Autore
Cappuccio, Massimiliano

Titolo
Cybernetics and the Skilled Mind. Pre-reflective Action Control in High Performance
Periodico
Reti, saperi, linguaggi
Anno: 2025 - Volume: 28 - Fascicolo: 2 - Pagina iniziale: 271 - Pagina finale: 299

Is reflective awareness beneficial or rather detrimental to the control of expert action? Cybernetics, the study of self-regulating systems, can help us answer this question in the context of high performance. Each of the three historical waves of cybernetics contributes to explain why experts tend to underperform when they closely monitor their own activity as they perform – for example, when sportspeople, craftspeople, and artists are instructed to single out and track some component processes of their actions. First-wave cybernetics provides the foundations for understanding skilled behaviour as the fine-tuned regulation of perceptual variables through negative feedback and adaptive control. Second-wave cybernetics highlights how habitual patterns emerge from recursive, self-organising interactions between embodied observers and their environments. Third-wave cybernetics examines skilled habits within systems of practices and social forms of regulation, showing how agents maintain local autonomy within broader organisational and normative structures. I argue that all the three strands of cybernetics provide robust arguments in favour of "Radical Habitualism", the thesis that habitual, pre-reflective control is the fundamental enabler and the distinctive hallmark of optimal skilled performance and that reflective control is, in turn, inherently suboptimal. Corroborated by empirical research in sport & performance psychology and supported by the models of expert control developed by cyberneticists, the radically habitualist framework presented in this paper aims to offer a unified anti-representationalist, and anti-intellectualist account of skill & expertise, reconciling ecological, enactivist, and pragmatist perspectives on action control.



SICI: 2279-7777(2025)28:2<271:CATSMP>2.0.ZU;2-Q
Testo completo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.12832/119461
Testo completo alternativo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.12832/119461

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