The Psychology of Expertise and the Skillfulness of Virtue
(Draft Version)
Matt Stichter
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
School of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs
Washington State University
PO Box 644880
Pullman, WA 99164
mstichter@wsu.edu
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The Psychology of Expertise and the Skillfulness of Virtue
One approach to understanding the concept of a virtue in ethical theory has been to
compare and contrast virtues with practical skills, since both involve learning how to act well.1
If the thesis that a virtue is a type of practical skill is correct, then it will have a significant
impact on our conceptions of virtue and moral knowledge. Determining whether a skill model of
virtue is plausible requires answering two central questions. First, what is the nature of skills and
expertise? Second, what characteristics would virtues and the virtuous person have if they are
modeled on skills and expertise? This paper delves into both questions, by analyzing some of
the current psychological research on expertise and exploring the philosophical implications of
that research for virtue theory. Various arguments that have been given both for and against the
skill model of virtue will be examined in order to determine which arguments are empirically
consistent with the psychology literature. On the whole though, this paper represents only an
initial foray into this subject matter, as both the psychological and philosophical literature on
these topics is vast. The main goal of this short paper is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of
examining the skill model of virtue in the light of psychological research on expertise.
The significance of the ‘virtue as skill’ thesis can be seen in Aristotle’s (1984) suggestion
that “we should use as evidence what is apparent for the sake of what is obscure.” (1104a14-15)
Making analogies to practical skills with which we all have some familiarity, as Aristotle often
did, can shed light on the more obscure nature of virtue. According to Julia Annas (1995), “The
intuitive appeal of the ancient skill analogy for virtue rests on the idea that one practical activity
– acting well – is like another prominent practical activity, working well.” (p. 229) Paul
Bloomfield (2000) points out that another benefit of the skill model is that it can yield “a viable
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On this analogy, the virtuous person is seen as an ethical expert, who has achieved expertise in many moral skills.
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epistemology in which moral knowledge is shown to be a species of a general kind of knowledge
that is not philosophically suspect”. (p. 23)2
Opinions on the ‘virtue as skill’ thesis are divided. Some argue that virtues are not skills,
for the differences between the two are too vast. Others argue that while virtues are not skills,
they are at least structurally similar in a number of ways. Finally, a few argue that virtues can be
understood as actual skills, and not merely analogous to skills in some limited respects.
There are two related difficulties in settling this debate. First, while part of the appeal of
the skill model of virtue is due to our familiarity with acquiring practical skills, the downside of
this is that we tend to rely too much on just our own experiences of acquiring skills. Although
most of us have acquired several practical skills, few of us have achieved the level of expertise
with regard to those skills, and it is the comparison of the virtuous person to experts in a skill that
matters most for the ‘virtue as skill’ thesis. There is ample psychological evidence that novices
use strategies that are quite different from those used by experts, and as a result, our own
experiences with skills can be misleading when it comes to thinking about how experts perform.
Second, not all of our experiences with skill acquisition will be the same. This leads to
philosophers implicitly working with different conceptions of skills. Furthermore, if there are
different conceptions of skills, then there can also be different conceptions of the ‘virtue as skill’
thesis. Thus, an apparent agreement between philosophers that virtues are like skills can mask
serious underlying disagreement, if they are operating with fundamentally different conceptions
of skills.
For example, although Julia Annas endorses the skill model of virtue, she believes that
only some accounts of virtue are compatible with this approach, because not all of the ancient
virtue ethicists embraced the idea that virtues are like skills. Surprisingly, Annas (2003) claims
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This is especially relevant given all the recent empirical challenges to virtue from situationist psychology.
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that “Aristotle rejects the idea that virtue is a skill” (p. 16), despite the frequent analogies that he
draws between skills and virtues. She claims instead that it was Socrates and Plato who accepted
the skill model of virtue.
However, D.S. Hutchinson (1988) has argued that the Socratic view of practical skills
was a controversial view in ancient Greek thought, and that “Plato is taking sides in a fourthcentury debate about the nature of practical knowledge.” (p. 26) Hutchinson argues that there
were important debates regarding the nature of skills between Plato and Socrates, on the one
hand, and Isocrates and other rhetoricians, on the other. The former group viewed skill
acquisition as an intellectual exercise of grasping universal principles, while the latter viewed
skills as gained primarily through practical experience. Hutchinson (1988) concludes that “when
Aristotle takes a stand on what sort of knowledge skill is, and what sort of skill virtue is, we
regularly find that Aristotle turns Plato upside down and chooses the Isocratean alternative which
Plato had rejected.” (p. 40) So it is not as simple of a matter as thinking that there is a single
skill model of virtue, and that one group accepts it while the rest reject it.3
Progress on this issue will be next to impossible without some general agreement as to
the nature of skills. Furthermore, the usefulness of any comparison of virtues to skills depends
upon the accuracy of the account of practical skills being referenced. To move the discussion
forward, we need a model of skill and expertise that is supported by recent research.
The most well-known philosophical account of skill acquisition is the one developed by
Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus (1986) in their research on the extent to which artificial intelligence
can duplicate human expertise. According to the Dreyfus account, skill acquisition is broken
into 5 stages, with a progression from using context-free rules to developing a sensitivity to the
3
Although I view the approach taken in this paper as broadly Aristotelian, my main interest is really in
contemporary virtue theory. I mention the Ancient Greek debate here just to show that the use of different
conceptions of skills and expertise has occurred since the “virtue as skill” thesis was initially proposed.
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relevant features of particular situations. Dreyfus has also discussed the possible ethical
implications of the skill model. In his view, ethical action is skillful action, and “The skills
model thus supports an ethics of situated involvement such as that of Aristotle, John Dewey, and
Carol Gilligan.” (Dreyfus, 2004, p. 251) One of the implications of this account for the ‘virtue
as skill’ debate is that Dreyfus specifically rejects the Socratic account of skills which Annas
promotes.
However, as useful as the Dreyfus model has been, we cannot rely solely on it for the
most accurate portrayal of skill acquisition and expertise.4 The Dreyfus model is based mainly
on research done in the 1980’s, and there has been a considerable amount of psychological
research done on expertise in the last 20-30 years. A model of skill acquisition that will be of
use in settling debates about the ‘virtue as skill’ thesis will need to reflect this recent research.
The following sections of the paper offer a brief survey of how some of the psychological
research could impact debates about virtues and skills in areas of virtue theory, virtue
epistemology, and virtue ethics.
Virtue Theory
Julia Annas defends a skill model of virtue, and she has claimed that experts have the
ability to ‘give an account’ of their actions. Giving an account, according to Annas (1995)
means “that the person with a skill be able explicitly to explain and justify her particular
decisions and judgements, and to do so in terms of some general grasp of the principles which
define that skill.” (p. 233) The expert needs to be able to articulate the reasons for her actions,
and this explanation should draw upon the expert’s grasp of the principles underlying the skill.
Although this condition could be thought of as requiring merely that the principles are
articulatable, rather than requiring that the expert can actually articulate the reasons herself,
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There are also some problems with Dreyfus’s treatment of practical wisdom with respect to ethical expertise.
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Annas explicitly describes this requirement in terms of the expert being able to articulate the
reasons for her actions.5
The psychological research, however, does not support experts being able to give an
account in the manner described by Annas. Research shows that “experts often cannot articulate
their knowledge because much of their knowledge is tacit and their overt intuitions can be
flawed”. (Chi 2006, p. 24) Even when experts are able to articulate an explanation, the
explanations are often inconsistent with the observed behavior of the experts. These problems
occur both when experts are asked about a specific task they just performed and when asked in
general about their methods. Ericsson (2006) notes that:
When experts are asked to describe their general methods in professional activities, they
sometimes have difficulties, and there is frequently poor correspondence between the
behavior of computer programs (expert systems) implementing their described methods
and their observed detailed behavior when presented with the same tasks and specific
situations. (p. 231)
Of particular difficulty is getting an answer to the question of why the person responded one way
rather than another:
Because participants can access only the end-products of their cognitive processes during
perception and memory retrieval, and they cannot report why only one of several
logically possible thoughts entered their attention, they must make inferences or
confabulate answers to such questions. In support of this type of confabulation, Nisbett
and Wilson (1977) found that participants’ responses to “why-questions” after responding
in a task were in many circumstances as inaccurate as those given by other participants
5
It should be noted, however, that Annas does not require or even expect that experts are consciously deliberating at
the time of action. There is much empirical research to support her position on this. But she does expect that
experts can give an account after having acted, and that they are in a position to teach others.
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who merely observed these individuals’ performance and tried to explain it without any
memory or first-hand experience of the processes involved. (Ericsson, 2006, p. 230)
Despite these problems, there is a kind of reporting that experts can do about their thought
process which does appear to be reliable. Instead of asking experts to explain their behavior after
performing some task, experts are asked to ‘think aloud’ while engaged in performance of the
task. While these verbalizations are far more accurate than after the fact explanations, they are
not particularly detailed. The reason is that in ‘think aloud’ experiments:
participants were not asked to describe or explain how they solve these problems and do
not generate such descriptions or explanations. Instead, they are asked to stay focused on
generating a solution to the problem and thus only give verbal expression to those
thoughts that spontaneously emerge in attention during the generation of the solution.
(Ericsson, 2006, p. 228)
It is important to note that the research does not support the conclusion that experts can never
accurately articulate their reasons for action. Rather, there are reasons why such articulation may
be inherently difficult, and so articulation is not seen as a hallmark of expertise. In short, experts
are identified by their performance, and such experts have not been found to be able to reliably
given accurate accounts of their decisions and judgments. Annas, on the other hand, deems the
inability of a person to ‘give an account’ as evidence that one is not an expert. It is this specific
claim that is undermined by the psychological research.6
Virtue Epistemology
Linda Zagzebski (1996) makes room for an element of skillfulness in her account of
virtue epistemology, which models intellectual virtues on moral virtues. Although she does
6
Just to clarify my position, I should point out that I am not arguing that the psychological research shows that her
account of virtue is false. Rather it is her views on expertise that are being challenged. She could either give up the
demand for articulation, or give up the claim that virtues are like skills in this respect (and perhaps others).
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claim that virtues are associated with skills which provide the knowledge of how to achieve
success with the goals of virtue, she rejects the idea that virtues are themselves skills. She relies
on a common objection to the idea that virtues are skills, which is that skills are mere capacities,
while virtues are dispositions. The difference has to do with motivation, in that skills are
supposed to be capacities that you have regardless of whether you are motivated to act skillfully
or not, while virtues require that you are always motivated to perform well.
An initial look at some of the recent psychological research suggests, however, that
motivation is actually one of the most important elements in achieving expertise. Frequent
estimates place the amount of time necessary to achieve expertise in a field at 10 years or 10,000
hours. In addition, improving your level of skill requires not the mere repetition of things you
already know how to do, but continually striving to do things that you currently cannot do. This
kind of experience is referred to as ‘deliberate practice’, and it’s roughly 10,000 hours of
deliberate practice that’s needed for expertise. “Unless a person wants to pursue the difficult
path that leads to the development of talent, neither innate potential nor all the knowledge in the
world will suffice.” (Csikszentmihalyi 1993, pp. 31-32) Barry Zimmerman (2006) notes that
“coaches and expert performers have ranked desire to succeed as the most important factor for
eventual success in a domain.” (p. 709) One of the key questions this expertise research is still
attempting to address is “how some people manage to persevere through the very long periods of
practice and experience, involving both successes and inevitably many failures, that we now
know are so essential to the development of expert levels of skill.” (Feltovich, 2006, p. 45) So it
appears that virtues cannot be contrasted with skills merely on the grounds that one requires that
you be motivated to act well while the other does not.7
7
I acknowledge that I have not yet established that experts are required to always be motivated to perform well in
exactly the same way as the virtuous person, but expertise does require a stable commitment to acting well.
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Furthermore, once expertise has been achieved in a skill, the same kind of deliberate
practice is necessary to retain expert performance. Although it might be thought that once you
achieve expertise you never really lose it, “the available evidence suggests that maintaining skills
is as effortful as acquiring them in the first place, and benefits become increasingly more
specific, that is, limited to those skills that are actively practiced and maintained.” (Krampe,
2006, p. 733) Expertise requires some level of routine practice to maintain it or the level of skill
degrades over time. Thus, even after achieving expertise, a high level of motivation is still
required to maintain one’s expertise.
Even if virtues require some additional motivational element not found in all skills, this
does not necessarily show that virtues cannot be skills, since it may be that virtues are just a
special subset of skills.8 This response is along the lines that Zagzebski uses in response to
James Wallace’s argument that virtues are not skills because all virtues are valuable but not all
skills are valuable. As Zagzebski (1996) points out:
This argument does not support the conclusion that virtues are not skills, however, but
only that the class of virtues is not coextensive with the class of skills. On Wallace’s
reasoning it might be the case that every virtue is a skill, although not every skill is a
virtue. (p. 107)
Virtue Ethics
A skill model of virtue may also play a role in addressing certain objections that have
been raised about virtue ethics. Take for example, Robert Johnson’s (2003) criticisms of
Rosalind Hursthouse’s virtue-ethical account of right action. Hursthouse (2000) claims that an
action is right if and only if “it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically (i.e. acting in
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That is, virtues are moral skills, and there may be common features found in moral skills that would not be found
in non-moral skills. Presumably there would also be normative reasons for acquiring and exercising moral skills.
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character) do in the circumstances”. (p. 28) Johnson has criticized the account on the grounds
that the actions a non-virtuous person should take are often uncharacteristic of the virtuous
person, and thus Hursthouse’s account of right action is too narrow. He claims that people who
are not fully virtuous ought to engage in certain types of ‘self-monitoring’ actions in order to
become more virtuous, even though these types of actions are “utterly uncharacteristic of
completely virtuous agents.” (2003, pp. 817-818) The psychological research on skills clearly
demonstrates that novices employ strategies that experts learn to do without. While there are a
variety of ways that experts can be contrasted with novices, in general the research reveals that
“experts do not just complete tasks and solve problems faster and better than novices, but often
attain their solutions in qualitatively different ways”. (Feltovich, 2006, p. 44) So a skill model of
virtue can lend some support to Johnson’s critique that the right act for a non-virtuous person (or
novice) cannot be the same act that a virtuous person (or expert) would characteristically do.9
On the other hand, psychological research indicates that ‘self-monitoring’ activity is
required even as an expert. Self-monitoring behavior can come into play during deliberate
practice sessions, when the goal is to improve some specific aspect of one’s performance. Selfmonitoring is also relevant when experts face situations that contain features they have little prior
experience with. Feltovich (2006) claims that the research shows:
This kind of monitoring prevents blind alleys, errors, and the need for extensive back-up
and retraction, thus ensuring overall progress to a goal. In addition, these same kinds of
monitoring behaviors are critical throughout the process of acquiring knowledge and
skills on which expertise depends. (p. 56 - emphasis mine)
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It is not just that experts are able to perform actions that novices cannot, but also that some of the methods used to
improve one’s level of skill are not even available novices (for the methods depend on experience the novice lacks).
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Given the emphasized part of the quote above, on a skill model of virtue it would turn out that
self-monitoring activity is not “utterly uncharacteristic of completely virtuous agents.”
Finally, a skill model of virtue could partially address Johnson’s (2003) main challenge
for virtue based accounts of right action to “make room for a genuine moral obligation to
improve your character and to act in other ways that are appropriate only because you could be a
better person than you are.” (p. 811) Acquiring expertise requires one to be strongly motivated
to improve oneself, knowing that the process will involve years of difficult training. If virtues
are like skills, then the non-virtuous person would likewise need to embrace a commitment to
excellence, and to be disposed to take the necessary means to this end. Even when one achieves
a certain level of virtuousness, the commitment to self-improvement must be maintained; else the
virtuous person will soon lose the very expertise it took so long to acquire. There is little sense
in committing yourself to self-improvement but not to maintaining those improvements, and
similarly there’s little sense in committing yourself to maintaining excellence while not
committing yourself to achieving excellence in the first place.
Conclusion
Hopefully this paper has served as a kind of ‘proof of concept’ for creating a skill model
of virtue that is guided by the psychological research on expertise. An examination of this
research should help to clarify debates regarding the relationship between virtues and skills.
Furthermore, a skill model of virtue that is empirically consistent with the psychological
literature can have useful applications in debates about virtue epistemology and virtue ethics.
However, further inquiry into the psychological research on expertise and its philosophical
implications is needed to determine the true potential of this conception of virtue.10
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A more comprehensive treatment of this topic is currently in the works, so suggestions are always welcome!
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References
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