finally went professional. Despite these commitments, Kawauchi runs 125km (nearly 78 miles) a week, and has kept a prodigious racing calendar. He holds the records for the most marathons run faster than 2.20 and 2.11 (though he runs so often and so fast that the number of marathons run under these times is constantly changing). And in January, he ran solo against more than 100 teams at the Yashio Shinai Isshu Ekiden relays, winning the race overall and falling just a few seconds short of the course record. Incidentally, he also holds the unofficial world record for the fastest half-marathon run in a three-piece suit (1:06:42).
Adding to the mystique, Kawauchi is a loner: a rarity in endurance running. He has no training group or coach, and he sets his own training plans. Like many amateur runners who pick up the sport later in life, he is a self-coached runner.
What explains Kawauchi’s ability to perform consistently at such a high level? It is tempting to look for biological causes: perhaps in his unusually high VO2 max (his maximal oxygen uptake), or a ‘recovery’ gene (which might decrease his potential for injury), or his training history (he was coached in endurance running by his family from a very young age). These explanations surely tell part of the story, but Masaaki Sugita, the chief scientist at Japan’s athletics federation, suggests that at least part of the explanation is mental: ‘He’s a clever runner … he thinks for himself.’
My goal is to argue that Sugita’s comment expresses an important truth about the role of thinking in practical skill. To understand Kawauchi’s genius, we need to think of him not as a racehorse, but as an intellectual. And to understand him as an intellectual, we need to understand the nature of self-coaching.
Let’s start from the diametrically opposed view: the view that thought is the enemy of skill, which the philosopher Barbara Gail Montero at the City University of New York aptly calls the ‘just do it’ view. According to the just-do-it view, skilled action at its best is associated with ‘flow’ experiences that leave no space for thought; when we start thinking about what we are doing, skill breaks down in distinctive ways.
It is easy to think ourselves into the just-do-it view. Athletes are often extraordinarily bad at explaining their own successes. After winning the US Women’s Amateur Golf Championship in 2006, Kimberly Kim was asked about how she motivated herself to perform at such a high level. She answered:
To develop an alternative to the just-do-it account, I want to turn to the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle. In The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle distinguished between two kinds of knowledge: knowledge-how and knowledge-that. Knowledge-that is the kind of knowledge we refer to when we talk about someone knowing that something is the case, or whether it is the case; this has been the primary focus of philosophical concern for quite some time. Knowledge-how is the kind of knowledge we refer to when we talk about someone knowing how to do something, or being skilled at doing something.
Ryle’s interest in knowledge-how stems from his wider attack on the dualist picture of mind that he traces back to René Descartes in the 17th century. His dualist opponent offers a picture of mental states as non-physical internal states that are logically independent of bodily states. Ryle argues that this picture renders the mind mysterious – branding it the myth of the ghost in the machine – and in response develops dispositional accounts of various mental states and activities.
When applied to knowledge-how, the Cartesian view of the mind yields what Ryle calls intellectualism. Intellectualism tries to explain the intelligence of skilful actions in terms of inner acts of contemplation. According to this view, when a middle-distance runner kicks at the right time in order to out-sprint her competitors, it must be because she considered relevant facts about the right time to kick before kicking. For the intellectualist, any piece of knowledge-how can be reduced to a bundle of knowledge-that.
Given his wider project and his attack on intellectualism, we might expect Ryle to have been a proponent of the just-do-it view. In fact, he is the exact opposite. Ryle thinks that thought is central to skill, because he opposes the intellectualist’s picture of skill, but also her picture of what thought is. On Ryle’s view, thought cannot be understood as inner speech or contemplation; it is a distinctive learning-oriented engagement with the world.
When he introduces the concept of knowledge-that, Ryle takes the connection between thinking and intelligent action for granted. He claims that ordinary language supports the idea that:
Image: Shiho Fukada/The New York Times
Adding to the mystique, Kawauchi is a loner: a rarity in endurance running. He has no training group or coach, and he sets his own training plans. Like many amateur runners who pick up the sport later in life, he is a self-coached runner.What explains Kawauchi’s ability to perform consistently at such a high level? It is tempting to look for biological causes: perhaps in his unusually high VO2 max (his maximal oxygen uptake), or a ‘recovery’ gene (which might decrease his potential for injury), or his training history (he was coached in endurance running by his family from a very young age). These explanations surely tell part of the story, but Masaaki Sugita, the chief scientist at Japan’s athletics federation, suggests that at least part of the explanation is mental: ‘He’s a clever runner … he thinks for himself.’
My goal is to argue that Sugita’s comment expresses an important truth about the role of thinking in practical skill. To understand Kawauchi’s genius, we need to think of him not as a racehorse, but as an intellectual. And to understand him as an intellectual, we need to understand the nature of self-coaching.
Let’s start from the diametrically opposed view: the view that thought is the enemy of skill, which the philosopher Barbara Gail Montero at the City University of New York aptly calls the ‘just do it’ view. According to the just-do-it view, skilled action at its best is associated with ‘flow’ experiences that leave no space for thought; when we start thinking about what we are doing, skill breaks down in distinctive ways.
It is easy to think ourselves into the just-do-it view. Athletes are often extraordinarily bad at explaining their own successes. After winning the US Women’s Amateur Golf Championship in 2006, Kimberly Kim was asked about how she motivated herself to perform at such a high level. She answered:
I have no idea. I guess it was like God playing for me. I don’t know how I did it. Thinking back, I don’t know how I did it. I just hit the ball and it went good.Reports of this phenomenon – which the cognitive scientists Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr in 2001 called expertise-induced amnesia – are widespread. So often, athletes, artists and musicians are fluid in their field of practice but inarticulate in interviews. (...)
To develop an alternative to the just-do-it account, I want to turn to the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle. In The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle distinguished between two kinds of knowledge: knowledge-how and knowledge-that. Knowledge-that is the kind of knowledge we refer to when we talk about someone knowing that something is the case, or whether it is the case; this has been the primary focus of philosophical concern for quite some time. Knowledge-how is the kind of knowledge we refer to when we talk about someone knowing how to do something, or being skilled at doing something.
Ryle’s interest in knowledge-how stems from his wider attack on the dualist picture of mind that he traces back to René Descartes in the 17th century. His dualist opponent offers a picture of mental states as non-physical internal states that are logically independent of bodily states. Ryle argues that this picture renders the mind mysterious – branding it the myth of the ghost in the machine – and in response develops dispositional accounts of various mental states and activities.
When applied to knowledge-how, the Cartesian view of the mind yields what Ryle calls intellectualism. Intellectualism tries to explain the intelligence of skilful actions in terms of inner acts of contemplation. According to this view, when a middle-distance runner kicks at the right time in order to out-sprint her competitors, it must be because she considered relevant facts about the right time to kick before kicking. For the intellectualist, any piece of knowledge-how can be reduced to a bundle of knowledge-that.
Given his wider project and his attack on intellectualism, we might expect Ryle to have been a proponent of the just-do-it view. In fact, he is the exact opposite. Ryle thinks that thought is central to skill, because he opposes the intellectualist’s picture of skill, but also her picture of what thought is. On Ryle’s view, thought cannot be understood as inner speech or contemplation; it is a distinctive learning-oriented engagement with the world.
When he introduces the concept of knowledge-that, Ryle takes the connection between thinking and intelligent action for granted. He claims that ordinary language supports the idea that:
[A]n action exhibits intelligence, if, and only if, the agent is thinking what he is doing while he is doing it, and thinking what he is doing in such a manner that he would not do the action so well if he were not thinking what he is doing.by Josh Habgood-Coote, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Shiho Fukada/The New York Times
