ryle et al-on ryle

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MODERN STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY

RYLEEDITED BY OSCAR P. WOOD

AND GEORGE PITCHER

Introduction by Gilbert Ryle

MACMILLAN London, 1971

= New York: Doubleda , 1970


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CONTENTS

Autobiographical, Gn.BERT RYLE 1Critical Review of The Concept of Mind, STUART

HAMPSDXRE 17Intelligent Behaviour, J. L. AUSTIN 45An Honest Ghost?, A. J. AYER 53Ryle and Thinking, F. N. smLEY 75Ryle on Perception, ANTHONY QUINTON 10 ;Imagination, J M. SHORTER 137Mental Copies, G. B. MATTHEws 157Categories, P. F. STRAWSON 181Knowing How .and Knowing That, What, D. G.

B R O ~ 213Polymorphous Concepts, J. o. URMSON 249Words and Sentences, G. J. WARNocx: 267Ryle in Relation to Modem Science, J. J c. SMART 283Philosophy and Computer Simulation, ;KEITH G U N ~

DERSON 307Notes on Ryle's Plato, G. E. L, OWEN 341In Defence of Platonic Division, JOHN ACKRILL 373Verbs and the Identity of Actions-A P h i l o s o p h i ~cal Exercise in the Interpretation of Aristo 4tle, TERRY PENNER 393Chronological List of Published Writings 1927-

68 of Gilbert Ryle 461Notes on Contributors 469


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AUTOBIOGRAPHICALGILBERT RYLE

IMy father was a general practitioner, with two deep ex-trinsic interests. He was an amateur astronomer and aphilosopher. He contributed two papers to the Aristotelian Society in its very early days. I do not recollect himtalking much in the .home on philosophical matters, buthis large and variegated library contained many philosophical and semi-philosophical works-and I was an omnivorous reader.When he was a young man he had migrated into agnos-ticism from the Evangelicalism in which his father, eventually the first Bishop of Liverpool, had raised him.We ten children were brought up unchurched and nonchurch-going. I fancy that I was stimulated in my teensto think defensive heretical thoughts by our exemptionfrom the orthodoxies that naturally prevailed at school.But I cannot claim to have been persecuted there, or evenvexatiously teased for our godlessness. My schooldays co-incided with the First World War and this preoccupiedus all. I remember a young schoolmaster, recently down

from Oxford, asking us in the Sixth Form "What is col-our?" I gave a Lockean sort of answer, and laughed knowingly at the expense of a boy who declared that colourwas paint. I scored five marks for my sapience. I remember another master saying, "Ryle, you are very good ontheories, but you are very bad on facts." My attempts torepair this latter weakness were short-lived and unsuccessful.In 1919 I went up to Oxford, where for the first fiveterms I was working rather half-heartedly for ClassicalHonour Moderations. I lacked the ear, the nostrils, the


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2 RYLEpalate, and the toes that are needed for excellence inlinguistic and literary studies. However I took greedily tothe off-centre subject of Logic. I t felt to me like agrown-up subject, in which there were still unsolvedproblems. This was not my impression of the Classics ingeneral, as they were then taught. However I gladlylearned from Aristophanes and from an Aristophanictutor that Ancient Greece had not been wholly populated by the stately, cultured, and liberal-minded sageswhom Alma Tadema depicted and in whom eminentHellenists encouraged us to believe.For my next seven terms I was working for Greats inancient and modem philosophy, and in Greek and Romanhistory. I do not recall being at all worried by the nonintegration of our Roman history with our modem philosophy; or even of our Greek history with our Greekphilosophy, which happened to belong to different curricular "periods." But I did think that the Academy mattered more than the Peloponnesian War.I was from the start philosophically eager. I became amember of the undergraduateS' Jowett Society fairly.early and I read a lot of self-discovered things that surprised my philosophy tutor to hear about. I disappointedhim by failing to appreciate the bulk of Plato's Republic.This tepidness was not due to any comparisons betweenit and other, philosophically superior dialogues. I had notread any of these, any more than had, apparently, most ofthe Plato-venerating philosophy tutors of that era. Theytreated the Republic like the Bible, and to me most of itseemed, philosophically, no better.H. J. Paton was my tutor. Some of my fellow studentsfound him too unforthcoming, but for me his untiring"Now, Ryle, what exactly do you mean by . ?"was anadmirable spur. He was an unfanatical Crocean, w h ~ c h ,

at the time, was the main alternative to being a CookWilsonian. His evolution into a wholehearted Kantscholar and expositor had begun before I ceased to be in


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A Collection of Critical Essays 3statu pupiUari. In 1924 I spent some time acquiring areading knowledge of Italian and a modest grasp of Italianphilosophy by reading some Croce, but more Gentile,with the text under my nose and a dictionary in my hand.The chief thing that I now remember having learnedfrom Croce was this quite unintended lesson. Croceseemed to divide the Spirit, whatever that was, into twohouses, each of which was divided into two floors. Spirit,qua theoretical, split into Philosophical and Scientificthinkings, qua practical into moral and economic doings.The philosophical top-floor of the theoretical half enjoyed some sort of zenith-standing. I remember drawingthe startling conclusion, though not in these words,"Then, since philosophical thinking is a Good Thing,Bertrand Russell's thinking, in so far as it is philosophical,cannot be a Bad Thing, yet that is what Oxford philosophers ostracise it for being. So, despite them, I ought tolook at it, lest I miss something that ought not to bemissed." I did look at it. I dare say that this hop from abook by Croce to Russell's Principles of Mathematics waspartly powered by some native recalcitrance towards theofficial line.In my fifth year I worked for the new school of Modem Greats. Though my time was short and heavily preempted by unacademic avocations, I managed, withoutover-industry, not only to accumulate an adequate stockof Economics and Politics, but also to teach myself asmattering of scholastic philosophy. I did this partly frominquisitiveness and partly as a strategic move against myexaminers-to-be, who would get from the other candidatesnothing but post-Cartesian pabulum. I believe I did infact refresh them with my uncovenanted Greek and me-diaeval philosophy. In October 1924 I became a lecturer

in philosophy at Christ Church, and began teaching atonce. The senior philosophy tutor was then H. W. Blunt.He soon retired, and I was joined by M. B. Foster.


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4 RYLEI I

During my time as an undergraduate and during myfirst few years as a teacher, the philosophic kettle in O x ~ford was barely lukewarm. I think that it would have beenstone cold but for Prichard, who did bring into his chosenand rather narrow arenas vehemence, tenacity, unceremoniousness, and a perverse consistency that made ourhackles rise, as nothing else at that time did. The B r a d ~leians were not yet extinct, but they did not come outinto the open. I cannot recollect hearing one referringmention of the Absolute. The Cook Wilsonians werehankering to gainsay the Bradleians and the Croceans,but were given few openings. Pragmatism was still represented by F. C. S. Schiller, but as his tasteless jocositiesbeat vainly against the snubbing primnesses of his c o l ~leagues, even this puny spark was effectually quenched.Logic, save for Aristotelian scholarship, was in thedoldrums. Little was heard now even of the s e m i ~psychological topics discussed in Bradley's mis-titled Prin-ciples of Logic. Russell's Principles of Mathematics hadbeen published when I was three; twenty-five years laterit and Principia Mathematica were still only the objectsof Oxonian pleasantries. The names of Boole, De M o r ~gan, Venn, Jevons, McColl, Frege, Peano, Johnson, andJ. M. Keynes did not yet crop up in lectures or d i s c u s ~sions. In the bibliography of the Kneales' The D e v e l o ~ment of Logic no Oxford entries, save contn"butions toscholarship, belonged to the half century from Lewis Car-roll (18


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A Collection of Critical Essaysthat young Oxford could and should learn from Cambridge. Soon Oxford's hermetically conserved atmospherebegan to smell stuffy even to ourselves.

Two other major ventilators were opened in the secondhalf of the 19.2.os.1). Some of us junior. philosophy tutors began to attendthe annual Joint Sessions of the Mind Association andthe Aristotelian Society. We thus got to know, and to exchange ideas with our c o l l e a g u ~ , senior and junior, fromCambridge, London, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and theprovincial universities, and occasionally also with visitorsfrom overseas. Moore was always there; and even by itself,his to us smprising willingness to listen, combined withhis impartial readiness to explode at our sillinesses and toexplode at his own, would have made the week-end aheartwarming and hair.raising experience. It was at theJoint Session of 19.2.9 that I struck up a friendship withWittgenstein, of whose Tractatus Logica.PhilosophicusI had for some time been a mystified admirer. I had already realized that it was centrally concerned with Rus.sell's antithesis of the nonsensical to the t r u e - o r f a ~ , anantithesis which mattered a lot to me then and has mattered ever since.2). Before the end of the 1920s some of us junior philosophers started the "Wee Teas." This was an informaldining-club of six members that met once a fortnightduring term, with the host of the evening providing adiscussion-opening paper after dinner. The club, whichwe wound up in the middle 19(ios, took its name- "theWee Teas" by parody from the famous Scots sect; but italso signalised a contrast with a current Oxford institution known as "the Thursday Teas." This was a weeklyomnium gathemm of teachers of philosophy, at whicha short philosophical discussion ensued upon tea andbuns. These meetings tended to be crowded and hurried.They were dominated, quite properly, by our seiriors, toofew of whom, owing to the 1914-18 massacres, were much


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6 RYLEless than a generation older than our juvenile selves. Wedid not secede from this semi-routine philosophical tea-party. But our tongues wagged more freely and our witsmoved less deferentially in our own evening sessions.The members of the "Wee Teas" were, not all synchronously, Cox, Franks, Hardie, Kneale, C. S. Lewis, Mabboti:, Maclagan, Price and Ryle. The club was not, eitheracademically or philosophically, a cabal or a crusade. Wenever aimed at unanimity or achieved it; but we could tryout anything on one another without anyone beingshocked or rude or polite. Each of us had five friends andno allies. Without our noticing it at the time, hustingswords ending in "ism" and "ist" faded out of our use. Inthis and other ways we were outgrowing some then prev-alent attitudes towards philosophical issues. We discov-ered that it was possible to be at once in earnest andhappy.

I I II must have been near my middle twenties virhen good-humoured fraternal scepticisms about the existence of mysubject showed me that it really was part of my businessto be able to tell people, including myself, what philosophy is. Perhaps it was this brotherly tail-twisting thatawakened me rather early to the plot of Wittgenstein'sTractatus. Anyhow, probably over-influenced by Socrates'fruitless hunts for definitions, I was soon d e c l a r i n g ~

v ~ g u e l y enough but not yet modishly, that what philosophers examine is the meanings of expressions. In the dis-cussion that followecl my, I suppose, first paper to theJowett Society, Paton asked, "Ab, Ryle, how exactly doyou distinguish between philosophy and lexicography?" Iam sure that it was only much later than this that I wasprepared to reply that the philosopher's proprietary ques-tion is not "What does this or that expression mean?'', but"Why does this or that expression make nonsense? and


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A Collection of Critical Essays 7what sort of nonsense does it make?". By this time, I ex-pect, I would have flourished the grand phrases "logicalsyntax" and "logical grammar!'

I t was, I suppose, at about this same time and partly inreaction to the same tail-twistings, that I got the idea,which I have retained, that philosophising essentially in-corporates argumentation; and so incorporates it that, .whereas a weak or faulty inference might by luck putSherlock Holmes on the track of the murderer, a weak orfaulty philosopher's argument is itself a philosophicalblind alley. In this field there is no detachment of theconclusion from its premisses, if indeed the idiom ofpremisses and conclusions is appropriate here at all.If, for whatever reasons and in whatever way, philosophy involves reasoning, then, I argued, the theory andtechnology of reasoning needed to be studied by awould-be philosopher. It was from this interest, and notfrom Price's interest in sense-perception, that I "went allCambridge." It was Russell and not Moore whom Istudied, and it was Rnssell the logician and not Russellthe epistemologist. Having no mathematical ability,equipment, or interest, I did not make myself even com-petent in the algebra of logic; nor did the problem of thefoundations of mathematics become a question thatburned in my belly. My interest was in the theory ofMeanings-horrid substantive!-and quite soon, I amglad to say,in the theory of its senior partner, Nonsense.I laboured upon the doublets:-Sense and Reference, Intension and Extension, Concept and Object, Propositionsand Constituents, Objectives and Objects, Facts andThings, Formal Concepts and Real Concepts, Proper:Names and Descriptions, and Subjects and Predicates. I twas in Russell's Principles of Mathematics and not hisPrinci{Jia Mathematica, in his Meinong articles and his

~ O n Denoting'' and not his epistemology that I found thepack-ice of logical theory cracking. I t was up these crackslat Wittgenstein steered his Tractatus.


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8 RYLEIV

At about the time that I became a don, I started toteach myself German, partly by travel and partly bydictionary-aided reading. It may have been on a suggestion from Paton that I quite soon embarked on Hus-serl's Logische Untersuchungen; before long I was reading this alongside of. Meinong, Brentano, Bolzano, andFrege. My interest was at first in the strengths, and thenin the endemic weaknesses of Platonistic, because antipsychologistic theories of Meaning, i.e. of concepts andpropositions. I even offered an unwanted course of lee.tures, entitled "Logical Objectivism: Bolzano, Brentano,Husserl and Meinong." These characters were soonknown in Oxford as "Ryle's three Austrian railwaystations and one Chinese game of chance." I was right inthinking that their Meaning-theories would reflect somelight on and borrow some light from the partly paralleldoctrines of Frege and of Moore and Russell in their earlyEdwardian days. Because Mill was wrong, Heaven had tobe stocked with Logical Objects. But could the AngelGabriel admit Illogical Objects? or must even Heavenkowtow to what Husserl, like Wittgenstein after him,called "the rules of logical grammar" or "logical syntax?"When, if ever, is an Ens Rationis qualified to be an Entity? Of what class of Objects can logic be the science, ifdisqualified Objects have to be amongst them? AlthoughHusserl, unlike Meinong and like Russell, interested meby taking very seriously the opposition between Senseand Nonsense, he failed to make very much of it. UnlikeRussell, he did not adduce ensnaring, and so challenging,specimens of breaches of logical syntax. He did not hitupon. the paradox-generators and therefore did not try tobuild up any general diagnostic or preventive theory. Isuppose that there was no one around him to keep himon the qui vive with logicians' teasers. I t was a pity, butnot a very great pity that his Logische Untersuchungen


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A Collection of Critical Essays 9was not, as projected, reviewed for Mind by Russell during his period of incarceration in the First World War.

It is sometimes suggested that in my well or ill spentyouth I had been for a while a disciple of H u s ~ e r l ' s phenomenology. There is not much truth ill this. A gooddeal of phenomenology does indeed get into the secondedition of Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen, which iswhat I was reading alongside of Meinong, Fz:ege, Bolzano,Moore and Russell. So I did duly try to make out whatthis new "-ology" was, and why it was there. This involve

VIn the 1930s the Vienna Circle made a big itp.pact onmy generation and the next generation of philosophers.


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10 RYLEMost of us took fairly untragicaiiy its demolition of Metaphysics. After all we never met anyone engaged in c o r n ~mitting any metaphysics; our copies of Appearance andReality were dusty; and most of us had never seen a copyof Sein und Zeit. On the other hand there was obviouslysomethiJ?g very important, though stili disordered, in thePrinciple of Verifiability (and Falsifiability), quite apartfrom its Augean applications. We were not yet talking inthe obsessive lingo of "criteria." But its cash-equivalentswere already entering into our purchases and sales.There was a second quite unintended result of LogicalPositivism. For by jointly equating Metaphysics withNonsense and Sense with Science, it raised the awkwardquestion "Where. then do we anti-nonsense philosophersbelong? Are the sentences of which Erkenntnis itself iscomposed Metaphysics? Then are they Physics or Astronomy or Zoology? What of the sentences and formulae ofwhich Principia Mathematica consists?" We were facingwhat was in effect the double central challenge of Witt-genstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the singlecentral challenge of his future Philosophical Investigations. Neurath, Schlick, Carnap, Waismann, and for us,above all others, Ayer had undeliberately raised a problem the solution to which was neither in the Logical Syntax of Language nor yet in the Tractatus. We philosophers were in for a near-lifetime of enquiry into our owntitle to be enquirers. Had we any answerable questions,including this one?The conviction that the Viennese dichotomy "EitherScience or Nonsense" had too few "ors" in it led some ofus, including myself, to harbour and to work on a derivative suspicion. If, after all, logicians and even philosophers can say significant things, then perhaps some logi

ciansand philosophers of the past, even the remote past,had, despite their unenlightenment, sometimes said sig-nificant things. "Conceptual analysis" seems to denote a


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A Collection of Critical Essays 11permissible, even meritorious exercise, so maybe some ofour forefathers had had their Cantabrigian moments. I fwe are careful to winnow off their vacuously speculativ


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12 RYLEof their author with, say, Wittgenstein, honorific to both,and, what matters much more, elucidatory of both.

VIQuite soon after I doffed my khaki in 1945, Paton, asEditor of the new series, Hutchinson's Philosophical Library; invited me to contribute to it. I agreed, without yethaving a clear mind about the future book's theme. I didknow, however, that I wanted to apply, and be seen to beapplying to some large-scale philosophical crux the an

swer to the question that had preoccupied us in the1920s, and especially in the 1930s, the question namely"What constitutes a philosophical problem; and what isthe way to solve it?" Lots of us had delivered and repliedto papers on this theme; lots of us had published articlesand discussion-notes bearing directly or indirectly on it;and our useful little discussion-journal Analysis had forits title the noun that was prevalently used to identify thething, or one of the things, that non-metaphysical philosophers were permitted carefully to do. But by the later1940s it was time, I thought, to exhibit a sustained pieceof analytical hatchet-work being directed upon some notorious and large-sized Gordian Knot. After a long spellof enlightened methodological talk, what was needed nowwas an example of the method really working, in breadthand depth and where it was really needed.For a time I thought of the problem of the Freedom ofthe Will as the most suitable Gordian Knot; but in theend I opted for the Concept of Mind-though the book'sactual title did not occur to me until the printers werehankering to begin printing the first proofs. The Con-cept of Mind was a philosophical book written with ameta-philosophical purpose. Five years later my TamerLectures, entitled "Dilemmas," were fairly explicitly dedicated to the consolidation and diversification of whathad been the meta-theme of the Concept of Mind.


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A Collection of Critical Essays 13

VIIAbout the last twenty years of my professorial-cumeditorial existence nothing genetically informative re-mains to be said. A:owever, for the sake of the record, Igive two negative things in reply to questions that havebeen asked and will be asked.1). R. G. Collingwood, despite the great, but belatedlyrecognized merits of some of his philosophical writings,bad no influence at all on me, 'or I think on most. of my

contemporaries, either in our student days or after webad become his colleagues. That I did not attend his lec-tures shows little, since I was unassiduous as a lecturegoer. But I do not think that they were attended mucheven by other philosophically lively undergraduates.When we became philosophy tutors we saw a little moreof him at Sub-Faculty Committee meetings and at those"Thursday Teas" of which he was host. He was completelyconscientious, though cheerless, in the performance of his.academic duties. I think he was as unhappy in t h ~ com-pany of his philosophical colleagues as he was, I gather,happy in that of archaeologists and musicians. I surmise that he had quite early been lacerated by the JosephPrichard treatment, but lacked the resilience to retaliate;and that he then, very unwisely, deemed all philosophicalcolleagues to be unworthy. When, in 193;, I launched inMind an unconciliatory criticism: of the version of theOntological Argument in his Essay on PhilosophicalMethod, I had never heard him say a word on this orany contiguous matter; and though my article resulted insome correspondence between us, I am pretty sure thatwe never met to reduce or to liquidate our differences. IfI knew his Christian name, it certainly never tripped offmy tongue, even behind his back. I think, .in retrospect;that my generation was at fault in not even trying to cultivate our remote senior; but he missed a golden opportunity by keeping himself aloof from the post-war recruits


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RYLEinto the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy. Philosophy got m o v ~ing at Oxford without his participation.2). John Austin and I had a good deal to do with oneanother in administrative matters, especially after he b e ~came my brother-professor. There were many routine c o n ~tingencies and one or two rows in which we were allies.On the other hand I did not see or hear very much of himas a philosopher. He was not a member of the "WeeTeas"; and we who were senior to him were wisely madeineligible for his "Saturday Mornings." By cultivatinghearsay I did get to know something of what had passedin these Saturday discussions, but until Urmson and W a r ~nock published his ideas after his tragically early death,I did not realize their range and depth. Many of themwere completely new to me. Naturally I heard his formaland informal contributions to our Philosophical Society;but not his contributions to the undergraduates' JowettSociety, since I had for a long time kept away from itsmeetings in the belief that it was being suffocated byover-patronage from dons and graduates. A paper of mineentitled "Ordinary Language," which came out in thePhilosophical Review in 1953, touches, I now think, onlyperipherally on the features of language in which Austinhad been chiefly interested, though at the time I wasalmost unaware of this.In any case I doubt if there would have been very muchoverlap between his thoughts and mine-or much conflicteither. My chief, though not sole, interest in linguisticmatters focussed on such dictions as were, (or else bycontrast were not) in breach of "logical syntax"; and ofthe outcasts it focussed especially on the trouble-makersand the paradox-generators. For these enquiries writtenor printed specimens are more convenient than thosewhich are vocally uttered, very much as the anatomist offallacies prefers, if possible, to have his specimens onpaper or on the blackboard.Austin's main interests, however, were in the diction'swhich constitute communications between persons, with


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A Collection of Critical Essays 1;spoken communications having preference over evenepistolary communications. It is almost true to say thathe was out to classify and describe all the kinds of oursayings other than that one kind of saying that logicianscare about, namely delivering a premiss or a conclusion.What the blackboard is for is not what the voice is for.A:it examiner might pose two questions:-

! ) Why cannot a traveller reach London gradually?2) Why is "I warn you . ." the beginning of a warning, but "I insult you . ." not the beginning of aninsult? On six days out of seven Question 1 would be Ryle's fa.vourite; Question 2, Austin's. Each of us would think-wrongly-that there is not much real meat in the onfavoured question. But their meats are of such entirelydisparate kinds that the epithet ((linguistic" would applyin totally different ways 1) to the answer-sketch ((Adverbslike 'gradually' won't go with verbs like 'reach' for thefollowing reason ; 2) to the answer-sketch "To insult is to say to someone else pejorative things withsuch and such an intention, while to warn is to say Anti-nonsense rules govern impartially sayings of alltypes. '(Reach gradually'' will not do in questions, commands, counsels, requests, warnings, cQmplaints, promises, insults, or apologies, any more than it will do instatements. Epimenides can tease us in any grammaticalmood. To an enquiry into categorial requirements, references to differences of saying-type are irrelevant; to anenquiry into differences between saying-types, referencesto category-requirements are irrelevant. Infelicities andabsurdities are not even congeners.


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lNTELLIGENT BEHAVIOURA Critical Review of The Concept of MindJ L. AUSTIN

Even to the undergraduate, plain thinking and plain liv-ing as the work of the past fifty years has made him, Professor Ryle's 1first book, long awaited, will seem one thathe cannot afford not to possess and that he can afford topossess. This is a very considerable achievement on thepart of both author and publisher. Not only is the bookstimulating, ~ n j o y a b l e and original, but a quite unusuallyhigh percentage of it is true, the remainder at least false.In short, it stands head and shoulders above its contemporaries; it will deservedly enjoy a success, and even avogue. Because this is so certain, and after emphasizingthat it is to be welcomed most warmly as a voice whichspeaks, where too many are mute, for the genuine workbeing done at present in philosophy, the risk may betaken of referring freely to points of criticism.Professor Ryle is at pains to put his points not merelyhonestly but fairly. But he is by nature a philosophe ter-rible, and has chosen therefore to cast his work in theform almost of a manifesto. His interest lies in the wordswe use when we speak-or think we do-of the qualities,faculties and performances of men's minds, and in thepersistent misunderstanding of such words by theorists:but he develops his theme as a sustained series of skir-mishes against what he calls, "with deliberate abusiveness," the official philosopher's myth of "the ghost in themachine."This myth he describes in the form given to it by Descartes. Every man has both a body (the machine), whichThe Times Literary Supplement, April 7, 1950. Reprinted withpermission of Mrs. J. L. Austin and the Editor of the T1mes LiterarySupplement.


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RYLEis in space, is rigidly governed by physical laws, and leadsa public career of movement; and also a mind (theghost), which is not in space, is not governed by physicallaws, and leads a private career of thinking, sensing, willing, feeling and so on, activities of which the self alone isaware through introspection. Both bodies and minds"exist"; but how they interact is a mystery-especially forCartesians, who hold the ghost itself to be rigidly gov emed by para-mechanical laws of its own.According to Professor Ryle, this myth is "not merelyan assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake,and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a categorymistake. It represents the facts of mental life as if theybelonged to one .logical type or category when actually they belong to another.'' He proceeds to deal in suc:-cessive chapters with Intelligence, Will, Emotion, SelfKnowledge, Sensation, Imagination and Intellect. In themiddle (for no very apparent reason) is a chapter inwhich he expounds some of his principal techniques, moreparticularly the logic of "dispositional" words and of"achievement" words; and a concluding chapter discussesthe roles, actual, possible and impossible, of psychology.Disarmingly, Professor Ryle admits at the start that hewm "probably be taken to be denying well-known factsabout the mental life of human beings," and unfortunately few readers will escape an uneasy feeling that thisis at times the case. In spite of the conviction carried bymany of the acute and illuminating discussions in thebody of the book, it is impossible not to feel that he ismisguided, as a strategist, both in his choice of objectiveand in his appreciation of his own forces. What he hasproduced is a quiverful of miscellaneous and original arguments, all either sound oi: not without substance, tendingto show that many "mental" words do not describe the4'mind" and its "activities" in the simple way in whichthey are commonly thought to do: but the idea that thesearguments add up to a single logical method and tend to


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A Collection of Critical Essays 47a single clear-cut conclusion looks like an afterthoughtand seems an illusion.

To take first the objective. There can be no doubt that,though Professor Ryle does genuinely attack the myth asa whole, his fire is directed priinarily against the "ghost."He is, of course, entirely convinced that the body is not a"machine," and argues forcibly to that effect, especially inhis chapter on the Will. Yet the very term "ghost" is inone way more deliberately abusive than "machine"; for aghost does not really exist at all. Professor Ryle holds thatwe should contrast not mind with body but intelligentbehaviour with unintelligent behaviour: behaviour isintelligent when executed 44in certain frames of mind"or "from certain dispositions," by which phrases weintroduce a reference, not to entities and episodes d i f f e r ~ent in kind from behaviour, but to past and future andpossible behaviour in addition to actual present b e h a v ~iour. But behaviour by what? Officially, Professor Rylewould answer: By the man (not merely by his body). Yethe seems to take .it that all behaviour ~ y the man" mustbe bodily behaviour (as indeed the term "behaviour'' itself implies). Thus he expresses again and again, but e s ~pecially in the last chapter, views sympathetic to Behaviourism, in spite of his disapproval of its 4'mechanistic"bias; and he would apparently like, though he does notquite dare, to endorse the James-Lange theory of feelingsand the view that thinking is just sub-audible utterance(in a certain frame of mind, of course). Undoubtedly hedoes persuade himself that what he has to show is that"occult" episodes 1'in the mind," which are 4'private" toone person, simpiy do not occur at all-not merely thatthey are never mysterious causes, themselves mysteriouslycaused, of our physical movements, nor merely that theirnumbers and vapeties have been exaggerated.Those who, like Professor Ryle, revolt against a dichotomy to which they have been 01ice addicted, commonlygo over to maintain that only one of the alleged pair ofopposites really exists at all. And so he, though he does


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RYLEnot believe the body is a machine, does believe that italone, and not the "ghost," exists: he preaches with thefervour of a proselyte a doctrine of "one world." Yet whathas ever been gained by this favourite philosophical pastime of counting worlds? And why does the answer alwaystum out to be one or two, or some similar small, weiirounded, philosophically acceptable number? Why, ifthere are nineteen of any thing, is it not philosophy?Then, for Professor Ryle's methods. He claims to expose the myth as "one big category-mistake." Yet whathe says in explanation of this term will hardly suffice toshow that there is here a single clear type of mistake atall. If there is, it is something so very general as misunderstanding the ways in which words are intended to be, andnormally are, used, and so wrongly iiiferring that they canbe made to behave like other, very different, words, andthat what they "stand for'' (dangerous phrase) is "like"what those other words stand for. :Sut this, broad as it is,is not the only basis of Descartes' myth; nor is it a mis-take peculiar to him-it lies behind other, quite different,theories of the mind also. Nor, surely, is it a mistakewhich is in any clear or special sense "logical.'' WhereProfessor Ryle says that something has been wronglytaken to belong to a certain "logical" category or to be ofa certain logical type, it is not easy, to see why "logical''might not be omitted without loss. It may be time thatwe stopped talkiJ:ig of "logical" grammar and "logical" syn-tax, when all we mean is grammar and syntax, or perhapseven nothing in sufficient particular. For the author,"logic" still has a mystique, which leads him, for example,regularly to express a preference, in clinching his arguments, for some rather unconvincing appeal to an "infinite regress," rather than for his own convincing elucidafions of the correct meanings and usages of words, aboutwhich he is inclined, in his preface, to be unnecessan1yapologetic.The fact is that Professor Ryle does not confine himselfto any single technique or method.of argument, nor is the


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A Collection of Critical Essays 49book one whit the worse for that. He has a number ofregular, and most effective, stand-bys. He shows repeatedly that we are inclined to suppose that words whichstand for dispositions stand for episodes, which then,since they are clearly not episodes of the ordinary observable kind, are taken to be "occult" episodes "in the mind";or again, he shows that we often wrongly take wordswhich describe "achievements," like winning or curing,to describe the exercise of mysteriously infallible faculties;or again, he shows that we mistake for categorical descriptions of unobservable facts statements which really, inspite of their grammatical form, are hypothetical or atinost "mongrel-categorical." But elsewhere he as commonly invokes doctrines which are quite peculiar to theparticular topic concerned. To "debunk" self-knowledgehe calls on the theories of "index-words" and "secondorder processes"; sensation he shows to be simply quitedifferent from observation; imagining and willing are saidjust not to occur, and so on.

These two errors in strategy-the belief that he has toshow that only one world exists, that of bodily behaviour,actual cum hypothetical, and the belief that he has readyto his hand a single Excalibur, clothed in the name ofLogic-combine to produce in Professor Ryle whatamounts to a genuine, if surely temporary, delusion. Heseems successfully to conceal from himself, at essentialmoments, both the actual occurrence of numbers of ex-periences which, it seems obvious, do occur and which hehimself, when not immediately concerned to eliminatethem, does admit to occur; and, further, that many of hisarguments, among them some which are thoroughly-sound and important, are from the point 9f view of eliminating the "ghost" quite beside the mark.To take some examples. Imagination is commonly supposed to be or to include the "seeing" of "mental pictures.'' Professor Ryle argues that there is no such thing;

he explains imagining as being, roughly, like pretending.Yet though, no doubt, the extent to which people do


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;o RYLEgenuinely "see images" is often grossly exaggerated, surelythey do sometimes see images. To take an obvious e x ~ample, they do see after-images. The author seems to ar-gue that because a man seeing Helvellyn in his mind's eyedoes not see Helvellyn but only "sees" it, therefore he"sees" nothing; but he may "see" something.* To "see"may be a metaphor; but not all metaphors should be a s ~sumed to be misleading. And even in the same chapter,when Professor Ryle discusses memory, he speaks of "vis-ual imagery" as something which obviously occurs. Again,in dealing with sensation, he rightly points out that thisis constantly confused with observation, which is quitedifferent, including a's it does the watching, recognizing,naming, &c., of what we sense. Yet however true this is,how could it tend to disprove that the experience of sen-sation ("glimpsing" or what not) does actually occur, orthat it is not a "private" or "occult" experience? Similarly,in the chapter on Intellect, although the distinctiondrawn at some length between a mitn's performance inexpounding a theory and his performance in inventing it("pondering") is a useful one, and although it may wellbe true that the attention of philosophers has been tooexclusively directed to the former, to which their terminology is alone appropriate, how can this justify an omis-sion to notice that "ponderings" are in fact "internal e p i ~sodes"? "Ponderings," like "feelings," once firmly distinguished from what they are not, are thenceforward left inthe air, where they are surely not more happily locatedthan "in the mind."Professor Ryle is admiraply sensitive to the nuances of*This sentence is printed as in the original but it looks as though

it should read:The author seems to argue that because a man seeing Helvellynin his mind's eye does not see Helvellyn but only "sees" it, therefore he sees nothing; but he may see something.In this and the next sentence quotation marks would then alwaysindicate a metaphorical use of the word "see!' whereas in the preceding sentences they are used to draw attention to a particular phrasewithout implying a special sense. [Eds.}


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A Collection of Critical Essayswords: a good example is his thorough and expert analysisof the various m.eanings of the word "can." He is, however, capable of abusing his own favourites, such as theword "disposition" itself, and even of an occasional sur-prising looseness of expression in the formulation of critical points in his own doctrine.Such looseness, however, is only the defect of the verygreat virtues of Professor Ryle's chosen manner of writing,which is racy, untechnical and idiosyncratic, and whichwill make his book readable and intelligible to many outside the fold of philosophy who will benefit from it. Closepacked though the thought is, it is so. firmly expressedthat it can be followed with the greatest of ease. Thesimple syntax is enlivened by a refreshingly wide choiceof words, especially of polysyllables, often surprisinglyand tellingly apt, only rarely archaic or pedantic. Theabundant examples are both striking and helpful, andPrpfessor Ryle's wholehearted faith in the deliverances ofhis own personal experience, which prompts him to as-sure us now that beggar-my-neighbour is a more intellectual game than snap, now that men are relatively easyto understand, cannot but endear him to his readers. All,too, save those who have never learned to suspect solemnity, will join in his enjoyment of his numerous jokes, forthe most part shrewd and spontaneous, only occasionallystraying ..over the borderline into facetiousness. The jokesof a clown, says the professor, are the workings of hismind; and certainly his own wisecracks and epigrams(though far from clowning) go to bear out his theory inhis own case. Le style, c' est Ryle.


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RYLE AND THINKINGF. N. SIBLEY

I'This article is concerned mainly with views about thinking put forward by Ryle in a series of papers1 publishedsince the discussion in Chapter IX of The Concept ofMind. He regularly distinguishes thinking, where this refers to "such activities as pondering, musing and calculating," from thinking "that something is the case" (TL6;), and in most of these papers he deals with the formernotion. I shall concentrate on this too.Ryle does not always draw the boundaries of thinkingin the same way. :ae always includes (1) activities, eithertheoretical or practical, like excogitating, multiplying, try-ing to solve problems and translating, that end in asolution, conclusion, or result; he usually includes (2)activities, like following an argument or going over something in one's head, where no solving is attempted; andhe sometimes includes ( 3) daydreams and undirectedreverie ("A man in a daydream is thinking," T 19;).Sometimes, within one article, he shifts back and forthbetween broader and narrower senses. Such shifts accordwith our ordinary uses of "thoughts" and "thinking." I

1 "Thinking and Language.'' Proceedings of the Aristotelian So-ciety, Supplemental}' Volume 25, 1951, pp. 65-S.:z.." T h i n k i n ~ " Acta Psychologica, Volume 9, 1953, pp. 189-96."A Puzzlmg Element in the Notion of Thinking," Proceedings ofthe British ACademy, Volume 44, 1958, pp. 129-44"Thinking and Reflecting" in The Human Agent, Royal Instituteof Philos!>phy Lectures, Volume I, 1966-67."The Thinking .of Though.ts," University of Saskatchewan Uni~ Lectures, No. 18, 1968.I abbreviate these respectively to TL, T, PE, TR, and TT, andThe Concept of Mind, 1949, to CM.


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RYLEshall follow the main gist of Ryle's discussions by confining my attention to ea tegories (1) and (2) .Ryle's primary question throughout is what thinkingis, what constitutes it, what it essentially consists in,though not all he says is directly relevant to this. His mainnegative task is to reject accounts which find thinking toconsist in any single ingredient or unitary activity. Indifferent papers this negative aim takes various shapes.In some the stress is on arguing that thinking comprisesa collection of activities with no common strand of importance. In the latest papers (TR and TT), however,he argues that thinJ


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A Collection of Critical Essays 77doing'-trying to constmct a philosophical theory, solvea chess problem, recollect a telephone number, composean after-dinner speech, translate a poem, or run throughthe Kings of England-refute "our vain presumption"that thinking is "one uniform and nominatable X-ing"(TR 219). The account offered in some of these passages seems clearly to be a "multiple-activity" or "family"account (though he also says (TR 219), where he is developing the different ("adverbial") line of thought, thathe is not going "to resort to the now over-hallowed'family likeness' device so long before reaching, what itis for, the last resort") .The second distinguishable explanation Ryle gives forrejecting a single-activity account of thinking is thatthinking is "polymoxphous." This second explanation isnot explicitly distinguished from the multiple-activity ex-planation; indeed they are usually given side by side asif parts of one account. But they should be distinguished;for while both claim that thinking involves not one, butany of a diverse range of activities, the examples of thesediverse activities must be different ones. The two accounts must operate on different levels with differentexamples. ..I intexpret the polymoxphous view as different from themultiple-activity view (whether or not Ryle intended adistinction) for this reason: according to the polymorphous view, the activities a thinker may perform are notonly heterogeneous, but are also activities that might beperformed without the performer thinking. In introducing the notion, Ryle says, for i n s t a n c e ~ "There need beno action, inner or overt, performed by the policeman onhis beat, which he may not also perform when strollinground the same streets when his work is over" (TL 68and similarly elsewhere). But if so, the examples Rylegave earlier, calculating, composing poems, trying to solvechess problems and so on, to iUqstrate the heterogeneityof thinking activities, cannot also be examples of. theheterogeneous X-ings that make thinking polymor-


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RYLEphous. For calculating or trying to compose a poem are,ipso facto, instances of thinking. Ryle, however, does notalways make this plain; immediately after explaining thatthinking is polymorphous (TL 68-6


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A.Collection of Critical Essays 79or the adverbial account would have failed. "The notionsof being pensive and having thoughts do not explain, butneed to be explained via the notion of intelligently X-ing,where 'X' is not a yerb of thinking' (TR .216-17, myitalics). The mentality of activities resides in the a d v e r ~bial element, not in the activity, or X-ing, itself. I shallcomment briefly on this programme.First, within this theory, mental adverbs, like "carefully," "attentively" and "purposefully," will not qualifythe verbs they most commonly qualify. Ordinarily we a p ~ply them to verbs like "pondering," "counting," "planning," "calculating," etc., and these are verbs of thinking.Pondering, etc. are already necessarily impregnated withsome degree of some of Ryle's thought-adverbs. Theycan be done with greater or less care, attention, etc., butnot with a zero degree, mindlessly-or, as Ryle himselfputs it, "absentmindedly or deliriously." 'Whatever countsas a proper specimen of thinking (excluding category(3)) is of this kind. But the X-ings Ryle needs must notbe. Nor, it must be noted also, may Ryle's X-ings bepositively non-mental either. I t would be easy, but mistaken, to suppose that, with the tennis-player for instance, Ryle has dissolved the player's thinking into a setof adverbs qualifying various purely physical doings ormovements. Any exclusively non-mental X-ing would, bythat token, be incapable of qualification by mental adverbs; Ryle's adverbs cannot qualify physical processes likesweating or twitching. (Equally, they cannot even qualifythose mental oc.currences, like daydreaming, that constitute category (3) of my tripartite division of thinking.)So Ryle's X-ings must be neutral vis-a-vis thought. Theymust be qualifiable either as careful, careless, attentive,etc., or as mindless, absent-minded, involuntary, etc. Indeed, they are the same X-ings that the polymorphousaccount required.On the whole, in the later articles, Ryle provides theright sort of examples. With the tennis player, he givesX-ings like moving his feet, making eye and arm move-


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8o RYLEments, and swinging his racquet. With other activities,including those of the Penseur, he mentions such inwarddoings as picturing numbers, saying words to oneself andmanipulating imaginary chessmen, together with suchovert X-ings as writing numbers on paper, uttering wordsaloud and manipulating real chessmen. All these can bequalified both by thought-adverbs and also by adverbs,like "absently," "randomly" and "without attention," that.exclude thought. ,Ryle, then, seems to deny, earlier on, an essentialactivity, by opposing to it both a multiple-activity accountand the polymorphous account; and to deny, later, anyactivity; by opposing to it an adverbial account. But thethree accounts are not incompatible, even if Ryle's presentation and examples occasionally obscure the fact.Proper specimens of thinking, like anagram-solving andcomposing sonatas, might have no common ingredient;each might also involve different neutral X-ings, likemanipulating letters and striking piano keys; and thinkingmight be not an activity additional to these X-ings, butthe manner of X-ing.

nThe three accounts that occur in Ryle's papers onthinking are compatible. But are they true? Or, at least,has he any cogent arguments for them? His denial of anessential activity proceeds, I have indicated, first by proposing that the proper specimens of thinking comprise afamily, more recently, and for him more importantly, byproposing the adverbial theory. I want to ask, first,whether he offers any cogent arguments, aside from theadverbial account, against an essential ingredient view;

s e c o n d l y ~ whether any of his arguments establish the adverbial account.The answer to the first question, I think, is that inthe papers prior to TR, where the adverbial view isdeveloped, Ryle gives no argument at all to refute the


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A Collection of Critical Essays 81essential activity view, though he certainly claims to berejecting it. The arguments he does use are not relevantto this question. Those, especially in PE and TR. towhich he devotes much space (and which I discuss in IIIlJelow), attacking the view that thinking requires imagesor words as a necessary "vehicle" do not bear on i n g r e d i ~ent activities at all. Those about polymorphousness areabout activities. But since the X-ings relevant here mustbe neutral as between mental and n o n ~ m e n t a l , no e s s e n ~tial ingredient of thinking could come to light in theinvestigation of them. So their obvious heterogeneity,which may seem to prove his point, is irrelevant, and doesnot establish the absence of a common feature at theother level, among proper specimens of thinking. It mayseem likely that there is also no important commongredient among these very varied proper specimen a c t i v i ~ties too; but nothing has shown this. Simply citing thevarieties of thinking, like citing varieties of games, doesnot yet establish. the point. Ryle himself regards the"family resemblance" device as a last resort; and in thearticles before TR he has hardly attempted to reach this.It may be that the adverbial argument, when it appearsin TR, will establish what he has Claimed throughout.But even before looking at that, it could do no harm,even if it did no good, to look for a common ingredient inall thinking. It is not clear that we must fail to find one,any more than it is clear that we can succeed. Unless theadverbial, or some other argument against the very p o ~sibility is successful, the only course is to look and see.This Ryle does not attempt.I shall just mention one possibility (there may beothers) that prima facie might be worth examining. Itseems indisputable that, with the Penseur, the t e m i i ~player and any other kind of thinking, some more thanzero degree of attention is necessarily involved. TheComposer must attend to the notes he plays or imagines,....e man trying to recall a telephone number to the n u m ~bers that pass through , his head, and the architect or


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RYLEmathematician to the bricks or numbers that he movesabout on his actual ot mental table or sheet of paper. I fnot, they are thoughtlessly doodling. But if attending isnecessary to make activities involving it cases of thinking,is it also sufficient?There seems one obvious objection to saying so. Theman doodling may be attending to the random and p u r ~poseless way his hand traces marks on paper, in theminimal sense that he may see and be able to_ reportlater how his hand moved: that he began with swirlinglines on the left and ended with squares on the right. Hewas not unaware of what he was doing, but he was notthinking either. Again, a man listening, even attentively,to a lecturer's words need not be thinking. He mightregister perfectly the lecturer's words, without taking in,thinking about; accepting, or rejecting his argument. Onemight therefore suggest, as a not unplausible sufficientcondition of thinking, that one must be attending to orwatching for considerations of a certain kind, namely,those of relevance or appropriateness. There is no o b j e ~tion, in defining an activity, to specifying the kind ofobject the defining verb requires, just as 4'bibbing" has tobe defined as excessive drinking, not just of water, butof alcohol.Relevance and appropriateness, of course, are them-selves broad notions, open to various i n t e x p r e ~ t i o n s . Justas the objects or activities attended to are heterogeneous,so will be the kinds of relevance and appropriateness also.If I try to run through the list of Kings, or assess the listsomeone else produces, I shall expect . and accept onlynames of kings, and I shall reject Pitt or Lloyd Georgei f they come to mind or are mentioned. I f I am composinga sonata, I may reject note sequences that do not d ~velop the first subject, and so on. But whether this is anobjection would itself need discussion.Obviously, I am not seriously arguing for this sugges-tion about attention to relevance here. My point is thatRyle asserts his view without looking for, or arguing


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A Collection of Critical Essays, ~ g a i n s t , any prima facie candidates. So, unless he has otherarguments that are telling, his claim, even if true, has notbeen made out. But another reason for not pursuing thesuggestion here is that, even if it were correct, it is unclear whether it would refute Ryle's claims. For while hesometimes argues only against an essential ingredient inall thinking, he is usually arguing against an essentialingredient activity. So even if attending to relevance wereessential, he might deny that it is an activity. He wouldpresumably dissolve it, by the adverbial account, into anadverbial parasite upon non-mental X-ings. I leave thesequestions unresolved, therefore, and turn to the argument about adverbial verbs.The adverbial account, if true, would exclude any essential activity; the only activities involved in thinkingwould be neutral X-ings. My inquiry again is less intowhether the account is wrong, than into ~ t h e r (as someseem to assume) Ryle has established it. I f not, it remainsat best sub judice.Ryle links his distinction between uactivity" and "adverbial" verbs with a distinction between (


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RYLEsay, if told that someone is thinking, that we are toldwhat he is doing, though not very specifically, and notmerely that he is doing whatever he is doing in somemanner or other. Again, we might say that the command"think," like the command "eat," is obeyable, thoughpretty unspecific, and that if I then think about myincome tax or a philosophical problem, I am obeying thecommand. Nothing in these examples shows that t h i n k ~ing is less an a_ctivity, more adverbial, or less autonomous,than running or eating; indeed prima facie they suggestthe opposite.Next, Ryle stropgly suggests that the only true orgenuine activities are autonomous ones. This sounds likea statement about ''what there is." Indeed, he impliesthat autonomous, non-adverbial verbs are "verbs forseparately do-able, lowest-level doings" (TT 11). Takenontologically, so to speak, this suggests a category ofgenuine or basic activities which could occur on their own(and to which adverbial notions are applied), the onlyreal goings-on of the world. But in the ontological senseof "autonomous" suggested here, it turns out that Ryle'sX-ings are largely not autonomous, and that his Y-ings(like thinking) are. Ta,ke his example (TT 5) of theswift contraction of the right eyelid, which may be atwitch or a conspiratorial wink, or the shuffiing of brickson a table, which may be a scarcely noticed sort of doodling or a piece. of architect's planning. For Ryle, theX-ings or autonomous doings in the two cases are,spectively, contracting the eyelid and moving bricksabout. And, as I argued earlier, these X-ings must beneutral; they must no more be twitching or doodling(which are necessarily involuntary or purposeless) thanthey can be winking cir planning (which are necessarilynot). But that being so, the eyelid-contracting and the

b r i c k ~ m o v i n g seem not to be examples of activities thatcould occur alone. For it seems reasonable to argue thatthe eyelid contraction is either involuntary, in which casewhat occurred was a twitch, or not involuntary, in which


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A Collection of Critical Essayscase what occurred was a wink, or a practice wink, or anyof a number of other things. What can occur on its ownis one or other of these things, not a contraction which isneither involuntary nor not involuntary, but neutral; anymore than the man in the next room can be neither whitenor non-white. In this sense, neutral X-ings are not autonomous activities. What may be neutral is not theoccurrence, but the description of the occurrence. Whatwe have is, indeed, what Ryle also comes to call it, a"thin description." And to give something "the thinnestpossible description" (TT 8) is not to find a simplest orbasic or "separately do-able" doing. Real activities thatoccur occur with their adverbial features, whether we describe them fully or not. Anything may be more or lessthinly described, but this does not entail that somethingcorresponding merely to the thin description can occurseparately, autonomously and on its own.I have indicated that certain interpretations of autonomousness suggested by things Ryle says are unsatisfactory. So presumably the relevant sense involves takingactivities in pairs: "Y-ing is not autonomous" means, forRyle, that a man cannot engage in Y-ing (thinking) without doing something describable as "X-ing," whereas hecan do something describable as "X-ing" without Y-ing(thinking); in which case, that element of the latter activity which "X-ing" describes is autonomous with respect to Y-ing.

However; if this is what is meant by saying that thinking is not an autonomous activity, it will not, even iftrue, make the case Ryle wants. The argument againstthinking being an activity (and, a fortiori, the argumentfor it being adverbial) must establish more than that itis non-autonomous. Ryle must establish that thinking isnot, or does not also include, some activity additional toX-ing which is nevertheless non-autonomous in the sensethat it requires X-ing and ceases if X-ing ceases. Thereare plenty of at least prima facie activities that are nona,utonomous in this sense, those for instance that require


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86 RYLEanother activity as. their object or result. Refereeing, timing, controlling, trundling, propelling, listening to andwatching would all seem, unless Ryle can show otherwise,to be activities requiring other activities as, in a broadsense, their objects, and Consequently not related to thelatter adverbially as hunying is to running. So althoughRyle's denial that thinking involves any activity besidesneutral X-ing may be correct, it needs support by othermeans. I postpone considering what other facts or assumptions Ryle' relies on. Instead, I mention first a possible difficulty for the adverbial view and some considerations that seem to favour an activity view.The difficulty is this. For thinking, attending, etc., tobe analysable adverbially, there must, on Ryle's ownterms, be an autonomous and neutral X-ing that thethinker is doing and that the adverbs qualify. Ryle concentrates on examples like the tennis-player and thePenseur, men thinking what they themselves are doing.He scarcely discusses, in terms of this theory, the thoughtfui listener at the philosophy lecture or the mathematicaldemonstration. The latter is certainly thinking, followingthe speaker's argument, monitoring, trying to accept orreject it as it occurs. But there seems to be no neutralX-ing that he need be doing at all, and hence none to beadverbially qualified. The X-ing, or at least the relevantX-ing, the one he checks, rejects, accepts, etc., is notsomething he is doing. He is not necessarily manipulatingimages himself, nor need he be repeating the argumentunder his breath. At least, Ryle would presumably notwant to say so, any more than he says that the man talking aloud or planning with real bricks need be silentlyimagining words or picturing bricks as well. The man atthe lecture is just listening; though if he is listeningthoughtfully, he will be considering the speaker's X-ings,the speaker's manipUlations of spoken words or figures,and perhaps silently approving some and rejecting others.So what is the neutral X-ing that he is doing? Not thesilent approving or rejecting, s i n ~ e these are neither ao-


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A CoUection of Critical Essays 87tivities nor neutral. Not nodding or shaking his bead,since, like the Penseur, he may do nothing overt. Perhaps,it might be suggested, what he is doing attentively islistening to the argument. But this will not do. I f "listening" is inte:rpreted neutrally, as a verb of perception, notof thinking, then "listening attentively" may mean thathe misses nothing said, can repeat the argument verbatimafterwards, but need not have thought about, or followedthe steps of it at all. With a good auditory memory hecould repeat a short argument delivered in a language hedoes not even understand. He was listening attentively,but not thinking or following. I f we attempt a strongerinte:rpretation, "listening" becomes what it must not become, a verb of thinking, e.g., listening for implicationsand non-sequiturs.There seems to be no third way, viz., listening in theneutral, auditory sense, with the mental elementpacked into a lengthy and hyphenated adverbial phrase,e.g., "attentively-to-actual-or-possible-irrelevances, nonsequiturs, etc.," since in this perceptual sense of "listening" you cannot be attentive to these things. Nonsequiturs have no characteristic sound, as sopranos orglockenspiels do. To speak of "listening thinkingly," inRyle's manner, does not show that thinking is adverbial,but rather that we can provide an alternative and ratherunnatural adverbial locution.In short, it might seem an artificial move, adopted onlyto save the theory, to suppose that, besides listening toand following the argument, there is any neutral X-ingthat the listener must be doing. In which case, there isnothing to be qualified adverbially. Listening for is ofnecessity pu:rposeful; but it may not involve X-ing purposefully. Indeed, precisely what it may require is noX-ing, but various non-doings, not stamping, not shouting, etc. So even if this difficulty occurs only in th(:"spectator" cases, Ryle's adverbial account, taken at allliterally, presumably fails, since it was intended at the outset to apply to the widest range of cases of thinking. A


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88 RYLEtheory concerned with the manner of performing nonX-ings, which allowed us to do nothing in particular butdo it very well, would be Gilbertian as well as Rylean,and the vanishing point of the adverbial theory.2Perhaps these difficulties are either not genuine or notinsuperable. Probably, the label "adverbial" must betaken, as Ryle said in introducing it, metaphorically andnot very seriously (though he repeatedly says (TR 213and elsewhere}_ that "there must be an X-ing"). But thenit becomes unhelpful, if not misleading, and the literalinterpretation of the doctrine becomes shadowy: perhapssimply that, whether X-ing occurs or not, thinking is notan additional activity. But we have still been offered noproof of this.I shall mention therefore some considerations thatseem to favour the view that thinking does involve something, perhaps activities, additional to the X-ings, and notmerely the manner of those X-ings (though I do notregard thern as more conclusive on this side than I regardRyle's on the other).These points can be made, in different ways, abouteither the listener or the active thinker. For brevity Iconsider mainly the latter. He has to try to call up, provide for himself, names, hypotheses, possible objections,etc., not merely, like the listener, to try to assess thosepresented to him. He does not try to call up anything atrandom, and then set to to assess its relevance. He triesto o r i g ~ n a t e a controlled production of what is relevantor helpful. So his successes will in part show in whatimages, sentences, etc. he produces and in what sequence,and in their not being ones he has to dismiss out of hand.

2 Ryle even offers a similar case himself: waiting for a train involves "no X-ing in rarticular that I must positively be doing" (TR2 3 3) Here again, ' adverbial" seems, on any strict interpretation,a misnomer; though, as an account of waiting, "abstaining fromdoings that conflict with the objective" may be correct. But herethe absence of any activity does not sound strange, since few wouldsuppose waiting, unlike thinking, to involve activity anyway.


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A Collection of Critical Essays 89Even so, having produced possible solutions, he may stillhave to ponder and assess them much as if anotherthinker had produced them, and sometimes he may beunable to decide on their acceptability or relevance. Sohis job overlaps with the listener's.The first point is that the verbs used here all have thefeatures by which, in CM, Ryle marked out activities ortasks. I may try for some time, or with intermissions, tothink up suitable gestures, words, or hypotheses. I maytry carefully or hard, or find it easy; there may be a successful outcome, or an unsuccessful outcome i f I have toreject my productions as incorrect or irrelevant, or nooutcome if I just keep trying till I give up. And so withpondering, considering, controlling, directing, vetting,monitoring and assessing the items of which my X-ingsconsist.Secondly, these apparent candidates for. activity statusare used to indicate something responsible for, andexplanatory. of our X-ings, at least when we are successful. One may, indeed, try hard without anything releva.ntooming to mind. So the X-ings of the. unsuccessfulthinker may sometimes be indistinguishable from thoseof the man who is not trying to think. But when they arerelevant, .we explain the sequences of items that occur,the manner of their occurrence, and our acceptance, rejection, or reordering of them by reference to these try-ings, efforts, and "activities." We say that, had we notbeen thinking, those items would not have come to mindiQ. that way just then.In short, the occurrence, and manner of occurrence,of my relevant and sequential X-ings seem to be the outcome of my trying, controlling and guiding; and thecontinuance or dismissal of my X-ings is the result of myassessings of what I call up. I t therefore sounds decidedlyodd to try to equate or identify these tryings and controllings, which are responsible for and explanatory of themanner of X-ing in certain circumstances, with the manner of X-ing in those circumstances. It does not follow,


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92 RYLECertainly, from the fact that a man X ~ e s in an adverbiallycorrect way, in the manner-cum-circumstance sense, itneed not follow that he is thinking; it could sometimes(though doubtless only sometimes) be coincidence. Thislack of identity between thinking and X-ing adverbially inthis sense is most notable when the thinking is stumblingor unsuccessful. The man who produces the wrong wordsat the wrong time because, though thinking hard, he isthinking unsuccessfully, may, in this sense, X in a mannerindistinguishable from that of the man who is not reallythinking at all. Indeed, the only X-ing a man who is tryingto think hard, but for the moment stuck, does may be ofthe marking-time kind, repeating the question over andover like the man who, in identical circumstances, is nottrying to think.In any event, if, as seems likely, Ryle's thought-adverbsare not to be reducible in the end to the content, time,place and de facto relevance of X-ings, such X-ings beingsequences of thought simply in virtue of these c h a r a c t e r ~istics, itwould seem that what the thought-adverbs add tothe fact that ~ i n g is going Qn in this manneF is an e x p l a ~nation of this manner of X-ing in those circumstances.But if a man X ~ s as he does because he is, and as the u t ~come of being, on the qui vive, it is not yet obvious whythis explanation of the manner and aptness of his X ~ i n g isto be preferred to saying that he is thinking, actively c o n ~trolling and directing his X-ing. I f Ryle's adverbs,"thinkingly," etc., serve the same function, to explain _thewhat, how and when of X-ing, as the verbs "to think,"etc., he is operating with explanatory adverbs where wecommonly use verbs. But this raises the question whetherthere is anything positive and substantial in the adverbialview, or whether there is just a switch of labels and l o c u ~tions. Certainly Ryle's opposition to thinking as an a c t i v ~ity and his endorsement of adverbiality have a substantialand ontological ring, and seem to carry promise of different logical features. But what do they come to? Why notcall the tryings, attendings, directings, and controllings


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A Collection of Critical Essays 93that occur ia thinking "activities," rather than, as Rylecalls them (TR 219), "adverbial things"?I suspect that one main operative reason why Rylejects an activity view is that, by doing so, he rules outcertain untenable views that a popular but restrictive c o n ~cept of an activity encourages. Ryle is, apparently, c o r n ~mitted to this concept or sense himself, and so, in thatsense, is right to deny that thinking is an activity a d d i ~tional to the neutral X-ings. I shall call it the processionor process concept of an activity. The basic argument forthat element in thinking which is additional to X-ing notbeing itself an activity seems to be this. For an activity togo on between t1 and tn there must be some processionof items, some sequence of changes, describable anddatable. I f between two times there are no such datableoccurrences, no activity is going on. If thinking goes onfrom t1 to tn, this period will be occupied by a series ofepisodes, timeable at t2, ts, etc., comings and goings ofwords, changes or replacements of images, etc. These arethe X-ings. Such series of events may occur when there isno thinking, and the neutral term "X-ing" may be usedto describe them "thinly." What Ryle's view comes to, Ithink, is that when thinking goes on there are no d e ~scribable or timeable processions of items and changesbetween t 1 and tn beyond those that can be mentionedin the neutral "X-ing" description. This, as far as I cansee, is a main ground for his anti-activity view; it is a d i ~rect outcome of a certain conception of an activity.I think it reasonably clear that this is Ryle's conception.The reason he gives for a wink and a twitch involvingonly one and the same activity is that photographicallythey are alike (TT 5), and he says, of a man talking s e n s i ~bly, tha.t "a tape-recording would reproduce just what hewas doing in this thinnest sense of 'doing'" (TT 9).Roughly, if no occurrences can be recorded, no activityis going on (though, since Ryle's account is not purelyovert or "physicalist," what occurs between t1 and tn,When the Penseur thinks in silence, is a sequence of


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94 RYLEroughly describable and datable items which this time aresubvocal or imagined). Given this conception of an a c ~tivity, it follows immediately that thinking cannot be, orinclude, an additional explanatory activity; and for precisely the reasons it could not previously be identifiedwith the X-ing. Thinking cannot consist in any processionof items or changes, since any such sequence could occurin mindless reverie. Hence, by a characteristically Ryleanargument, the calling up, directing, controlling, and, inshort, the explanation of a sequence of items cannot itself be sensibly regarded as an additional sequence ofitems, tangible, introspectible or "ghostly," beyond theX-ing.Granting, however, that thinking cannot be an activityin this sense, the question remains whether this is theonly permissible sense of "activity." Is an adverbial view,in some loose sense, forced on us? I believe that there 'isno reason to employ "activity" only in this way, nor is itthe only use sanctioned by common speech. Ryle' s is aphilosopher's restriction. We use "activity" to cover manydifferent though partly similar concepts; we are n o t o r i ~ously ill-equipped with specific category words, and elsewhere .Ryle himself has invented many ("achievements,""tasks," "mongrel-categoricals"). Plenty of durationalhappenings that we might naturally call activities do notconsist in processions of events and changes. The w e i g h t ~lifter who for several seconds holds a heavy weight p e r ~fectly still above his head is not for those seconds.doingnothing, though his activity is not of the same sort aswhen raising or lowering the weight. Photographically hemay look just like the astronaut in flight who "holds" asimilar weight above his head. While the weight-lifterholds the weight, no activity, in one sense, is going on.But in another he is certainly engaged in an activity,and a strenuous and taxing one. So with a man holdingchest-expanders apart, or keeping up a steady pressure onsomething, etc. All these doings, to use Ryle's tests, maylast a while, require effort, involve care, and may be tiring.


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A Collection of Critical Essays 95They are episodes, and of the "task," not the "achievement" sort. Of course, unlike such "process activities" aslifting the weight, they cannot be done fast or slowly; sotoo with such activities (if we may call them such) aswatching, listening for irrelevances, or attending. Buteven some of Ryle's activities, like angling, to which wemight add floating, sea-bathing and diving, which do involve episodes and changes, cannot be fast or slow. I seeno reason, therefore, fram our ordinary labelling tendencies or from the adverbial tests Ryle elsewhere employs,to deny that many verbs which are not verbs for "processactivities" are verbs for activities. All that has been shownpositively, I believe, is that thinking and pondering arenot in one sense activities.Ryle's denial of an activity account of thinking doubtless has important negative value. It excludes those objectionable suppositions already exposed in CM-thattennis-playing or conversing must be interspersed with orcontrolled by bursts of silent word or image manipulating,that the Penseur's sequences of subvocal talk must becontrolled by similar but more hidden sequences. Butthese views result only from holding that thinking is anactivity in the restricted "process" sense. I f there is no reason to deny, and some to assert, that thinking is anactivity in a less restricted sense, there may be little, otherthan labels and locutions, to choose between my nonprocess activities and Ryle's adverbiality except that "activity," misinterpreted, can encourage errors, whereas adverbiality is a departure from established usage. I f Rylemeant something more substantial by his rejection of activities, I have not found a case made o u ~ . Nor have Ifound anything in these articles to recommend an "adverbial" view in any substantial sense. The label has tobe taken, Ryle admits, jn a metaphorical way. At mostthis seems to mean that the thinker is in a certain frameof mind or disposition vis-a-vis his own or others' X-ings,which still leaves a distinction to be made between kindsof dispositions. The spectator attentive to follow the lee-


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RYLEture shortly to begin and the would-be active thinkerready for the conundrum to be put to him differ respectively from the spectator actively attending during thelecture and the thinker actively on the qui vive abouthis own X-ings while solving the conundrum. The formerpair, ready to think but not yet thinking, are ready in astraight-forwardly dispositional sense. The latter pair, already actively exercising this disposition, are on the quivive in a different sense, r e s p e c t i v ~ I y , listening for errors,relevances and non-sequiturs, or trying to originate nonerrors and sequiturs. Whatever Ryle's reasons for callingtheir states of mind a.dverbial or dispositional, they arecertainly states we normally call "thinking" and for whichwe ordinarily and correctly employ the notion of activity.The logic of this category of "active dispositions" will bethat of these "activities." It is hard to dispose of suchactive notions as trying; and, despite the new set oflabels and the positive-sounding pronouncements in theselater papers on thinking, Ryle seems not to advance muchin elucidating these so-called dispositions beyond CM. Infact in the two most recent papers he has pursued thedifferent topic, how the thinking of the originating andexperimental Penseur differs from that of other sorts ofthinkers. This involves his accounts of the pyramiding ofadverbs and implications, all of which would applyequally to an "activity" or a "dispositional" labelling ofthinking. t have not attempted to discuss this question(though it is worth noticing that the adverbial differences that characterize the Penseur, like 44experimentally,''4'tentatively" and 4'suspiciously," are ones by which Rylequalifies, not neutral X-ings, but pondering, considering,examining, etc.); for this is no longer to discuss the differences between thought-concepts (like examining, trying to find out, attending and considering) and mereneutral X-ings (like uttering and muttering) in connection with which the labels "adverbial" and 4'non-autonomous" were introduced.I have not discussed, in the foregoing, the character-


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A Collection of Critical Essays 97istically valuable detail of Ryle's papers, but haveconcentrated on his more important-sounding and programmatic pronouncements, which do not always con-nect obviously with that detail. Nor have I argued for anactivity view of thinking, but rather that, since it is un-clear what.refuting such a view amounts to, it is doubtfulwhether Ryle }J.as done it. I f the cash-value of the metaphor "adverbilll" is really a dispositional account, it is notoqvious that, with those "active dispositions" that we call"thinking," these papers of Ryle's have forwarder! thediscussion.

mI turn now to a different aspect of Ryle's treatment ofthe question, "What is Thinking?" In the. earlier papersRyle sometimes interprets this as a question, not aboutwhat thinking is, but about whether thinking requires an"apparatus'' or"vehicle," i.e., words, images, or "symbols,"a question which, with certain exceptions, he either an-swerS negatively or rejects. I t could of course be true thatany "programme of identifying thinking with some procession or other is radically misguided" (TR 210, myitalics}, yet still true that some such processions werenevertheless required in thinking. I shall briefly considerRyle's arguments against such necessary "vehicles" ofthought.At least three doctrines are suggested by things Rylesays . The first is unexceptionable: the man tying knotsand the conversationalist are both thinking, but they donot require images of knots or .silent soliloquies in addition to their overt performances. Hence not all thinkingrequires processions of private items. But this leaves openwhether the thinking of the outwardly inactive Penseur

requires silent soliloquy, imagery, etc. The second doc-trine, which concerns this question, may be only therelatively weak claim that silent thinking requires no oneparticular species of items, e.g., unspoken words, or visual


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RYLEimages, but only some members of a perhaps lengthy dis-junction. This weak claim is suggested by the remark thatthinking requires no proprietary things in the way thatsinging requires noises (PE 137). But this would notestablish the third and much more extreme doctrine, thatsilent thinking can occur without any private processionsat all. Only this extreme view denies the position of thosewho have held that thinking cannot occur withoutimages, words, "symbols," or, in Price's phrase, "quasisensible particulars" of some sort, and perhaps Ryle neverintended to hold it; but when, in the earlier articles, hedenies the need of any "vehicle,'' "medium,'' or "apparatus" for thought, it often sounds as if he does, and he hascertainly been understood thus.Unfortunately, the vagueness and variety of his locutions make it impossible to say what exactly his view is,while providing some easily demolished straw men. "Nonecessary apparatus" suggests that with which an act isperformed, e.g., spades for digging. "No necessary stuff,materials" suggests that out of which thoughts are constructed, as pots are out of clay: "No necessary medium"suggests that in which something is done, as swimming isin water; and "vehicles" suggests that which carriesthought, as transportation requires a carrier. But unlessthese are merely metaphors, they are easily rejected. Wedo not need, literally, tools for thinking, materials tomake thoughts out of, a medium to think in, etc., norpresumably has any reputable recent philosopher thoughtso. So while Ryle may rightly "deny that it even makessense" (PE 134) to ask these questions, one wishes toknow whether, under these locutions, he was also rejecting the not obviously absurd view, held by many, thatwhen silent thinking occurs, there must occur some se-quences of imagined words, pictures, diagrams, gestures,or other quasi-sensible particulars in which the thoughtsare, at least in minimal degree, "embodied," "expressed,"or "clothed"; the opposite view being, in Price's words,that there is such a thing as "pure or naked thinking.''


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A Collection of Critical Essays 99I shall not presume to pronounce on whether Ryleintended this latter extreme position; certainly his ownlater ''adverbial" views seem to run counter to it. The

Penseur's X-ings precisely are such things as manipulating words, tunes, images, or diagrams in the mind's eye orear; so either Ryle was not espousing the extreme view,or else that view is in prima facie conflict with his laterviews. However, since the topic of interest is, and historically has been, the conflict between the two extremeviews, that silent thinking can, and that it cannot, occurwithout sequences of imagined or inner particulars, Ishall make some comments about it and the bearing ofRyle's other arguments on it.I shall simplify this traditional dispute by distinguishing, within cases of thinking, an "activity" and an "object." The "activities" (or, on an adverbial or dispositionalaccount, the supposed activities) include pondering, considering, tryingto solve, accept, reject, call up, etc. The"object" is what we ponder, consider, try to solve, etc.,and varies from case to case. It may be a question or problem, theoretical or practical, verbal or musical; it may bean answer, a possible solution, or a list of kings. It is, likeRyle's X-ings, whatever might be expressed overtly inwords or diagrams, or spoken sotto voce, visualized, etc.I t might be a half-written or half-imagined after-dinnerspeech which one considers, seeks to change, or decidesto accept. I t might be the question, uttered aloud orsilently, "Whether a mallet is more suitable than a hammer," or the proffered solution, "that there is no primenumber between 405 and 409." The difference between"act" and "object" might be stressed by pointing out thatthese questions or solutions might occur to someone andbe understood by him without his thinking about or considering whether to accept them at all. Understandingwhat might be thought about, or what might be thoughtabout it, is not thinking about it.I shall take it that there must be some such question,solution, list, or speech as the grammatical object of one's


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lOO RYLEpondering, and that the traditional dispute is overwhether it must have, or need not have, an expressionor embodiment. One party asserts that, without an actualor sotto voce verbal list, or an actually drawn or inwardlyimaged genealogical table, etc., however fragmentary, wehave not called up, cannot think about, accept or rejectthe list of Kings; that we cannot consider whether amallet is preferable to a hammer without actually or inwardly saying or hearing these words, or having similarbits of verbal or other imagery. Thinking requires bothan object, 0, and that 0 be embodied or expressed, how-ever partially. This is how I interpret the doctrine thatRyle may, at least at moments, be attacking. (I mustignore the question whether thinking also . (the "activity") must, or need not, have some expression in "heard"words or "seen" pictures, and whether this question iseven intelligible.)Oddly, the dispute is often traditionally discussed as if,at least by implication, it were an empirical one, resolva-ble by introspection or memory. Ryle himself says that"when I recollect, however clearly, a stretch, howeverrecent, of my musing or pondering, I do not seem to be... automatically primed with the answers to questionsabout the concrete ingredients of the thoughts the havingof which I have no difficulty in recounting ... and goeson that, if asked, "my answer might be, 'No; I don't recallsaying anything to myself at all .. . '" or "'No; I am surethat I did not visualize anything'" (PE 131-32). But suchdenials will not refute the opponent who concedes that,contingently, we often cannot . recall in what guise ourthoughts occurred, but insists that they must have hadsome embodiment. The dispute cannot, by Ryle orothers, be intended as empirical; and for a conceptualquestion, to establish or reject a necessity, arguments ap-propriate to a conceptual question are needed. So it re-mains to see what other arguments Ryle gives, and whatothers might perhaps be given.


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A Collection of Critical Essays 101If, at least at times, Ryle is arguing for the extremeposition that, in general, thinking requires no embodiment, he also seems to admit one kind of exception:

some thinking necessarily involves words rehearsed eithersubvocally or aloud. He says, "I do in fact think that anunworded argument belongs where an unworded quatrainbelongs-nowhere" (TR 218) . But it is not obvious thatthese are mere isolated exceptions to. the extreme thesis.For if, until you have in some degree formulated thequatrain or argument in words, you cannot have thoughtit out, it would seem by parity of reasoning that, untilyou have formulated in words, pictures or some appropriate way that you must use a mallet, or that Henry Ifollows William II, you have not thought these out either.Alternatively, anyone who totally denied the necessity ofthoughts being somehow expressed might deny thatRyle's quatrain provided a relevant exception at all. For,he might say, Ryle's remarks merely reflect the necessarytruth that composing quatrains is dealing with words, notdiagrams or pictures, just as calculating is dealing withnumbers, not sounds or faces, and thinking about kingsis dealing with names, not machine-diagrams or mallets.While it is true that thoughts about numbers, he mightsay, if expressed, aloud or subvocally, will be expressedin written, spoken, or pictured numerals, and thoughtsabout speeches, if expressed, will be in words, spoken,written, or imagined, the present issue is whether theycan be thou

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