ABSTRACT
Although the title of this chapter contains both the word ‘skills’ and the word ‘knowledge’, and although throughout the book I refer at times to skills and at other times to knowledge, I do not consider the two concepts to connote completely distinct areas of human activity or consciousness. Skills are often associated with motor control, such as the ability to play fast scales, whereas knowledge is connected with notions of understanding or acquaintance, such as appreciating in what ways psychedelia influenced the history of rock or ‘knowing a song’. But the notion of skills also includes the execution of purely mental acts of interpretation, such as recognizing chord progressions by ear or reading notation ‘in the head’. Similarly, a covers band musician’s knowledge of a song, when put to use in music-making, is the necessary condition for motor activity: without the knowledge, the song could not be played. I do not wish to go into the distinctions between skill and knowledge as a philosophical problem, but rather to acknowledge that it is sometimes more reasonable to refer to one of these than the other, as in the common usage of the two words.
