What is Skilled Coping? Experts on Expertise

The paper uses a phenomenological analysis of interviews with a professional string quartet to critique the notion of 'skilled coping' as used by Hubert Dreyfus. According to Dreyfus, skilled coping is away of being and acting in which one is immersed in one actions such that one is not thinking or reflecting. He uses examples from various experts, such a chess-, baseball-, and soccer players, to illustrate this. I argue that his account suffers from a reductive dualism between coping and reflection and further from a lack of clarity. I use my work with the string quartet to illustrate that so-called skilled coping, rather than a distinct phenomenon, is a series of connected mental phenomena that span highly reflective stances as well as trance-like states of absorption. Therefore, I point out that Dreyfus's problematic usage in fact prevents us from appreciating the phenomenological complexity of the absorption of experts.