Chapter 7 examines interventions that can be implemented to address mental illness stigma. These include individual actions that the person who is stigmatized can engage in to help them cope with or resist stigma and actions that other people are obligated to perform in order to decrease stigma they may endorse or perpetuate unwittingly. These also include structural changes that social institutions and systems must undergo to make social structures less stigmatizing and more supportive of people with mental illness, and social and cultural interventions that increase the belongingness and acceptance of people with mental illness into the community as well as transform social norms to be more supportive of people with mental illness. In addition to using philosophical argumentation, this chapter draws on empirical literature in social psychology that examines what works to reduce and resist stigma.

Chapter 13 COLLECTIVE SKILLS, PRACTICES, AND CULTURAL INNOVATION argues that, in order to make sense of the possibility of cumulative culture, we ought to distinguish between collective skills and individual or group skills. I argue that practices are partly grounded on cognitive states of agents, rather than entirely on individual and collective dispositions, if cumulative culture is possible. Collective intelligence is explained in terms of a theory of collective skills as productive practices.

Chapter 12 FROM PUZZLES OF CONTROL, LEARNING, AND FLEXIBILITY TO A THEORY OF SKILLS contends that in order to account for what makes skills distinctive, skills must involve standing knowledge states. I lay out a novel solution to the puzzle of learning by doing, which offers additional reasons to reject the doctrine of essentially intentional actions.

Chapter 5 A THEORY OF NATURAL TALENTS singles out two theoretical questions surrounding talents. The first is whether their existence is a myth. The second is whether talents are necessary for acquiring skills. I argue that accepting the existence of talents helps account for some robust psychological generalizations. On the other hand, there are good reasons to think that in a variety of domains, talents are by no means required for skill acquisition. I develop a novel theory of talents—capacitism—which falls out from the theory of intelligence developed in Chapter 4 and provides the philosophical foundation for debunking the myth of the raw talent. The final section concludes the general argument that skill is a natural kind.

Chapter 3 analyzes some of the ways that stereotypes harm people’s sense of self and identity. One way is through expressive harm, which is the harm that results from the unwitting and inevitable perpetuation of stereotypes. Stereotypes have a pervasive cultural power that enables them to control people’s thoughts, feelings, behavior, and social interactions even when people actively disavow the stereotype. Other ways that stereotypes harm people’s sense of self and identity are through the internalization of oppressive social scripts, which ascribe motivations and expectations for behavior, and through stereotype threat, in which people inadvertently and paradoxically act in ways that correspond to stereotypes even as they are trying hard to avoid fitting stereotypes. When people with mental illness internalize oppressive social scripts and experience stereotype threat, they incorporate negative stereotypes into aspects of their experience and identity, which damages their identity and sense of self and also diminishes their autonomy.

Chapter 3 INTELLIGENCE SOCIALISM opposes two radically different views about the relation between skills and intelligence—elitism and socialism. Elitism—pervasive in popular culture as well as in psychometrics—is the view that only a particular class of skill—‘theoretical’, or ‘intellectual’ skills, versus ‘practical’ or ‘embodied’ skills—manifests intelligence. I single out the best case for the stronger socialist claim that no principled difference in intelligence can be found between theoretical, or intellectual, skills, and practical, or embodied skills.

Chapter 11 AN EPISTEMIC THEORY OF STRATEGIC CONTROL argues that a knowledge-based theory of strategic control for expert skilled action can explain skilled action’s flexibility as well as the fact that skilled action is procedurally controlled. My discussion provides novel reasons to doubt the doctrine of essentially intentional actions. I outline a theory of automatic control.

Chapter 6 INTELLECTUALISMS distinguishes between forms of intellectualisms and lays out the main goal of the second part of the book: to defend a form of intellectualism about skills, skilled action, and intelligence that, while explaining the distinctive features of intelligence and skills in terms of knowledge, it shies away from fully identifying either intelligence or skills with knowledge states. It is a form of intellectualism that is compatible with socialism and that pertains to the kind of intelligent beings that we are; it concerns agentive intelligence but it also extends, in a qualified way, to subagentive intelligence, thereby widening the scope of traditional intellectualism. In all of these ways, it is intellectualism with a human face.

Chapter 2 SKILLS in ACTION argues that skills are keys to understanding crucial notions in action theory, such as intentional action. The idea that intentional actions are constitutively the employment of skills is an attractive thought, and yet, the view has fallen in disrepute. This chapter resuscitates it: I argue that no other capacity—from instincts to habits or talents, to innate general-purpose faculties—can figure as centrally in action theory.

Chapter 10 PRACTICAL CONCEPTS AND PRODUCTIVE REASONING reviews arguments for positing practical concepts and discusses a novel empirical argument for the psychological reality of practical concepts that relies on evidence for a distinctively productive kind of reasoning.