## 1. Biography



Gilbert Ryle was born in Brighton, Sussex, England on 19 August 1900.
One of ten children, he came from a prosperous family and enjoyed a
liberal and stimulating childhood and adolescence. His father was a
general practitioner but had keen interests in philosophy and
astronomy that he passed on to his children and an impressive library
where Ryle enjoyed being an "omnivorous reader" (Ryle,
1970, 1). Educated at Brighton College (where later in life he would
return as a governor) Ryle went to Queen's College, Oxford in
1919 initially to study Classics, but he was quickly drawn to
Philosophy, graduating in 1924 with first-class honours in the new
Modern Greats School of Philosophy, Politics and Economics. While not
particularly sporting, his undergraduate studies were relieved by
rowing for his college eight, of which he was captain, and he was good
enough to have trials for the University boat. After his graduation in
1924 he was appointed to a lectureship in Philosophy at Christ Church
College and a year later became tutor. He would remain at Oxford for
his entire academic career until his retirement in 1968; in 1945 he
was elected to the Waynflete Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy. With
the outbreak of war Ryle volunteered. He was commissioned in the Welsh
Guards, serving in intelligence, and by the end of the War had been
promoted to the rank of Major. He became the Editor of *Mind*
after G.E. Moore's retirement in 1947; a post he held until
1971. Ryle was unstinting in his advice and encouragement to
generations of students. With colleagues he was "tolerant (and)
uncensorious" (Warnock, xiv), but in philosophical debate he
could turn into a formidable opponent, expressing an intense dislike
of pomposity, pretence and jargon (Urmson, 271; Gallop, 228). He was
also ever ready to challenge both the excessive veneration paid by
others to Plato and Classical authors as well as the philosophical
positions held by such contemporary colleagues as Collingwood in
Oxford or Anderson in Australia. He befriended Wittgenstein whose
work, if not his effect on colleagues and students, he greatly
admired. "Outstandingly friendly (and) sociable" (Warnock,
xiv), he is remembered as an entertaining conversationalist. Despite
having turned away from literary studies during his first year at
Oxford, sensing he had little aptitude for them, and even though he
read little other than the novels of Jane Austen (about whom he wrote
authoritatively) and P. G. Wodehouse, the style of Ryle's
writing is often literary and instantly recognizable even after a few
sentences (Urmson, 271; Mabbott, 223). A confirmed bachelor, he lived
after his retirement with his twin sister Mary in the Oxfordshire
village of Islip. Gardening and walking gave him immense pleasure, as
did his pipe. He died on 6 October 1976 at Whitby in Yorkshire after a
day's walking on the moors. "Philosophy irradiated his
whole life" (Mabbott, 224). He is reputed to have said that the
only completed portrait of him made him look like a "drowned
German General" (Mabbott, 224).


## 2. Philosophy as Cartography



When Ryle became a young don in the 1920s, philosophers could no
longer "pretend that philosophy differed from physics, chemistry
and biology by studying mental as opposed to material phenomena"
(1971b, vii). Although the turn away from psychologism was laudable,
philosophers succumbed instead to what Ryle considered to be a
regrettable temptation to look for Objects which were neither mental
nor material. Such objects were to be for philosophy what beetles and
butterflies are for entomology:



> 
> Platonic Forms, Propositions, Intentional Objects, Logical
> Objects ... [and even] Sense Data were recruited to appease our
> professional hankerings to have a subject matter of our own (1971b,
> vii).
> 



Ryle's campaign against the tendency of philosophers to
"hypostasise their own terms of art" lasted throughout his
career. Even his very first articles carried the
"Occamizing" message that "[p]hilosophical problems
are problems of a certain sort; they are not problems of an ordinary
sort about special entities" (1971b, vii; these early articles
include 1929, 1930a, 1933a, and 1933b).



Instead, think of a philosopher, by analogy, as a cartographer.
According to Ryle, competent speakers of language are to a philosopher
what an ordinary villager is to a mapmaker. A local villager knows his
way by wont and without reflection to the village church, to the town
hall, to the shops and back home again from the personal point of view
of one who lives there. But, asked to draw or to consult a map of his
village, he is faced with learning a new and different sort of task:
one that employs compass bearing and units of measurement. What was
first understood in the personal terms of local snapshots now has to
be considered in the completely general terms of the cartographer. The
villager's knowledge by wont, enabling him to lead a stranger
from place to place, is a different skill from one requiring him to
tell the stranger, in perfectly general and neutral terms, how to get
to any of the places, or indeed, how to understand these places in
relation to those of other villages (1962a, 441).



We are like the villager with respect to our employment of words and
phrases. Knowledge by wont of the use of expressions and of concrete
ideas is something everybody learns in the course of growing up
speaking and understanding a language: "their 'logical
geography' is taught by one's daily walks" (1945,
207). So too do people know how to operate with ordinary,
non-technical, and even semi-technical and technical expressions as
well as with relatively concrete and some abstract ideas without being
able to codify the rules, permissions, or sanctions that govern their
operations.



Now, almost every word or phrase we use contributes to what we say in
a way such that had it been replaced by a word or phrase with a
different significance, it would have had different "implication
threads":



> 
> It would have been a different statement, different in having
> different implications, in requiring different tests for truth or
> falsehood, in being compatible and incompatible with different
> affiliated statements, in being evidence for or against different
> corollaries, and so on. (1962a, 442-3)
> 



To the extent that I understand what I am saying, I understand the
particular differences that the expression contributes to the
statements, questions, commands, etc. that I make with it. In making
everyday (non-philosophical) statements, or in asking ordinary factual
questions, or in giving concrete, practical advice I am like, Ryle
says, the villager who simply walks to his destination without having
to think about what he is doing or turning back in his tracks. But
even in making everyday, non-philosophical statements, I employ a
plurality of expressions. The implication threads of some of these
expressions may "pull against" the implication threads of
others. For example,



> 
> ... I might truly and intelligibly describe a weary sailor in a
> storm as having toiled voluntarily, although reluctantly; and then I
> find myself in a perplexity. For I seem to be saying that he toiled
> not under compulsion but because he volunteered to do it, despite the
> fact that he did not want to do it. The natural implication threads of
> 'voluntarily' seem to pull away from the natural
> implication threads of 'reluctantly'. (1962a, 443)
> 



To resolve this complexity it is not enough that I be familiar with
the separate contributions of the two adverbs. To resolve it, I need
to be satisfied that the conflict is only apparent. I am confronted
with a conceptual problem that requires that I be able to *say*
how the implication threads of the one bear on the implication threads
of the other. This requires abstracting from or ignoring the
particular reference to this sailor or that storm; it requires that I
operate upon general notions of *actions, motive, preference,
strength of desires, choice* and so on.



The most philosophically interesting questions arise for those cases
of conflict that present themselves again and again. We speak in the
same breath of a responsible human agent who is, and acts, in a world
that is a field of physical, chemical, and biological causes and
effects. "Men *must*, we feel, be free; yet they
*must*, we feel, be amenable to prediction and explanation.
Their actions cannot be mechanical. Yet also they cannot be
unmechanical" (1962a, 444). From the point of view of laymen and
scientists who are actually exploring the world, we find out what
there is by perceiving it; yet from the point of view of the inquirer
into the mechanism of perception, what we perceive never coincides
with the world (1954, 2). The reconciliation of these convictions, an
answer to the question *how* this could be, belongs to
philosophy.



> 
> We have now to operate *upon* what we ordinarily operate
> readily and unquestioningly *with*. We now need the theory of
> our daily practice, the geography of our daily walks. When two or
> twenty familiar implication threads seem to pull across and against
> one another, it is no longer enough to be able unperplexedly to follow
> along each one by itself. We need to be able to state their
> directions, their limits and their interlockings; to think
> systematically *about* what normally we merely think
> competently *with*. (1962a, 444)
> 


## 3. Type Trespasses and Systematic Ambiguity



If the "logical geography" of natural language expressions
is taught by our daily walks, the same cannot be said about
philosophers' attempts to theorise about the geography. For when
we treat philosophical problems as "problems of an ordinary sort
about special entities", or "hypostasise our own terms of
art", we tend to commit type-errors or category mistakes which
render our theories absurd. 



> 
> 
> When a sentence is (not true or false but) nonsensical or absurd,
> though its vocabulary is conventional and its grammatical construction
> is regular, we say that it is absurd because at least one ingredient
> expression in it is not of the right type to be coupled or to be
> coupled in that way with the other ingredient expression or
> expressions in it. Such sentences, we may say, commit type-trespasses
> or break type-rules. (1938, 178)
> 
> 
> 



The expressions "category" and "type" are
themselves formal ones, and Ryle insists that "there is (and can
be) no finite number of categories or types". Ryle's
identification of type-errors or category mistakes is intimately tied
to the production of nonsensical or absurd sentences; and
"delineating a category is a matter of marking a
logico-conceptual space of sense-making rather than a factual domain
of truths..." (Backstrom and Gustafasson 2017, 48).
Ryle's introduction of "proposition-factor" (as an
ingredient expression) will, as he points out, tend to be misleading
as soon as one inquires about the nature of "factor" and
fail to treat this expression as an abstraction or discriminable
feature of what is integrally said or integrally thought (see section
4, below). 



Philosophical theories that commit type-trespasses (such as
Plato's early theory of Forms and Russell's introduction
of Classes and his theory of Types) require demonstrations of the
regresses and contradictions that ensue (as demonstrated,
respectively, by Plato's own criticism of his early work in
*Parmenides* and Wittgenstein's criticism of Russell in
*Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)*. Untangling may also be
necessary for individual sentences that commit a breach of logical
syntax (for example, "'Heterological' is
heterological" or "This sentence is false"). Some
type-mistakes are obvious: such as (adapting an example from *The
Concept of Mind*) the inference from "She came home in a
Chevrolet and a flood of tears" to "She came home in two
things". As we shall see below, the category mistake Ryle
identifies in "There is a mind and a body" or "there
is a mind or a body" is less obvious. For it takes a fair bit of
untangling to show that "mind" and "body" are
different logical or grammatical types; a fact which renders the
assertion of either the conjunction or the disjunction nonsensical.




Crucially, identifying type-errors requires being alert to the
pervasive or "systematic" ambiguity of our natural
language expressions. For, 



> 
> 
> [a] given word will, in different sorts of context, express ideas of
> an indefinite range of differing logical types and, therefore, with
> different logical powers. And what is true of single words is also
> true of complex expressions and of grammatical constructions. (1945,
> 206)
> 
> 
> 



Thus, even if we were to put aside ambiguity of the kind that
logicians ignore (Ryle calls such expressions "pun
words"), we are faced with another sort of elasticity of
significance which characterizes the use, according to Ryle,
"not of a few but of most or of all
expressions..."(1945, 205). Unlike ambiguous words such as
"bank", "report" or "stud", the
inflections of meaning to which most of our expressions are
susceptible nonetheless have affinities: the ideas expressed by these
expressions in their various uses are "intimately
connected" with each other; they are "different
inflections of the same root" (1945, 206). The paraphrases and
translations of these expressions will normally have "a
precisely similar" flexibility. This means that if we were to
paraphrase the expression as it is used in one context in order to
make clear its implication threads in that context, we can expect the
paraphrase, like the original expression, to express a different idea
in a different context. To use a contemporary idiom, the paraphrase,
like the original expression, is "context-sensitive".



The philosophical task Ryle recommends involves tracing the
inflections of significance that are conveyed by expressions with a
common root in their various employments. On this way of looking at
it, it is not wrong to say that the philosopher studies or
investigates the idea or the concept of, say, justice. But putting it
this way may be misleading if it obscures the fact that the logical
force of the relevant expression "is just") may change
with the context in which it is used. Again, Ryle thought this to be
so for *most* single words and complex expressions and not only
the ambiguous "pun-words". For, "[u]nnoticed
systematic ambiguities are a common source of type-confusions and
philosophic problems" (1945, 207).



Systematic ambiguity affects not only single words and complex
expressions. It affects grammatical constructions as well. Since
expressions of the same grammatical constructions function to express
thoughts of multifarious logical sorts, those starting to philosophise
(those operating upon ideas and not merely with them) "tend to
be blind to the fact that different ideas have different logical
powers..." (1945, 200). Assimilation of the functions or
uses can lead to trouble, and this can be shown by eliciting
contradictions, absurdities, and paradoxes. To return to where we
began:



> 
> The inevitable consequence is that naive intellectual operations
> with those ideas lead directly to logically intolerable results.
> Concepts of different types cannot be coerced into similar logical
> conduct. Some sort of contradiction arises from the attempt and this,
> in fortunate cases, compels the thinker to turn back in his tracks and
> try to change his treatment of the outraged concept. (1945,
>  201)[2]
> 


## 4. Concepts, Propositions, and Meaning



The implications of this view for the concept of meaning or for
nominalisations of the verb 'to mean' are important. We
are not at all likely to be misled by expressions of the form
'*x* means what *y* means.' But when we use
the expression quasi-descriptively, as in 'The meaning of
*x* is the same as the meaning of *y*' or
'The meaning of *x* is doubtful' we are liable to
be misled into thinking that we are referring to some queer new
object. Ryle generalises the point to suggest that all the mistaken
doctrines of concepts, ideas, terms, judgment, contents, and the like
derive from the fallacy



> 
> that there must be *something* referred to by such expressions
> as 'the meaning of the word (phrase or sentence)
> *x*' [which is analogous to the policeman] who is
> referred to by the descriptive phrase 'Our village policeman is
> fond of football'. (1932, 56)
> 



The meaning of an expression is not an entity denoted by it and not
the nominee of any *thing*. It would be a related mistake to
suppose, Ryle tells us, that a particular concept is precisely
indicated by a particular expression: as if the idea of equality could
be identified as that for which the word 'equality' stands
(1945, 206). For Ryle, agreeing here with Wittgenstein,
"concepts are not things that are there crystallised in a
splendid isolation"; rather



> 
> they are discriminable features, but not detachable atoms, of what is
> integrally said or integrally thought. They are not detachable parts
> of, but distinguishable contributions to, the unitary senses of
> complete sentences. To examine them is to examine the live force of
> things that we actually say. It is to examine them not in retirement,
> but doing their co-operative work. (1962b, 185)
>  [3]
> 



The idea that expressions have meaning insofar as they stand for
things should be rejected. Indeed, some expressions denote (in one of
a variety of ways) because they are significant. To learn the meaning
of an expression is to learn to operate correctly with it; more like
learning a piece of drill than like coming across a previously
unencountered object (1957, 365).



Concepts are instead to be understood as that which is conveyed by a
word or phrase independently of the language (English or French) in
which the word is written or spoken. Although we tend to make use of
abstract nouns to talk about that which is conveyed by various words,
this should not mislead us. Russell and Moore may have described their
pursuits as the investigation of supra-mundane entities, but this was
not, claims Ryle, the way they or any other philosopher set about
their task. Aristotle, for example, when studying Plato's
account of Pleasure, did not "stare hard" at an entity or
Essence designated by this abstract noun: "Instead he rightly
considered what we are asserting or denying *in concreto* when
we say that someone did or did not enjoy the concert; or that someone
enjoys this piece of music more than that piece" (1962b, 185).
Unlike the abstract noun "Pleasure", the live verb is
making specific contributions to sense. Similarly, an analysis of the
concept, say, of *existence* "cannot consist just in acts
of contemplating a rarefied object, withdrawn, like a coin in a
museum, from its native commercial transactions" (1962b,
185).


## 5. Ordinary Language



Ryle is often described as an ordinary language philosopher or as
recommending that philosophy should concern itself with the ordinary
use of language. In a certain sense this is apt; in another it is
not.



Philosophers may well study the stock use of various expressions. But
these may be highly technical or semi-technical expressions, as well
as vernacular ones. Berkeley, for example, in examining the stock (and
possibly the only) use of 'infinitesimals', was examining
the way in which this word was employed by mathematicians.
Philosophers of law, biology, mathematics, formal logic, theology,
psychological and grammar are all required to examine technical terms
or concepts. So if 'ordinary' is contrasted with
'technical' or 'specialised' then some
philosophy is and some philosophy is not concerned with ordinary
language (1953, 304).



But one reason it may be true that philosophy should be couched in
vernacular terms has to do with philosophy's special task. Just
as the cartographer was required to use a different, more general
vocabulary to plot the geography of the local village, so too should
the philosopher use a more general vocabulary than the
specialist's to plot the "cross-bearings" between
the concepts of different theories. The tangles and knots that a
philosopher has to unpick are set not by some branch of specialist
theory, but "in the thought and the discourse of everyone,
specialists and non-specialists alike" (1953, 304).



Talk about the *use* of an expression, like the use of
safety-pins and table-knives, helps us to avoid thinking that we are
talking about any queer relations or queer entities; to suppose or
half-suppose that "studying the meaning of the phrase 'the
solar system' [is] ... the same thing as studying the solar
system" (1953, 306). It reminds us, for example, that when
enquiring into the problems of perception or in discussing the
concepts of seeing, hearing, and smelling, we are *not*
tackling the questions of opticians, neuro-physiologists or
psychologists. We are rather after accounts of how certain words work,
"namely words like 'see', 'look',
'overlook', 'blind', 'visualise',
and lots of other affiliated expressions" (1953, 317).



A philosopher of Ryle's ilk is interested in the informal logic
of the employment of expressions; the nature of the logical force that
expressions have as components of theories and as pivots of concrete
arguments. That is why, he says, in our discussions we argue
*with* expressions and *about* those expressions in one
and the same breath. We are trying to register what we are exhibiting;
to codify the very logical codes which we are then and there observing
(1953, 318).



Often the appeal to what we do and do not say, or can or cannot say is
resisted, Ryle says, by those who hold that philosophical disputes can
be settled by formalising the warring theses, or translating them out
of the natural language in which they were originally constructed into
the notation, perhaps, of a *Principia Mathematica*. As we
should expect from a philosopher who sees his job as the plotting of
the logical force of expressions as they appear in different contexts,
Ryle describes as a "formaliser's dream" the
conviction that the investigation can be regularised in such a way as
to replace what was philosophically puzzling by logical problems
amenable to known and teachable procedures of calculation. Indeed, he
denies not only that the logic of everyday statements but even the
logic of the statements of scientists, lawyers, historians and
bridge-players can in principle be adequately represented by the
formulae of formal logic.



Of course, he concedes, the logical behaviour of the terms of
non-notational discourse may be assisted by studies in formal logic;
so may chess-playing assist generals. But waging a campaign can no
more be replaced by playing games of chess than the study of the
logical behaviour of the terms of non-notational discourse can be
replaced by doing formal logic. Thus in the slogan 'Back to
ordinary language', 'ordinary' may be contrasted
with 'notional'. The slogan can then be used by those who
have awoken from the formaliser's dream. So used, he says, it
should be repudiated only by those who hope to replace philosophising
by reckoning (1953, 316-7).


## 6. The Official Doctrine and its Contemporary Offshoots



Ryle's writings on the question of what constitutes a
philosophical problem, and of the way to solve it, occupied him in the
1920s and 30s. *The Concept of Mind* was written after this
"long spell of methodological talk": what was needed was
"an example of the method really working" (1970, 12).
Although entitled *The Concept of Mind*, the book, Ryle tells
us, is



> 
> an examination of multifarious specific mental concepts, such as those
> of *knowing, learning, discovering, imagining, pretending, hoping,
> wanting, feeling depressed, feeling a pain, resolving, doing
> voluntarily, doing deliberately, perceiving, remembering* and so
> on. (1962b, 188)
> 



As the analogy of philosophy with cartography suggests, Ryle
investigates the workings not just of one concept by itself, but
"all of the threads of a spider's web of inter-working
concepts" (1962b, 189).



The book focuses on the "type-errors" or "category
mistakes" which philosophers of mind are prone to make when they
consider the logical form of "mental conduct verbs",
especially if they use as their starting-point the "Janus-faced
account of human life" suggested by a Cartesian conception of
the mind.



Ryle's explicit target in *The Concept of Mind* is what
he calls the "Official Doctrine", which results, he tells
us, at least in part from Descartes' appreciation that Galilean
methods of scientific discovery were fit to provide mechanical
explanations for every occupant of space, together with
Descartes' conviction that the mental could not simply be a more
complex variety of the mechanical. This "two-world",
Cartesian view has distinctive ontological, epistemological, and
semantic commitments that each lead to particular philosophical
puzzles.


### 6.1 The ontological commitment



The ontological commitment of the view is that there are two different
kinds of things, body and mind, that are somehow harnessed together.
The one exists in space and is subject to mechanical or physical laws;
the other is not in space and is not subject to these laws. And yet
the mind and body influence each other. The view that mind and body
are somehow fundamentally different or distinct, but nonetheless
interact, leads to the philosophical conundrum known as *the
mind-body problem*. For contemporary philosophers of mind, the
mind-body problem no longer involves construing the mind as an
independent substance. But working out the relation between mental and
physical *properties* remains an urgent project (Kim, 2).
 [4]



In contemporary philosophy of mind, Ryle is credited with having
established an important connection between mental predicates and
behaviour; but many of his successors (Place, Armstrong, Putnam, and
Fodor) thought he misconstrued the nature of that connection. When
strict physicalist positions were beset by objections from the
multiple realisability of mental predicates,
"token-physicalist" versions of functionalism (or
"ontic-neutral" versions of the causal theory of mind)
stepped up to the plate, and advertised that, in acknowledging
behavioural outputs as well as stimulus conditions, they were
retaining what was right about Ryle's emphasis on behaviour (in
the circumstances), but rejecting what they considered the
"explanatory vacuity" of conceptual or definitional links
between mental predicates and behavioural ones. These were replaced
with causal links between the alleged referents of the mental terms
and the action to be explained.



But to suppose the explanatory power of mental conduct terms depends
on their designating an event or state that is causally related to the
performance is to accept another version of the
"paramechanical" hypothesis, even though it is now couched
in ontic-neutral or physicalist
 terms.[5]



Although Ryle's own target is the attempt to staple an elusive
mental event construed as a conscious "experience" onto a
respectable biological (muscular, neurophysiological) causal chain, it
is nevertheless clear that the problems he sees will also apply to
modern-day variations on the dualist theme. That is, it will also
apply to weak, non-reductive identity theories that wish to preserve a
causal role for mental properties. For consider:



> 
> The episodes supposed to constitute the careers of mind have one sort
> of existence, while those constituting the careers of bodies have
> another sort; and no bridge-status is allowed .... Minds, as the
> whole legend describes them, are what must exist if there is to be a
> causal explanation of the intelligent behaviour of human bodies; and
> minds, as the theory describes them, live on a floor of existence
> defined as being outside the causal system to which bodies belong.
> (1949a, 65)
> 



It would be difficult to find a better anticipation of the mind-body
problem as we know it today. The problem of mental causation may not
be exactly the same as Descartes' problem, but it is nonetheless
inherited by anyone who insists that mental properties must, on the
one hand, make a causal difference and by those who, on the other,
think that physics is a closed causal system. Just as mind-body
interaction was a problem for substance dualism, so is mental
causation *still* the problem facing the many varieties of
(both reductive and non-reductive) physicalism (Kim, 29-30).



It seems then that the two ontological aspects of the Official
Doctrine--finding a place for the mental in the physical world
and the problem of mental causation--still survive today.


### 6.2 The epistemological and semantic commitments



The ontological commitments of the Official Doctrine lead to the
mind-body problem; the epistemological commitments of the Official
Doctrine lead to the problem of other minds. According to the
traditional view, bodily processes are external and can be witnessed
by observers, but mental processes are private, "internal"
as it is metaphorically described (since mental processes are not
supposed to be locatable anywhere). Mental processes or events are
supposed, on the official view, to be played out in a private theatre;
such events are known directly by the person who has them either
through the faculty of introspection or the
"phosphorescence" of consciousness. The subject of the
mental states is, on this view, incorrigible--her avowals of her
own mental states cannot be corrected by others--and she is
infallible--she cannot be wrong about which states she is
 in.[6]
 Others can know them only indirectly through "complex and frail
inferences" from what the body does.



But if all that is mental is to be understood in this way, it is
unclear how we are justified in believing that others have the
requisite episodes or mental accompaniments. It would be possible, on
this view, for others to act as if they are minded, but for them to
have none of the right "conscious experiences"
accompanying their actions for them to qualify as such. Perhaps we are
in much the same position as Descartes who thought it made sense to
wonder whether such creatures are automata instead.



The problem of other minds is compounded by even more serious
difficulties given certain assumptions about the way language works.
Proponents of the Official Doctrine are committed to the view that
mental discourse serves to designate items that carry the metaphysical
and epistemological load of that doctrine.



> 
> The verbs, nouns and adjectives, with which in ordinary life we
> describe the wits, characters and higher-grade performances of the
> people with whom we have do, are required to be construed as
> signifying special episodes in their secret histories, or else as
> signifying tendencies for such episodes to occur. (1949a, 16-17)
> 



Ryle's criticism of the Official Doctrine begins by pointing out
an absurdity in its semantic consequences. If mental conduct verbs
pick out "occult" causes then we would not be able to
apply those verbs as we do; so something must be wrong with a theory
of mental phenomena that renders so inadequate our everyday use of
these verbs. For, according to the Official Doctrine



> 
> when someone is described as knowing, believing or guessing something,
> as hoping, dreading, intending or shirking something, as designing
> this or being amused at that, these verbs are supposed to denote the
> occurrence of specific modifications in his (to us) occult stream of
> consciousness. (1945, 17)
> 



Ryle's criticism of the view is that if it were correct, only
privileged access to this stream of consciousness could provide
authentic testimony that these mental-conduct verbs were correctly or
incorrectly applied. "The onlooker, be he teacher, critic,
biographer or friend, can never assure himself that his comments have
any vestige of truth." And yet,



> 
> it was just because we do in fact all know how to make such comments,
> make them with general correctness and correct them when they turn out
> to be confused or mistaken, that philosophers found it necessary to
> construct their theories of the nature and place of minds. Finding
> mental-conduct concepts being regularly and effectively used, they
> properly sought to fix their logical geography. But the account
> officially recommended would entail that there could be no regular or
> effective use of these mental-conduct concepts in our descriptions of,
> and prescriptions for, other people's minds. (1949a, 17)
> 



Ryle is often given credit for having shown some of the many
difficulties in substance or Cartesian dualism. But the arguments in
*The Concept of Mind* warn of difficulties for any account that
takes mental conduct terms to discharge their explanatory role by
signifying inner processes: whether irreducibly mental or at bottom
physical. Ryle's target was not merely the ghostliness of the
mental processes hypothesized by the Cartesian; it was their essential
hidden-ness. The thrust of Ryle's polemic is that theories about
the nature of the alleged referents of the mental concepts we employ
in our ordinary everyday commonsense practices cannot make a mystery
of this employment without threatening to rob the theories of their
subject matter. Our practice of employing such mental concepts would
be a complete mystery on a view that takes the
"truth-makers" of our mental statements to be not only
items within an occult (to others) stream of consciousness, but also
on a view that takes them to be items within an occult (to most of us)
series of computations or neurological events. Both picture the
truth-makers of our claims about other minds or our ascriptions of
mental predicates as hidden and thus in practice (if not in principle)
as inaccessible.


## 7. The Intellectualist Legend



To highlight the general difficulties with Cartesianism is only part
of Ryle's destructive strategy. The other part is to show how
logical absurdities arise with one particular offshoot of the Official
Doctrine: one he dubs "the intellectualist legend". This
involves the type-error or category mistake of supposing that what
distinguishes certain performances from others that are perceptually
similar (in one sense of 'perceptual') is the addition of
some non-perceptual feature. The Official Doctrine construes this
feature as a special mental
 accompaniment.[7]
 The intellectualist legend, accepting this construal of the Official
Doctrine, says that intelligent or rational behaviour can be
accommodated or explained by some sort of theoretical operations
involving these hidden accompaniments. But if this is a mistake, it is
a big one; for it is made not only throughout various sub-branches of
philosophy but also in collaborating disciplines. (The idea, for
example, that intelligence involves physically realised,
(non-introspectible) theoretical (computational) operations is one of
the founding blocks of the cognitive sciences.)



This picture of how rational abilities in general are to be explained,
including the ability to speak a language, was called into question by
Ryle in a number of early papers (especially in 1946a, ostensibly
reworked as the second chapter of 1949a, and in 1946b and 1950). It
was also called into question by Wittgenstein in his discussion of
rules (Wittgenstein, SSSS143-155 and 179-202).



In broad brush-strokes, Ryle's argument-strategy against the
supposition that generally intelligent or rational abilities can be
explained in terms of prior theoretical operations (involving the
apprehension of the relevant truths) is to exhibit how the supposition
leads to logically vicious regresses. Intelligent behaviours cannot be
explained, in general, by assuming that theoretical operations have
gone on behind the scene, since those operations themselves can be
intelligent or non-intelligent. The supposition that intelligent
behaviour always requires prior (or even contemporaneous) theoretical
operations launches a vicious regress of theoretical operations. Thus,
it must be allowed that some intelligent behaviour is not the outcome
of prior theoretical operations.



The role of the rules, standards, or norms that govern our practices
should neither be exaggerated nor underestimated. For Ryle (as for
Wittgenstein), rules are codifications or distillations of normative
practices that are already up and running. As Ryle aptly quips,



> 
> [t]here were reasoners before Aristotle and strategists before
> Clausewitz. The application of rules of reasoning and strategy did not
> have to await the work of their codifiers. Aristotle and Clausewitz
> were, in fact, only able to extract these rules, because they were
> already being applied. (1946b, 233)
> 



The crystallisation of performance-rules in rule-formulae is, in some
cases, a product of studies in the methodology of the practices in
which they have already been applied and not the condition of their
being applied. In other words: there must be a way of applying a rule
that does not require the prior consultation of an expression of that
rule.



Close attention to the cases in which we credit someone for her
performance shows that it is often enough for her (merely) to have
satisfied certain criteria or for her performance to have lived up to
the relevant standard. Close attention to the cases in which we
require not only that she satisfy certain criteria but also that she
apply the criteria by using an expression of a rule to guide her shows
that the latter is in fact a separate skill, which we only sometimes
(but importantly not always) demand of the one we wish to credit for
her
 performance.[8]



The ability to apply criteria in order to ensure that one's
performance is successful is like showing a ticket in order to ensure
one's right to travel by rail (1950, 239-40). It would be
a category mistake to imagine that the ticket itself plays a role in
the explanation of the train journey on the same level as the pistons,
levers, and tracks. So, too (we might add), would it be a category
mistake to imagine that reasons, for example, play a role in the
explanation of action on (almost) the same level as the internal
processes that explain (in a different sense) the body's
motions; or that meanings or understandings play a role in the
explanation of language use on (almost) the same level as the internal
processes that explain (again, in a different sense) vocalisations.
But just this type of category error seems to be made by those who
construe the relevant mental phenomena, including understanding, as
inner causal
 events.[9]



For discussion of the importance of skill, drill, powers and
propensities, see Backstrom and Gustafasson 2017. 



For more discussion on some of the themes in this section, see the
supplement:


* Some Problems in Contemporary Work on Knowing-How and Knowing-That


## 8. Behaviourism



Ryle's view is standardly characterised as a weaker or
"softer" version of this doctrine (Smith and Jones, 144).
According to this standard interpretation, Ryle's view is that
statements containing mental terms can be translated, without loss of
meaning, into subjunctive conditionals about what the individual will
do in various circumstances. So Ryle (on this account) is to be
construed as offering a dispositional analysis of mental statements
into behavioural ones. It is conceded that Ryle does not confine his
descriptions of what the agent will do (under the circumstances) to
purely physical behaviour--in terms, say, of skeletal or muscular
descriptions--but is happy to speak of full-bodied actions like
scoring a goal or paying a
 debt.[10]
 But the "soft" behaviourism attributed to Ryle still
attempts an analysis (or translation) of mental statements into a
series of dispositional statements which are themselves construed as
subjunctive conditionals describing what the agent will do (albeit
under the relevant action description) under various circumstances.
Even this "soft" behaviourism is bound to fail, however,
since mentalistic vocabulary is not analysable or translatable into
behavioural statements even *if* these are allowed to include
descriptions of actions. For the list of conditions and possible
behaviour will be infinite since any one proffered translation can be
defeated by slight alteration of the circumstances; and the defeating
conditions in any particular case may involve a reference to facts
about the agent's mind, thereby rendering the analysis circular.
In sum, the standard interpretation of Ryle construes him as offering
a somewhat weakened form of reductive behaviourism whose reductivist
ambitions, however weakened, are nonetheless futile.



But this characterisation of Ryle's programme is wrong. Although
it is true that Ryle was keen to point out the dispositional nature of
many mental concepts, it would be wrong to construe him as offering a
programme of analysis of mental predicates into a series of
subjunctive conditionals. The relationship between mental predicates
and the "hypothetical" and "semi-hypothetical"
sentences with which we can "unpack" them is other than
that required by this kind of analysis.



It will be helpful to keep in mind that Ryle's target is the
Official Doctrine with its attendant ontological, epistemological, and
semantic commitments. His arguments serve to remind us that we have in
a large number of cases ways of telling or settling disputes, for
example, about someone's character or intellect. If you dispute
my characterisation of someone as believing or wanting something, I
will point to what he says and does in defending my particular
attribution (as well as to features of the circumstances). But our
practice of giving reasons of this kind to defend or to challenge
ascriptions of mental predicates would be put under substantial
pressure if the Official Doctrine were correct.



For Ryle to remind us that we do, as a matter of fact, have a way of
settling disputes about whether someone is vain or whether she is in
pain is much weaker than saying that a concept is meaningless unless
it is verifiable; or even that the successful application of mental
predicates requires that we have a way of settling disputes in all
cases. Showing that a concept is one for which, in a large number of
cases, we have agreement-reaching procedures (even if these do not
always guarantee success) captures an important point, however: it
counts against any theory, say, of vanity or pain that would render it
unknowable in principle *or in practice* whether or not the
concept is correctly applied in every case. And this was precisely the
problem with the Official Doctrine (and is still a problem, as I
suggested earlier, with some of its contemporary progeny).



Ryle points out in a later essay that there is a form of dilemma that
pits the *reductionist* against the
 *duplicationist*[11]:
 those whose battle cry is "Nothing but ..." and those
who insist on "Something else as Well ...". Ryle
attempts a dissolution of these types of dilemma by rejecting the two
horns; not by taking sides with either one, though part of what
dissolution requires in this case, as in others, is a description of
how both sides are to be commended for seeing what the other side does
not, and criticised for failing to see what the other side does.



The attraction of behaviourism, he reminds us, is simply that it does
not insist on occult happenings as the basis upon which all mental
terms are given meaning, and points to the perfectly observable
criteria that are by and large employed when we are called upon to
defend or correct our employment of these mental terms. The problem
with behaviourism is that it has a too-narrow view both of what counts
as behaviour and of what counts as observable. The attraction of
Cartesianism is that it recognizes in a way the behaviourist does not
that there may be crucial differences between creatures who--on a
certain restrictive notion of behaviour--do indeed behave
identically. The problem with Cartesianism is that it attempts to
account for these differences by hypothesizing the existence of occult
or hidden causes.



In an attempt to defeat the Cartesian or Platonist and remind us that
mental predicates have perfectly ordinary standards of application,
Ryle focuses on what is observable. It is part of his war against what
is not only occult (and observable only through introspection) but
also against what is hidden from the viewpoint of a third-party
observer. But, in focussing on what is observable, he does not commit
himself to reducing what is observable itself to sequences of
"muscular behaviour". Those who attribute to Ryle a
"soft" behaviourism are at least correct that the
reminders he issues to ward off Cartesianism include frank appeal to
what he later will describe as actions much higher up on the
"sophistication ladder" like paying a bill, or scoring a
goal, as well as to what he will later call "concrete",
"*per se"*, or "infra" doings like
scribbling numbers on a cheque book or kicking a ball between two
posts.



Surely, as his earlier critics pointed out (and as those who see him
as a behaviourist ignore) some of the phenomena he allows will
reintroduce a realm of private occurrences (dreams and imaginings will
be the paradigm case). But as Ayer suspects, this sort of
"ghost" is an honest ghost. Not simply (as Ayer suggests)
because the phenomena do not command the stage of a private theatre:
in the sense that no one else can tell us about them they are in that
respect
 private.[12]
 As Ryle himself admits, "the technical trick of conducting our
thinking in auditory word-images, instead of spoken words, does indeed
secure secrecy for our thinking ..." (1949a, 35).



It is an "honest ghost" since privacy or secrecy of
certain episodes will not lead to privacy for them all; and thus the
epistemological concomitant to the Official Doctrine that would lead
to the problem of other minds is not a threat. Nor does this sort of
privacy usher in the semantic consequences of the Official Doctrine.
The privacy attending our dreams and imaginings does not impugn our
right to draw on observable (in the robust sense of the term)
phenomena to defend our right to employ mental predicates for a large
number of cases, for "this secrecy is not the secrecy ascribed
to the postulated episodes of the ghostly shadow-world" (1949a,
35).



There will indeed be cases in which only the agent can say whether she
is pondering, imagining, dreaming, letting her mind wander,
calculating, solving, planning, or rehearsing. But the sort of privacy
in which only she can say whether she was doing any of these or other
particular things is not the sort of privacy that gives rise to
philosophical conundrums like the problem of other minds and the
problem of necessarily private languages. On the contrary, the ability
to describe one's dreams (as well as one's sensations)
*presupposes* a language whose terms have established and
public criteria for their correct use.


## 9. Dispositional Concepts



A constant irritant for Ryle, throughout his writings, is "the
preposterous assumption that every true or false statement either
asserts or denies that a mentioned object or set of objects possesses
a specified attribute" (1949a,
 115).[13]
 As an example of a kind of sentence whose primary job is other than
fact-stating, consider laws. Although we speak of law-sentences as
true or false, "they do not state truths or falsehoods of the
same type as those asserted by the statements of fact to which they
apply or are supposed to apply" (1949a, 116-7). The way to
bring out the difference is to note that part of the point of trying
to establish laws is to find out how to infer from particular matters
of fact to other particular matters of fact, how to explain particular
matters of fact by reference to other matters of fact, and how to
bring about or prevent particular states of affairs.



A law, Ryle tells us, is "an inference ticket (a season ticket)
which licenses its possessors ... to move from one assertion to
another, to provide explanations of given facts, and to bring about
desired states of affairs by manipulating what is found existing or
happening" (1949a, 117).



A dispositional sentence such as 'Jones believes the earth is
round' is unlike a law-sentence insofar as it mentions an
individual, Jones. But it is like a law-sentence insofar as its role
is not (or not primarily) one of describing or reporting, or stating
that some object has such-and-such an attribute or stands in
such-and-such a relation with another object. Its
"truth-maker", to use a contemporary expression, has to be
understood in terms of what would satisfy it as opposed to what it
purportedly
 describes.[14]
 What would satisfy a law is not specified or mentioned in the
law-sentence; similarly, what would satisfy a disposition is not
specified or mentioned in the disposition-sentence. Nor could it be.
What would satisfy 'Jones believes the earth is round' is
an open-ended (infinite) list of inferrings, imaginings, saying, and
doings (etc.) on the part of Jones (1949a, 44). (And note again, a
propos of behaviourism, that if 'imagining' is construed
in one of its ordinary senses, as something someone may be doing just
by sitting, unmoving, with his hand on his chin, there is explicit
reference to an irreducible-to-behaviour mental occurrence in this
specification of what would satisfy the sentence as well as the
explicit denial of the finiteness of the long list that would unpack
the sentence by alluding to its satisfaction conditions.)



Ryle suggests that 'John knows French' is a warrant which
gives us the right to infer that John understands what he reads in
*Le Monde* or that he is communicating successfully when
telephoning in French*.* Immediately on specifying what we are
entitled to do with the inference ticket 'John knows
French', Ryle admits that the examples of what would satisfy the
sentence are too precise, for



> 
> [w]e should not withdraw our statement that he knows French on finding
> that he did not respond pertinently when asleep, absentminded, drunk,
> or in a panic; or on finding that he did not correctly translate
> highly technical treatises. We expect no more than that he will
> ordinarily cope pretty well with the majority of ordinary French-using
> and French-following tasks. 'Knows French' is a vague
> expression and, for most purposes, none the less useful for being
> vague. (1949a, 119)
> 



To adopt a couple contemporary turns of phrases, the warrants or
inference tickets provided are therefore *pro tanto* and
*occasion-sensitive*. The latter is yet another feature of
Ryle's view that puts him at a safe distance from the ideals of
analytical behaviourism. 



Ryle concedes that what he says about dispositional sentences is
likely to be contested by the "addicts of the superstition that
all true indicative sentences either describe existents or report
occurrences" (1949a, 119). How could the statement 'This
wire conducts electricity' or 'Jones believes the earth is
round' be true unless there were something now going on, albeit
unfortunately behind the scenes? (Note that this applies to those
today who take it for granted that dispositional concepts report
existences ('dispositions') which in turn, it is argued,
require 'causal bases' to facilitate prediction,
explanation, and modification.) But consider Ryle's argument
against this. Even those who are attracted by this picture will have
to admit that we often do know that a wire conducts electricity, that
an individual knows French, that a person is proud, that a sugar cube
is soluble, without having discovered anything in the appropriate
sense "hidden" (read: accessible via introspection or
laboratory experiment). In any case what would be the point or the
theoretical utility of discovering what is hidden? Ryle suggests the
utility would consist only in its entitling us to do just that
predicting, explaining, and modifying which we already do and often
know that we are entitled to do. Even if these postulated processes
were conceded, they themselves are hypotheses or inferences to
("the best explanation"): processes the existence of which
are inferred from the fact that we can predict, explain, and modify
the observable actions and reactions of individuals. So if a theorist
demands actual "rails" to ground ordinary inferences, this
theorist will have to provide some further "rails" to
justify his own peculiar inference from the legitimacy of ordinary
inferences to the purported "rails" that he supposes to
ground them. "The postulation of such an endless hierarchy of
'rails' could hardly be attractive even to those who are
attracted by its first step" (1949a, 120). 


## 10. Self-knowledge



The editors of a contemporary volume on self-knowledge write:



> 
> Each of us effortlessly knows an enormous amount about those of our
> attributes which go with our rationality, sentience, and affective
> susceptibilities: our beliefs, hopes, desires, and fears, whether we
> have a headache or an itchy toe, whether we are elated or depressed,
> whom we love and hate, what attracts or repels us. (Wright, et. al.,
> 1)
> 



Whereas knowledge of others' sensations, emotions, and
intentional states demands reliance on independently articulatable
grounds, self-knowledge is, by contrast, characteristically immediate.
This immediacy is already enough to be philosophically perplexing, but
not only do we know *differently* from others what we think,
hope, and feel, we are also, in normal circumstances, regarded as
knowing *best*. Furthermore, if we do enjoy certain mental
attributes, we are expected to know that we do: our mental states are
salient to us. According to the editors, "[t]hese three features
of the epistemology of self-knowledge--*immediacy*,
*authority*, and *salience*--combine to set a
certain explanatory problem ...".



To what extent does this explanatory puzzle arise because of a tacit
allegiance to Cartesianism? We have already seen how the
epistemological consequences of the Official Doctrine lead to the
problem of other minds. The other side of the Cartesian coin seems to
put us in an especially privileged position with respect to our own
minds. For, if ascribing mental predicates to others is problematic,
according to the Official Doctrine, ascribing them to ourselves is
problem-free. Immediacy, authority, and salience are features of the
epistemology of self-knowledge that the Cartesian view is best-placed
to accommodate.



Ryle would see this contemporary expression of the problem of
self-knowledge as a result of the conflation of various suspect
philosophical tendencies. One of these has its roots in the
epistemological strand of the Official Doctrine; another is the
tendency of philosophers to underestimate the many-layered complexity
of mental discourse. This includes the refusal to acknowledge that the
same sentence may have different elasticities or kinds of jobs, as
well as the tendency to favour sentence-jobs of informing, describing
or reporting over those, for example, of explaining, exhorting,
encouraging, or admonishing.



For if self-knowledge is to be construed as a sort of perception of
inner states or events that are (by the special faculty of
introspection or by the "refulgence" of consciousness)
"visible" to me but not to others, then Cartesianism,
though seeming to leave knowledge of our own minds intact, instead
presents an untenable picture of what this "knowledge" can
be. Sorting out this confusion puts what can genuinely be called
self-knowledge on relative parity with other-knowledge. It will also
leave room for the importance of "unstudied talk",
"ego-pronouncements", or "avowals", which do
enjoy protection from epistemic criticism. But once the nature of this
protection is understood, philosophical perplexity should be
extinguished, not kindled.



Ryle accepts the sort of privacy or secrecy that attends our dreams,
imaginings and silent soliloquies and he concedes that besides the
dispositional one there is another sense of 'know' which
has to do with what a person is presently thinking, feeling or doing.
He does not deny the existence of mental processes of this kind
(again, a reason to resist calling him a 'behaviourist');
nor does he deny that I am the only one in a position to say what, for
example, my musings, ponderings, or dreams are about. Nor does Ryle
deny that usually when we witness something, or feel something, or act
in such-and-such a way we are able, when asked, to give a correct
account of it. He denies, rather, that either the
"luminous" or "refulgent" view of
consciousness or one that buys into the intellectualist legend is
required to accommodate this ability. He acknowledges that the concept
of visualizing, imagining, or "seeing" in the mind's
eye, and "hearing" in the mind's ear are useful
concepts. He denies that these uses commit us to the existence of
pictures or images that we contemplate or tunes that we hear: rather
than construe someone who pictures his nursery as the spectator of a
resemblance of his nursery, he should be construed as resembling a
spectator in his nursery (1949a, 234).



Ryle's discussion of avowals introduces, in effect, a different
elasticity in our use of 'know', when we say, for example,
that usually a person knows what she is on about. This has to do with
her propensity to avow moods, feelings, inclinations, intentions,
desires, and so forth. One striking feature of avowals is that they
seem to enjoy a special kind of security from epistemic assessment or
criticism. "How do you know?" or "I think you must
be mistaken" or "You have been careless in your
observations" do not make sense as rejoinders to avowals. For
Ryle,



> 
> [i]f the avowal ["I feel depressed"] is to do its job, it
> must be said in a depressed tone of voice; it must be blurted out to a
> sympathizer, not reported to an investigator. Avowing "I feel
> depressed" is doing one of the things, namely one of the
> conversational things, that depression is the mood to do. It is not a
> piece of scientific premises-finding, but a piece of conversational
> moping. (1949a, 99)
> 



Ryle warns against construing the fact that avowals are unassailable
as indicating that there is special kind of knowledge in play. From
the fact that these utterances are protected from epistemic assessment
or criticism it does not follow that we have a special kind of
knowledge about them; any more, says Ryle, than it follows from the
fact that someone is not a quack doctor that he is a good doctor: for
he may not be a doctor at all (1993b, 216). For with the idea of
knowledge comes the idea of truth, of justification, of
representation, of description, of taking closer looks, etc.



The standards for assessing "ego-pronouncements" run along
lines of sincerity/insincerity where these in turn are cashed out in
terms of lying, feigning (for fun), acting (in a play), putting on
(for sympathy), etc. When lying, feigning, etc., are ruled out, then
someone's saying so may be on some particular occasion what
justifies us in accepting or what gives us a reason to accept what he
says. The question of his being wrong (as measured against some
additional standard) may not arise. If he is not wrong in saying that
he is in pain (because he can only be lying or insincere in the ways
that we are imagining have been ruled out) it does not follow that he
has a special kind of knowledge. Rather, it would be more appropriate
to say that questions of knowledge are here out of place. The
discussion of avowals, then, illustrates yet another elasticity or
sentence-job for certain mental expressions. None of this is to deny
that "I am in pain", for example, may have a use which, on
some occasion, counts as a description. Indeed, it may be both a
description and a complaint (1993a*,* 214).



Many contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind and
self-knowledge, accepting a modern variant of the assumptions of
Cartesianism, are committed to the view that in using mental
predicates, we (or the subject) attribute(s) to the subject a mental
state or condition of which her subsequent behaviour is a causal,
contingent manifestation. But once the assumption is made that mental
verbs function to pick out such underlying states or events, then
seemingly incompatible demands are placed upon these states and the
traditional philosophical problem of self-knowledge is revealed.
Construed as speaking from and expressing an occurrent state the
speaker is authoritative; construed as speaking from or referring to a
dispositional state she is not.



In Ryle's (and in Wittgenstein's) hands, pointing to the
non-descriptive, expressive, use of an utterance such as "I
intend to go to the store" or "I am bored" is
supposed to put to rest the mystery of the avower's presumptive
authority; it is not supposed to invite the development of a
philosophical account to explain it. It constitutes a step not only in
rebutting the Cartesian's accommodation of this authority, but
also in denying that there is only one use of the relevant
expression--namely, to describe or designate a state, occurrence,
or property--in the first place.



Similar considerations apply when we consider perplexities about the
Self, such as when children ask "Where was I before I was
born?" or (we might add) when many of us wonder "Where
will I be after I die?" What, precisely, is the mysterious
referent of "I", "me", and
"myself"? Since the way out of this puzzle is not merely a
rejection of the para-mechanical hypothesis, Ryle suggests a different
diagnosis:



> 
> Gratuitous mystification begins from the moment that we start to peer
> around for the beings named by our pronouns. ... [however] the way in
> which the people mentioned are identified by pronouns is quite
> different from the way in which they are identified by proper names.
> (1949, 179)
> 



Like the index finger used to point to an object, pronouns function as
"index words". Indexicals such as "here",
"now", "you" ,"she",
"I" and '"myself" indicate the place,
time, or person referred to. "I" is not an extra name for
an extra being any more than "now" is a name for a special
time: 



> 
> 
> ... it indicates, when I say or write it, the same individual who can
> also be addressed by the proper name "Gilbert Ryle".
> "I" is not an alias for "Gilbert Ryle"; it
> indicates the person whom "Gilbert Ryle" names, when
> Gilbert Ryle uses "I". (1949, 180)
> 
> 
> 



Furthermore, the first personal pronoun has different elasticities of
use. Sometimes "myself", for example, can be replaced by
"my body" (or parts of my body), as in "I am warming
myself (my hands) by the fire". In other contexts such pronouns
cannot be so replaced. 



> 
> 
> It makes perfect sense to say that I caught myself just beginning to
> dream, but not that I caught my body beginning to dream, or that my
> body caught me doing so .... [1949, 181].
> 
> 
> 



The puzzles are multiplied rather than solved when we talk of the Self
as akin to a business--with, for example, an executive branch
and subordinate departments--or a University--with
warring or collaborative Faculties representing mental capacities.
"Myself" and "I", in the example above, are
index words or indexicals used in different senses or with different
logical ties, in different sorts of contexts. 



The construal of "I" as a name renders its supposed
nominatum, the Self, and one's awareness of oneself, or
self-consciousness, particularly elusive. For though we can catch hold
of our streams of thoughts, and we can comment on this awareness, and
perhaps even reflect upon our self-comment, and then regret having
spent so much time in self-reflection, ...--we can never capture
the last episode of self-awareness, until another one comes along
which will, though capturing the last, will itself be elusive. 



> 
> 
> ... the more [one] puts one's finger on what the "I"
> stands for, the less does [one] succeed in doing so ... Like the
> shadows of one's own head, it will not wait to be jumped on. And
> yet it is never very far ahead; indeed, sometimes it seems not to be
> ahead of the pursuer at all. (1949, 178]) 
> 
> 
> 



The way out of the mystery is, again, to recognise that
"I" does not name an elusive Self any more than
"now" names an elusive Present. Neither functions as
names. They indicate the person who utters it or the time it is
uttered. 



> 
> 
> ... there is nothing mysterious or occult about the range of
> higher-order acts and attitudes, which are apt to be inadequately
> covered by the umbrella-title "self-consciousness". They
> are the same in kind as the higher-order acts and attitudes exhibited
> in the dealings of people with one another. Indeed the former are only
> a special application of the latter and are learned first from them.
> If I perform the third order operation of commenting on a second order
> act of laughing at myself for a piece of manual awkwardness, I shall
> indeed use the first personal pronoun in two different ways .... But so
> far from this showing that there are two "Mes" in my skin,
> not to speak, yet , of the third on which is still commenting on them,
> it shows only that I am applying the public two-pronoun idiom in which
> we talk of her laughing at him; and I am applying the method of
> inter-personal transaction which the idiom is ordinarily employed to
> describe. (1949,189) 
> 
> 
> 


## 11. Thinking



Ryle's express target in *The Concept of Mind* was the
Cartesianism of the Official Doctrine, and the ontological,
epistemological and semantic predicament we would be confronted with
if the view were correct. Because of this target, many of his
reminders about how mental expressions are used point to the kinds of
circumstances and performances that would satisfy them: often these
include what others suitably trained have no trouble seeing. But he
was dissatisfied that in this work he left out some of the cardinal
uses of concepts of thinking, in which there may be no performances
for others to witness. Certainly, the concept of thinking applies to
observable performances. But it also applies to the many
thinking-activities we may imagine of Rodin's *Le
Penseur* who is merely sitting on a rock with his chin in his
hand. Ryle's professed long-range objective in much of his later
work was to come to an understanding of the various sorts of thinking
*qua* pensive without committing either the
"Category-howler of Behaviourism or the Category-howler of
Cartesianism" (1979a, 17). In these later articles, he suggests
that what is needed besides the choice between "not muscular,
therefore inner" or "not inner, therefore muscular"
is a way of enlarging the domain of the mental so that it includes not
only actions or performances but also certain omissions or failures to
act that are conceived on a relatively high step of the ladder of
sophistication of mental discourse (1979c, 119).



Like all or at least most philosophically interesting concepts, Ryle
thought there was no general answer to the question 'What does
thinking consist of?' (any more that there is a general answer
to the question 'What does working consist of?').



> 
> When we start to theorise about thinking, we naturally hanker to
> follow the chemist's example, namely, to say what thinking
> consists of and how the ingredients of which it consists are
> combined .... But modelling thinking on processes like perspiring,
> digesting, counting, and apple-picking, which can be broken down into
> ingredient processes which have been coordinated in a certain way is a
> mistake .... (1951b, 260)
> 



There is a host of widely different sorts of toiling and idlings,
engaging in any one of which is thinking.



Ryle rejects the view that thinking is symbol manipulation: indeed, he
denies that words, phrases or sentences are symbols, if symbols are to
be understood as proxies or as representations for something else
(perhaps that which the word is alleged to designate). Thinking, in
the sense of pondering, calculating, and musing, is not reserved for
the labour of trying to decide things. Nor do we reserve the title
'thinking' for inner processes. An architect can think out
his plan while manipulating toy bricks as can a sculptor plan a statue
in marble by modelling a piece of plasticine. Additional labours might
be necessary to put these plans into words. In general, thinking
should not be equated with using language.



Our ordinary ways of describing our ponderings and musings tend to be
graphic and not literal. They should be histories, not chronicles, and
as such the plot should be told in abstraction from any particular
stream-of-consciousness reports of detail we may recall. In only some
cases of thinking the accomplishment of a task, if there is one,
involves the thinker's being equipped to declare his policy,
scheme or theory. But there can be thinking where there is no talking
or even the attempt to talk. Mozart's thinking results in
something playable, not statable; Cezanne may make mistakes but is not
in error. A symphony is not composed in English or German, it has no
translation, and there is no evidence for or against it. Thus,
although it is an important truth that the products of thinking may be
publishable truths or falsehoods (and not unshareable
introspectibles), this is true for only some types of thinking (1979b,
85).



When the thinking does result in propositions or sayings, however, the
temptation is on the one hand toward excessive inflation, and on the
other toward excessive deflation. For the result is not merely a
string of words linked together in a grammatically well-formed
sentence. In recognising this truth, however, we are tempted toward
the view that bits of language are only necessary as the interpersonal
vehicles of objective Meanings that are thinkable, in principle, to
any hearers or readers of any nationalities.



> 
> These Meanings are for the Duplicationist those significance-cargoes
> that are carried indifferently by your French and my English internal
> locutions--though the challenge to exhibit to his Reductionist
> critic even one such cargo, prised off its French or English vehicle,
> is as usual unwelcome to him. (1979b, 87)
> 



Ryle's solution is to reject the vehicle-cargo model. In owning
a penny, the duplicationist is right in saying I own more than a mere
metallic disc; but the reductionist is also right in rejecting the
idea that I own two things: a mere disc and a non-metallic,
unpocketable yet marketable cargo. The word I employ is not a noise
and something else as well; nor is just a noise. In learning a
word's meaning, I become enabled to conduct with it a host of
*inter alia* informative, calculative, recording,
anagram-solving, and versifying transactions of quite specific kinds.
Just as a penny is not just a disc and nor is it a disc and something
else as well, so a word is not just noise, but nor is it a noise and
something else as well. The penny is an institutionally-qualified
enabling instrument that I can use for specific sorts of transactions.
The word is a complexly qualified noise, endowed with a quite specific
saying-power, endowed by institutional regulations, accumulating
public custom, pedagogic disciplines, and so on. The formulation of
the qualifications of both penny and word would "require not
just some simple auxiliary nouns, simple adjectives or simple verbs
but a whole batch of syntactically variegated subordinate
clauses" (1979b, 88).



Even if it is true that *Le Penseur* is saying things to
himself, this description fails because it stops just where it ought
to begin. 'Murmuring syllables' to himself is the thinnest
possible description of what he is engaged in. A thick description may
be that he is trying to find out whether or not the things that he is
saying will lead him where he wants to go:



> 
> ... in his pondering, reflecting, deliberating, etc., the thinker
> is not guiding himself anywhere, but trying to find out whether this
> or that track of his own making would or would not qualify as a
> guiding, as opposed to a mis-guiding, or non-guiding, track. (1968,
> 494)
> 



Exploring is on a higher-sophistication level than piloting; and
piloting is on a higher sophistication level than following a
pilot's lead. If *Le Penseur* is trying to find the proof
of a new theorem then he is working on a higher accomplishment-level
than he is in trying to teach his student his proof when he has got
it; just as trying to teach it is on a higher-sophistication level
than that on which his students are working in trying to master
it.



On its thinnest description, *Le Penseur* may be muttering to
himself a few geometrical words or phrases, just as on its thinnest
description a penny is a piece of metal. But to say that that is not
*all* he is doing (or that that is not *all* the penny
is) is consistent with saying it is the only thing he is doing or with
denying that the penny is a piece of metal and something else as
well.



> 
> A statesman signing his surname to a peace-treaty is doing much more
> than inscribe the seven letters of his surname, but he is not doing
> many or any more things. He is bringing war to a close by inscribing
> the seven letters of his surname. (1968, 496)
> 



Thinking can be saying things to oneself under a thin description.
Under a thicker description it may be saying things to oneself with
the specific heuristic intention of trying to open one's eyes or
consolidate one's grasp. It is this specific, experimental
intention that is obliterated, Ryle tells us, by sweeping generic
slogans such as "Thought is Language" or "Thinking
is Saying Things to Oneself", whether or not this is
supplemented by "... and Something Else as Well." The
adverb 'experimentally' adds not an extra action but the
intention-to-find-out-what-happens-when .... Neither the
Reductionist nor the Duplicationist (the Behaviourist or the
Cartesian) can account for the adverb
'experimentally'.



> 
> They had tried to tell us what pondering is, eluding that little knot
> of subordinate clauses, such as '... in order
> to ...', 'what happens...', and
> '... when ...' without which the notion of
> *experimenting* cannot be unpacked; no more than burglary,
> treaty-signing, or goal-scoring can deliberately be described in
> simple adjectives *plus* simple verbs, whether mundane or
> transcendent. What qualifies an undertaking as one of pondering or,
> not very differently, as one of discussing, is not any catalogue of
> simple qualities and simple relations, whether rude or refined, but
> some nexus of statable because statement-shaped conditions. (1979b,
> 82)
> 


## 12. Sensation



Ryle was unhappy with the treatment he gave of the concepts of
sensation and perception in *The Concept of Mind*. In both the
Foreword and the Afterword of the chapter entitled "Sensation
and Observation", he expresses his dissatisfaction at having
given too much to the opposition by having "fallen in"
with the Official story that perceiving involves having
sensations.



In a later paper (1956) Ryle corrects this. The idea that perceiving
involves "having sensations" is called into question with
an investigation of the ordinary concepts of sensation and feeling and
their relation to the technical notions of sense-impression and
sense-data. (Arguably, today's notion of "perceptual
experiences" - conceptual or non-conceptual--also
figure as a target of Ryle's arguments.) In this section, I
shall discuss the negative thesis that perception does not require the
postulation of sensations construed in its ordinary sense and why one
motivation for postulating sense-data or sense-impressions should be
resisted. In the next, I discuss a different motivation and show why
the thickness of perceptual concepts thwarts attempts to discover the
"nature" of perception in physiological, optical,
acoustic, etc. phenomena.



Both philosophers and physiologists "pass without apology"
from saying that without optical or auditory sense-impressions there
is no seeing or hearing to saying that seeing and hearing involve the
having of sensations. But can the sense-impressions which are
supposedly required for perception be identified with sensations or
feelings in one of their non-technical senses?



Ryle suggests not. On one understanding of "feeling" or
"sensation" we include pains, nausea, tickles,
suffocation, and thirst, which are distressing in some way. (In the
*Concept of Mind* he notes that not all
"agitations" are disagreeable: "People voluntarily
subject themselves to suspense, fatigue, perplexity, fear, and
surprise ..."(95).)



A different understanding of "feeling" or
"sensation" comes with tactual sensations of external
objects and kinaesthetic sensations (of anatomically internal things
and events). Instances of the latter include the feeling of warmth,
say, as my hand approaches a fire or feeling how cold, rough, smooth,
slippery, or sticky some things are or whether they are vibrating,
stiff, resilient, or loose.



*Pace* Berkeley, the difference between these types of states
is not merely a matter of degree: feeling the warmth of a fire is not
like a feeling of pain. Feeling the fire is hotter than it was before
is a matter of perception, discrimination, or finding out a
difference. People can be better at it than others: doctors acquire
the skill of feeling pulses that an untrained person cannot and race
drivers feel a car going into a skid well before an ordinary motorist
can. Feeling pain, giddy, nauseous, or high, by contrast are not a
matter of perception, an acquired skill or that which training can
fine-tune. Mistakes due to carelessness are ruled out when we talk of
sensations *qua* pain or elation; they are not ruled out when
it comes to perception as discrimination or detection.



Armed with these two sets of implication threads (and in this sense,
different *understandings of*, or things we *count*
*as*) sensation or feeling, it can be seen that perception
requires neither of these. Seeing a cat does not require that I feel
anything in the sense of pain, discomfort, tickle, giddiness, or calm
(nor, we can add, relief, amusement, surprise, or rapture). Nor,
however, does seeing a cat or hearing a violin require that I
tactually or kinaesthetically feel with my eye or with my ear that
which I also perceive. Nor does smelling require that I feel, in this
sense, with my nose. And though the tongue is a double-sense organ
insofar as I can tactually and kinaesthetically detect the texture and
the temperature of food in my mouth, as well as taste it, tasting food
does not depend upon my being able to feel these other properties of
the food with my tongue.



So, Ryle says, when philosophers and psychologists assert that all
perceiving involves the having of sensations or the feeling of
something, either they are wrong or they are using a third, different
understanding of "sensation" or "feeling".



Let us examine this different sense of "feeling" or
"sensation". It does not seem to derive from ordinary use,
which, we might suggest, would not in itself be a problem, as long as
the implication threads of one understanding are not crossed with
those of another. Consider the epistemologist's notion of
sense-data or sense-impressions which are posited as candidates for
grounding knowledge or certainty in what is supposedly given in
perception. Suppose this third understanding of *sensation* or
*feeling* derives from sense-data or sense-impressions thus
understood. Whatever the merits or demerits of this view, in order for
sensations--now understood as sense-impressions or
sense*-*data--to play this foundational role, we must be
conscious of them. Curiously enough, however, we do not report them.
Instead, we report what we see under different descriptions, which
carry different luggage-loads. (Or, as Austin said, we report what we
see under different descriptions which depend, in part, on how far we
are willing to stick our neck out.) Someone who claimed to see
something green might subsequently, when he learns of the presence of
a cat, claim that what he saw was the eyes of a cat. The
"luggage" that Ryle speaks of here includes the logical
threads (including implication and evidence, etc.) that accompany
certain descriptions rather than others. (There are more ways to be
wrong, as Austin says, the more we stick our necks out.) We shall come
back to this in the next section. But now we are investigating a
third, new sense of "sensation" or "feeling"
which derives, not from ordinary use, but from the (alleged) needs of
epistemology. But what supports the idea that we see have such
experiences?



Not the fact that we report *appearances*, for, as Ryle reminds
us, we use the locution "it appears that ..." all the
time without committing ourselves to having any particular
experiences. "15 x 16 appears to make 220" or "It
looks as if the river is twice the size of the road" commit me
to no special sense-experiences. So, argues Ryle, we cannot adduce
idioms of the patterns "It looks as if ..." or
"It appears ..." as evidence of the untutored,
uninferential manner in which the postulated sense-impressions are
delivered to consciousness. But this leaves us with a problem.



We have, in fact, no special way of reporting the occurrence of these
postulated impressions; we are, therefore, without the needed marks of
our being conscious of such things at all. For there is surely
something absurd in maintaining that we are constantly conscious of
some things in the way in which we are conscious of pains, and yet
have no way of telling ourselves or other people anything whatsoever
about them. (1956, 343)



This particular theoretical allegiance that drives some
epistemologists to posit sensations understood in the technical sense
of sense-data has as its source the idea that there are two kinds of
space, which we know today, thanks to Sellars, as the space of reason
and the space of natural law. In the first, the notion of inference,
evidence, premises, evidence, and conclusions have their home; in the
other is the raw "data" understood in the sense of that
which is given or accepted without argument.



The allegiance to this picture has its source in the view that all
thinking intended to result in the discovery or establishment of
truths is inferring. A child sees a word on a page, an adult sees a
misprint, and an illiterate sees a black mark. Each has eyes in
perfect working order. According to this view, the difference between
seeing black marks, a word, or a misprint has to do with the reasoning
we bring to what is perceptually given. And sense-data (or, we may
add, perceptual experience) play the role of what is given prior to
any thinking, and prior therefore to any exploitation of knowledge or
beliefs previously acquired. A datum, as it is used here, is something
that we reason *from* and does not have to be reasoned
*to*.



Ryle dismisses this motivation for introducing sensation thus
understood on the grounds that not all thinking is inferring.
Multiplying, for example, is thinking but our calculations are not
conclusions and our mistakes are not fallacies. If it is not true that
the thinking that enters into perceptual recognition, identification,
comparison, etc. is inferring then the search for its fund of premises
is the search for nothing.



But worse, why suppose that seeing the misprint or seeing a crop of
wheat (as opposed to a word, or a planted field) is thinking at all?
It may be discerned in a flash; there may be no moment, however short,
in which one might be described as pondering, reflecting, or putting
two and two together. All the argument has shown so far is that
without a particular training, recognising a misprint or a crop of
wheat would be impossible. Why suppose the exploitation of the
knowledge resulting from this training involves thinking *qua*
reflecting, pondering, or inferring?



Here the fact that the misprint is immediately obvious to him is
supposed to need to be explained not just by reference to his prior
education, but also by the postulation of the performance by him of a
piece of thinking, with the queer property of not requiring any time
for its performance. (1956, 345)



According to Ryle, seeing a misprint involves the possession of the
exploitation of knowledge already acquired. But this exploitation of
knowledge required for perceptual recognition, identification, etc.
need not embody any thinking; *a fortiori*, it need not embody
inferential thinking. "So the argument for the occurrence of
sense-impressions to be the data or premises for the inferential
thinking embodied is doubly broken-backed" (1956, 345).



Readers interested in Ryle's thoughts about perception and
imagination are referred to the following supplementary documents:


* Ryle on Perception
* Ryle on Imagination


## 13. Afterword



This has been a short tour--concentrating on the philosophy of
language and mind--through but a patch of the rich philosophical
landscape that Ryle has charted. Left out are a number of themes and
interests of Ryle, for example, his discussion of traditions in
philosophy from Plato, through the Phenomenological tradition and the
work of Brentano, Husserl, and then Heidegger, through the trenchant
exposition of Wittgenstein's *Tractatus*, to his
criticism of Carnap, to Collingwood, and Anderson. I have not
commented on the dissolution of philosophical problems
he presented in his Tarner Lectures; nor have I been able to include
discussions on morality, feelings, pleasure, and much more. Nor is
this reading of Ryle a standard one: even many of his students
interpreted him as a behaviourist and irrealist. I hope it is enough,
however, to raise the possibility that his work has been widely
misunderstood, is presently underestimated, and that he has a lot to
contribute to today's debates.