Gilbert Ryle Quotes

A person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts.

The vain man does not think he is vain.

Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings.

Minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just bits of not-clockwork. As thus represented, minds are not merely ghosts harnessed to machines, they are themselves just spectral machines. . . . Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements. I shall argue that these and other analogous conjunctions are absurd.

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.

For making mistakes is not an exercise of competence, nor is the commission of slips an exercise of knowledge how; it is a failure to exercise knowledge how.

I discover that there are other minds in understanding what other people say and do.

Knowing how to apply maxims cannot be reduced to, or derived from, the acceptance of those or any other maxims.

The author is leading and the spectator is following, but their path is the same.

But when a person has done the right thing, we cannot then say that he knew how to do the wrong thing, or that he was competent to make mistakes.

The tangle of largely spurious problems, known as the problem of the Freedom of the Will, partly derives from this unconsciously stretched use of ‘voluntary’ and these consequential misapplications of different senses of ‘could’ and ‘could have helped’.

Minds are things, but different sorts of things from bodies;

The regress is infinite. and this reduces to absurdity the theory that for an operation to be intelligent it must be steered by a prior intellectual operation.

When I do something intelligently, i.e. thinking what I am doing, I am doing one thing and not two. My performance has a special procedure or manner, not special antecedents.

Roughly, execution and understanding are merely different exercises of knowledge of the tricks of the same trade.

Drill dispenses with intelligence, training develops it.

For the reason, or maxim, is inevitably a proposition of some generality. It cannot embody specifications to fit every detail of the particular state of affairs.

For this theory is just another unsuccessful attempt to wriggle out of a perfectly mythical dilemma.

When a boy begins to notice that he is fonder of arithmetic, or less homesick, than are most of his acquaintances he is beginning to be self-conscious, in this enlarged sense.

Nor does this understanding require a prolonged grounding in the not yet established laws of psychology.

Of course, to execute an operation intelligently is not exactly the same thing as to follow its execution intelligently. The agent is originating, the spectator is only contemplating.

Certainly there are some things which I can find out about you only, or best, through being told of them by you. The oculist has to ask his client what letters he sees with his right and left eyes and how clearly he sees them; the doctor has to ask the sufferer where the pain is and what sort of a pain it is; and the psychoanalyst has to ask his patient about his dreams and daydreams.

In making sense of what you say, in appreciating your jokes, in unmasking your chess-stratagems, in following your arguments and in hearing you pick holes in my arguments, I am not inferring to the workings of your mind, I am following them. Of course, I am not merely hearing the noises that you make, or merely seeing the movements that you perform. I am understanding what I hear and see. But this understanding is not inferring to occult causes.

Nor does this understanding require a prolonged grounding in the not yet established laws of psychology. Following the moves made by a chess-player is not doing anything remotely resembling problematic psychological diagnosis.

To do something thinking what one is doing is, according to this legend, always to do two things; namely, to consider certain appropriate propositions, or prescriptions, and to put into practice what these propositions or prescriptions enjoin.

The competent critic of prose-style, experimental technique, or embroidery, must at least know how to write, experiment or sew. Whether or not he has also learned some psychology matters about as much as whether he has learned any chemistry, neurology or economics.

A natural counterpart to the theory that minds constitute a world other than ‘the physical world’ is the theory that there exist ways of discovering the contents of this other world which are counterparts to our ways of discovering the contents of the physical world.

Philosophers, chiefly since Descartes, have in their theories of knowledge and conduct operated with a concept of consciousness which has relatively little affinity with any of the concepts described above. Working with the notion of the mind as a second theatre, the episodes enacted in which enjoy the supposed status of ‘the mental’ and correspondingly lack the supposed status of ‘the physical’, thinkers of many sorts have laid it down as the cardinal positive property of these episodes that, when they occur, they occur consciously.

If you do not divulge the contents of your silent soliloquies and other imaginings, I have no other sure way of finding out what you have been saying or picturing to yourself. But the sequence of your sensations and imaginings is not the sole field in which your wits and character are shown; perhaps only for lunatics is it more than a small corner of that field. I find out most of what I want to know about your capacities, interests, likes, dislikes, methods and convictions by observing how you conduct your overt doings, of which by far the most important are your sayings and writings.

Prior to Flew, major apologies for atheism were those of Enlightenment thinkers (David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Friedrich Nietzsche). Major philosophers of Flew’s generation who were atheists: W. V. O. Quine and Gilbert Ryle. But none took the step of developing book-length arguments to support their personal beliefs. In later years, atheist philosophers who critically examined and rejected the traditional arguments for God’s existence: Paul Edwards, Wallace Matson, Kai Nielsen, Paul Kurtz, J. L. Mackie, Richard Gale, Michael Martin. But their works did not change the agenda and framework of discussion the way Flew’s innovative publications did.

Intelligent' cannot be defined in terms of 'intellectual' or 'knowing how’ in terms of 'knowing that’; 'thinking what I am doing' does not connote 'both thinking what to do and doing it'. When I do something intelligently, i.e. thinking what I am doing, I am doing one thing and not two. My performance has a special procedure or manner, not special antecedents.

I must however make it clear from the start that this refutation will not invalidate the distinctions which we all quite properly draw between voluntary and involuntary actions and between strong-willed and weak-willed persons. It will, on the contrary, make clearer what is meant by ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’, by ‘strong-willed’ and ‘weak-willed’, by emancipating these ideas from bondage to an absurd hypothesis.

The fact that Plato and Aristotle never mentioned them in their frequent and elaborate discussions of the nature of the soul and the springs of conduct is due not to any perverse neglect by them of notorious ingredients of daily life but to the historical circumstance that they were not acquainted with a special hypothesis the acceptance of which rests not on the discovery, but on the postulation, of these ghostly thrusts.

If ordinary men never report the occurrence of these acts, for all that, according to the theory, they should be encountered vastly more frequently than headaches, or feelings of boredom; if ordinary vocabulary has no non-academic names for them; if we do not know how to settle simple questions about their frequency, duration or strength, then it is fair to conclude that their existence is not asserted on empirical grounds.

It is, however, one thing to know how to apply such concepts, quite another to know how to correlate them with one another and with concepts of other sorts. Many people can talk sense with concepts but cannot talk sense about them; they know by practice how to operate with concepts, anyhow inside familiar fields, but they cannot state the logical regulations governing their use. They are like people who know their way about their own parish, but cannot construct or read a map of it, much less a map of the region or continent in which their parish lies.

In consciousness, self-consciousness and introspection he is directly and authentically apprised of the present states and operations of his mind. He may have great or small uncertainties about concurrent and adjacent episodes in the physical world, but he can have none about at least part of what is momentarily occupying his mind. It is customary to express this bifurcation of his two lives and of his two worlds by saying that the things and events which belong to the physical world, including his own body, are external, while the workings of his own mind are internal. This antithesis of outer and inner is of course meant to be construed as a metaphor, since minds, not being in space, could not be described as being spatially inside anything else, or as having things going on spatially inside themselves.

Chronicles are not explanatory of what they record.

Champions of this legend are apt to try to reassimilate knowing how to knowing that by arguing that intelligent performance involves the observance of rules, or the application of criteria.

It is to do a bit of theory and then to do a bit of practice.

According to the legend, whenever an agent does anything intelligently, his act is preceded and steered by another internal act of considering a regulative proposition appropriate to his practical problem. But what makes him consider the one maxim which is appropriate rather than any of the thousands which are not?

The spectators applaud his skill at seeming clumsy, but what they applaud is not some extra hidden performance executed ‘in his head’.

Advocates of the double-life legend will answer that understanding the chess-player’s moves consists in inferring from the visible moves made on the board to unwitnessable operations taking place on the player’s private stage. It is a process of inference analogous to that by which we infer from the seen movements of the railway-signals to the unseen manipulations of the levers in the signal-box. Yet this answer promises something that could never be fulfilled. For since, according to the theory, one person cannot in principle visit another person’s mind as he can visit signal-boxes, there could be no way of establishing the necessary correlation between the overt moves and their hidden causal counterparts.

The first objection to the doctrine that overt actions, to which we ascribe intelligence-predicates, are results of counterpart hidden operations of willing is this. Despite the fact that theorists have, since the Stoics and Saint Augustine, recommended us to describe our conduct in this way, no one, save to endorse the theory, ever describes his own conduct, or that of his acquaintances, in the recommended idioms. No one ever says such things as that at 10 a.m. he was occupied in willing this or that, or that he performed five quick and easy volitions and two slow and difficult volitions between midday and lunch-time.

An accused person may admit or deny that he did something, or that he did it on purpose, but he never admits or denies having willed.

champions of the dogma of the ghost in the machine tend to argue that the imputed objects of consciousness and introspection cannot be myths, since we are conscious of them and can introspectively observe them.

The careful driver is not actually imagining or planning for all of the countless contingencies that might crop up; nor is he merely competent to recognise and cope with any one of them, if it should arise. He has not foreseen the runaway donkey, yet he is not unprepared for it.

The statement ‘the mind is its own place’, as theorists might construe it, is not true, for the mind is not even a metaphorical ‘place’. On the contrary, the chessboard, the platform, the scholar’s desk, the judge’s bench, the lorry-driver’s seat, the studio and the football field are among its places. These are where people work and play stupidly or intelligently. ‘Mind’ is not the name of another person, working or frolicking behind an impenetrable screen; it is not the name of another place where work is done or games are played; and it is not the name of another tool with which work is done, or another appliance with which games are played.

The difference between a normal person and an idiot is not that the normal person is really two persons while the idiot is only one, but that the normal person can do a lot of things which the idiot cannot do;

By what sorts of predicates should they be described? Can they be sudden or gradual, strong or weak, difficult or easy, enjoyable or disagreeable?

Nor could it be maintained that the agent himself can know that any overt action of his own is the effect of a given volition.

It is a subsidiary question how you conduct your imaginings, including your imagined monologues.

It does not, of course, follow from its being a technical concept that it is an illegitimate or useless concept. ‘Ionisation’ and ‘off-side’ are technical concepts, but both are legitimate and useful. ‘Phlogiston’ and ‘animal spirits’ were technical concepts, though they have now no utility. I hope to show that the concept of volition belongs to the latter tribe.

It has for a long time been taken for an indisputable axiom that the Mind is in some important sense tripartite, that is, that there are just three ultimate classes of mental processes. The Mind or Soul, we are often told, has three parts, namely, Thought, Feeling and Will;

The main object of this chapter is not, however, to discuss the whole trinitarian theory of mind but to discuss, and discuss destructively, one of its ingredients. I hope to refute the doctrine that there exists a Faculty, immaterial Organ, or Ministry, corresponding to the theory’s description of the ‘Will’ and, accordingly, that there occur processes, or operations, corresponding to what it describes as ‘volitions’.

This point, that the capacity to appreciate a performance is one in type with the capacity to execute it, illustrates a contention previously argued, namely that intelligent capacities are not single-track dispositions, but are dispositions admitting of a wide variety of more or less dissimilar exercises.

It is naturally difficult, if one denies the existence of the second theatre, to elucidate what is meant by describing the episodes which are supposed to take place in it as self-intimating. But some points are clear enough. It is not supposed that when I am wondering, say, what is the answer to a puzzle and am ipso facto consciously doing so, that I am synchronously performing two acts of attention, one to the puzzle and the other to my wondering about it.

But the rules which the agent observes and the criteria which he applies are one with those which govern the spectator’s applause and jeers.

A boy can be said to have partial knowledge of the counties of England, if he knows some of them and does not know others. But he could not be said to have incomplete knowledge of Sussex being an English county.

The first question which we had to decide had nothing to do with the occurrence or non-occurrence of any occult episode in the boy’s stream of consciousness; it was the question whether or not he had the required higher-level competence, that of knowing how to tie reef-knots.

Moreover both this constant awareness (generally called ‘consciousness’), and this non-sensuous inner perception (generally called ‘introspection’) have been supposed to be exempt from error.

although there may occur a few stages in his argument which are so trite that he can go through them by rote, much of his argument is likely never to have been constructed before. He has to meet new objections, interpret new evidence and make connections between elements in the situation which had not previously been co-ordinated. In short he has to innovate, and where he innovates he is not operating from habit.

It is a mystery not of the unsolved but soluble type, like the problem of the cause of cancer, but of quite another type.

So what of volitions themselves? Are they voluntary or involuntary acts of mind? Clearly either answer leads to absurdities.

If I think, hope, remember, will, regret, hear a noise, or feel a pain, I must, ipso facto, know that I do so.

The concept of volition is in a different case. We do not know in daily life how to use it, for we do not use it in daily life and do not, consequently, learn by practice how to apply it, and how not to misapply it. It is an artificial concept. We have to study certain specialist theories in order to find out how it is to be manipulated.

Volitions have been postulated as special acts, or operations, ‘in the mind’, by means of which a mind gets its ideas translated into facts. I think of some state of affairs which I wish to come into existence in the physical world, but, as my thinking and wishing are unexecutive, they require the mediation of a further executive mental process. So I perform a volition which somehow puts my muscles into action. Only when a bodily movement has issued from such a volition can I merit praise or blame for what my hand or tongue has done.

He applies in his practice what Aristotle abstracted in his theory of such practices.

The rules that he observes have become his way of thinking, when he is taking care; they are not external rubrics with which he has to square his thoughts.

In a word, he conducts his operation efficiently, and to operate efficiently is not to perform two operations.

if he had examined only one signal-box and knew nothing about the standardisation-methods of large corporations, his inference would be pitiably weak, for it would be a wide generalisation based on a single instance.

The connection between volitions and movements is allowed to be mysterious, so, for all he knows, his volition may have had some other movement as its effect and the pulling of the trigger may have had some other event for its cause.

There is thus a polar opposition between mind and matter, an opposition which is often brought out as follows. Material objects are situated in a common field, known as 'space', and what happens to one body in one part of space is mechanically connected with what happens to other bodies in other parts of space. But mental happenings occur in insulated fields, known as 'minds', and there is, apart maybe from telepathy, no direct causal connection between what happens in one mind and what happens in another. Only through the medium of the public physical world can the mind of one person make a difference to the mind of another. The mind is its own place and in his inner life each of us lives the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. People can see, hear, and jolt one another's Bodies, but they are irremediably blind and deaf to the workings of one another's minds and inoperative upon them.

The traditional theory of the mind has misconstrued the type-distinction between disposition and exercise into its mythical bifurcation of unwitnessable mental causes and their witnessable physical effects.

Philosophy is the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines

She had lived all her life among clergymen, and may have known too much about them for her own moral comfort. It is impossible to forget that picture of James, “It makes me sad and angry ...” In a fascinating essay on Jane Austen and the Moralists (reprinted in B C Southam’s Critical Essays on Jane Austen), Professor Gilbert Ryle points out that Jane Austen’s heroines “face their moral difficulties and solve their moral problems without recourse to religious faith or theological doctrines. Nor does it ever occur to them to seek the counsels of a clergyman.