ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the key to resolving the problem of the criterion within the epistemology of sport lies in a proper understanding of how the phenomenon of play fits into the world of sports. Indeed, the phenomenology of the lesser-skilled sportspersons, who nevertheless know how to play some particular sport, remains a neglected area of the philosophy of sport. Philosophers of sport should opt for sport-specific considerations when theorizing about knowing-how in sports, while entertaining the possibility that expert sport performance can render ‘the mind wandering in and out between conscious effort and control and automatic subconscious state’. The cognitivist picture allows that the information processing in expert performance, perhaps, takes place at a subconscious and/or automated level. Hubert Dreyfus’s theory of expert performance has been influential when philosophers of sport have thought about knowing in skilful sports movements.
