Section 4: Skill

_[1140a1] What admits of being otherwise includes both things made and things doable in action. But making things and acting are different (when it comes to their nature we rely even on discussions outside our school). Hence this disposition to engage in action involving reason is different from the disposition to make things involving reason. Hence too they are not included in one another. For _[5] acting is not making and making is not acting.

Now since building, for example, is a skill (technê) and is essentially a disposition to make involving reason, and there is neither any skill that is not such a disposition to make nor any such disposition to make that is not a skill, skill is identical with a disposition to make involving a true reasoning. _[10]

Every skill is concerned with coming into being, that is, with crafting things and seeing how something can come into being that is capable of either being or not being and whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing made. For skill is concerned neither with things that are, nor things that come into being by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature (since these have their origin _[15] in themselves).

Since making and acting are different, skill must be a matter of making, not of acting. And in a sense chance and skill are concerned with the same things. As Agathon says, “skill loves chance and chance loves skill.”

Skill, then, as has been said, is a disposition concerned with making _[20] involving true reasoning. Unskillfulness, in contrast, is a disposition concerned with making involving false reasoning. Both are concerned with what can be otherwise.