Philosophy of Skillful Coping. Motor Intentionality vs. Representations for Action

In many of his papers the contemporary and much debated author Hubert Dreyfus resorts to Merleau-Ponty's concept of “motor intentionality” in order to uphold the view of direct relation, not mediated by mental representations, between subject and world. He claims that as a person becomes an expert in a domain (driving, playing piano etc.), she does not respond in a rule-like way to objects, but in a flexible way to situations as wholes. No representations of objects or rules are active anymore; the whole situation in which that person is immersed requires her to act in a certain way. However, skillful coping, although not guided by rules, is not automatic action; it is intentional behavior, viz. motor intentionality–the body's adaptation to the environmental “solicitations”. This paper challenges this thesis by arguing that, in order to account for skillful coping, one need to explain how the body succeeds in dealing with complicated objects that require multiple object tracking, specific timing and spatiotemporal coordination of movements. Using contemporary research findings, it could be argued that such coping needs binding of many kinds of information (about object features, spatial details and motor commands) in the same mental file. After clarifying the concept of “mental representation”, the paper argues that such files are subpersonal representations for action.