to construct machines that can do the same tasks, as the discipline of artificial
intelligence has ampl ydocumented (e.g., visual recognition [Marr, 1982]).
It is difficult for me to escape the conclusion that we should abandon the idea
that expertise is something special and rare (from a cognitive or biological
point of view) and move toward the view that the human organism is in its
essence expert. The neonatal brain is alread yan expert s ystem. ‘‘Becoming ex-
pert’’ in sociall ydefined wa ys is the process of connecting ‘‘intrinsic’’ expertise
to the outside world so that it becomes manifest in particular types of behaviors
in particular types of situations. I believe that Fodor (1975), from another point
of view, was articulating a similar proposal: To broadl yparaphrase Fodor,
‘‘You can’t learn anything you don’t already know.’’
To look at expertise in this wa yma yrequire reversal of some of our per-
spectives on familiar situations. For instance, when considering Chase and
Ericsson’s (1981) stud yof SF, it is eas yto allow one’s focus of attention to fall
on the two hundred hours of practice that moved him from average to the
world’s best, implicitl yequating the acquisition of the expertise with the work
that went on in the practice period under observation. The perspective to which
Iamincreasinglydrawnsuggeststhatwefocusourattentioninsteadonwhat
SF brought to the experimental situation. SF’s intimate knowledge of running
times was, from this perspective, the principal manifestation of expertise that
‘‘bootstrapped’’ the digit-span task, and it seems to me that the most interesting
psychological considerations are how and why that knowledge came to be
applied to the task in hand when it did. What determined that it would be
applied after about fifteen hours of practice rather than instantaneousl yor not
at all? A plausible answer to that question ma ywell be ‘‘chance’’ (e.g., a par-
ticular sequence of numbers that strongl yreminded SF of a well-known run-
ning time).
In other words, the broad answer to the question of how SF became expert at
the digit-span task is that he was able to increment his expertise b yapproxi-
mately0.01percentinasituationinwhichhewasalreadyexpertatanumber
of things, including running times, that supplied the other 99.99 percent of
what was needed. And each of those preceding areas of expertise was likewise
resting on other forms of expertise in the same relationship in a constant,
unbroken sequence back to birth and beyond. What made SF ‘‘exceptional’’
in conventional terms was no more than a unique set of life experiences. In
the sections that follow, I pursue some implications of this wa yof looking at
expertise as applied to music.
24.2 Acquiring Musical Skill
One of the principal reasons for studying expertise is practical. Given that it
would be sociall ydesirable for certain manifestations of expertise to be more
widespread than the yare, we want to know what we can do to assist people to
acquirethem.Theissuebecomesacuteinrelationtoformaleducation,where
the general perception is that we set up environments that are supposed to
encourage expertise, but that man yindividuals still do not achieve levels that
we know to be possible (whether it be learning a foreign language, a musical
Musical Expertise 567