Abstract

Dreyfus says that the ‘mental’ is the enemy of expertise; but what does he mean by the term ‘mental’? We begin by showing that, on Dreyfus’s view, there are three senses of ‘mindedness’ in which skillful coping is not mental. We can abbreviate these aspects of skillful coping as ‘3 N’: it is non-reflective, non-conceptual, and non-subjective. We argue, however, that there can be a fourth sense of mindedness that refers to a non-intellectual type of mind, which would be compatible with skillful coping even on Dreyfus’s view. Given this, the rest of Sect. 2 makes clear why many of Dreyfus’s critics are on the wrong track, having misunderstood the core of his account. In Sect. 3, we present disanalogy arguments that support Dreyfus’s account of minded skillful coping. Finally, Sect. 4 discusses how our account differs from a new wave of sympathetic interpretations of Dreyfus, as seen in works by Gehrman and Schwenkler (2020), Robertson (2023), and Cappuccio (2023).