Gilbert Ryle | |
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| Born | 19 August 1900 Brighton, England |
| Died | 6 October 1976 (aged 76) Whitby, England |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | The Queen's College, Oxford |
| Philosophical work | |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | |
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Gilbert Ryle (19 August 1900 – 6 October 1976) was a British philosopher,[4] principally known for his critique ofCartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "ghost in the machine". Some of Ryle's ideas in philosophy of mind have been calledbehaviourist. In his best-known book,The Concept of Mind (1949), he writes that the "general trend of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be stigmatised as 'behaviourist'."[5] Having studied the philosophersBernard Bolzano,Franz Brentano,Alexius Meinong,Edmund Husserl, andMartin Heidegger, Ryle suggested that the book instead "could be described as a sustained essay inphenomenology, if you are at home with that label."[6]
Gilbert Ryle's father, Reginald John Ryle, was aBrighton doctor, ageneralist who had interests inphilosophy andastronomy, passing on to his children a large library. Gilbert's father was a son ofJohn Charles Ryle, the firstAnglicanBishop of Liverpool.[7][8] The Ryles wereCheshire landedgentry; Gilbert's elder brother,John Alfred Ryle, of Barkhale, Sussex, became head of the family.
Gilbert Ryle's mother, Catherine, was daughter of Samuel King Scott (younger brother of thearchitect SirGeorge Gilbert Scott) by his wife Georgina, daughter of doctor William Hulme Bodley, and sister of architectGeorge Frederick Bodley, himself a student of Sir George. Cousins of the Ryle family thus include thehaematologistRonald Bodley Scott, architectGeorge Gilbert Scott Jr., founder ofWatts & Co., and his son,Giles Gilbert Scott, designer of theBattersea Power Station.[9]
Gilbert Ryle was born in Brighton, England, on 19 August 1900, and grew up in an environment of learning.
He was educated atBrighton College and in 1919 went up toThe Queen's College atOxford to studyclassics, but was soon drawn to philosophy. He graduated with a "triple first"; he receivedfirst-class honours in classicalHonour Moderations (1921),literae humaniores (1923), andphilosophy, politics, and economics (1924).
In 1924, Ryle was appointed lecturer in philosophy atChrist Church, Oxford. A year later, he became afellow and tutor at Christ Church, where he remained until 1940.[10]
In theSecond World War, Ryle was commissioned in theWelsh Guards. A capablelinguist, he was recruited intointelligence work and by the end of the war had been promoted to the rank ofMajor. After the war he returned to Oxford and was electedWaynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy and Fellow ofMagdalen College, Oxford. He publishedThe Concept of Mind in 1949. He was president of theAristotelian Society from 1945 to 1946, and editor of the philosophical journalMind from 1947 to 1971. Ryle died on 6 October 1976 atWhitby, North Yorkshire.[10]
Ryle's brothers John Alfred (1889–1950) andGeorge Bodley (1902–1978), both educated at Brighton College, also had eminent careers. John becameRegius Professor of Physic at theUniversity of Cambridge and physician toKing George V. George, after serving as Director of Forestry first for Wales and then England, was Deputy-Director of theForestry Commission and appointed aCBE.[11]
Ryle was the subject of a portrait byRex Whistler, which he said made him look like "a drowned German General". He was a lifelongbachelor, and in retirement he lived with his twin sister Mary.[12]
Ryle has been characterized as an "ordinary language" philosopher, a style of philosophy he helped pioneer.[13] According toBryan Magee, Ryle's paper "Systematically Misleading Expressions" (1931) contains the "first clear public statement of the view of philosophy that has come to be known asLinguistic Philosophy",[14] whileG.J. Warnock says of his book,The Concept of Mind, that "it was one of the first, and hence has been one of the most widely influential, attacks in the new style upon an old family of problems".[15]
InThe Concept of Mind, Ryle argues thatdualism involvescategory mistakes and philosophicalnonsense, two philosophical topics that continued to inform Ryle's work. Herhetorically asked students in his 1967–68 Oxford audience what was wrong with saying that there are three things in a field: two cows and a pair of cows. They were also invited to ponder whether thebunghole of a beer barrel is part of the barrel or not.[16]
A distinction deployed inThe Concept of Mind, between 'knowing-how' and 'knowing-that', has attracted independent interest. This distinction is also the origin of procedural (knowing-how) and declarative (knowing-that) models oflong-term memory.[17] This distinction is widely accepted in philosophy.[17]
Philosophers have not done justice to the distinction which is quite familiar to all of us between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to do things. In their theories of knowledge they concentrate on the discovery of truths or facts, and they either ignore the discovery of ways and methods of doing things or else they try to reduce it to the discovery of facts. They assume thatintelligence equates with thecontemplation of propositions and is exhausted in this contemplation.
— Gilbert Ryle,Aristotelian Society Presidential Address, 1945.[18]
An example of the distinction can be knowing how to tie areef knot and knowing thatQueen Victoria died in 1901.
The philosophical arguments which constitute this book are intended not to increase what we know about minds but to rectify the logical geography of the knowledge we already possess.[19]
Ryle thought it no longer possible to believe that a philosopher's task is to study mental as opposed to physical objects. In its place, Ryle saw a tendency of philosophers to search for objects whose nature was neither physical nor mental. Ryle believed, instead, that "philosophical problems are problems of a certain sort; they are not problems of an ordinary sort about special entities."[10]
Ryle analogises philosophy tocartography. Competent speakers of a language, Ryle believes, are to a philosopher what ordinary villagers are to a mapmaker: the ordinary villager has a competent grasp of his village, and is familiar with its inhabitants andgeography. But when asked to interpret a map of that knowledge, the villager will have difficulty until he is able to translate his practical knowledge into universal cartographic terms. The villager thinks of the village in personal and practical terms, while the mapmaker thinks of the village in neutral, public, cartographic terms.[20]: 440–2
By mapping the words and phrases of a particular statement, philosophers are able to generate what Ryle callsimplication threads: each word or phrase of a statement contributes to the statement in that, if the words or phrases were changed, the statement would have a different implication. The philosopher must show the directions and limits of different implication threads that a "concept contributes to the statements in which it occurs." To show this, he must be tugging at neighbouring threads, which, in turn, must also be tugging. Philosophy, then, searches for the meaning of these implication threads in the statements in which they are used.[20]: 444–5
In 1968 Ryle first introduced the notion ofthick description in "The Thinking of Thoughts: What is 'Le Penseur' Doing?"[21][22] and "Thinking and Reflecting".[23][24] According to Ryle, there are two types of descriptions:[21]
Ryle's notion of thick description[21] has been an important influence on cultural anthropologists such asClifford Geertz.[25][26]Peter Strawson, a contemporary of Ryle, paid tribute to him by noting that "by reason of his energy, his authority, and his vision—besides the brilliance and inventiveness displayed in his own philosophical writing—contributed perhaps more than any other single person to the flowering of the subject in England in the years after the war".[27]
The Concept of Mind was recognised on its appearance as an important contribution to philosophical psychology, and an important work in theordinary language philosophy movement. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the rising influence of thecognitivist theories ofNoam Chomsky,Herbert A. Simon,Jerry Fodor, and others in the neo-Cartesian school became predominant. The two major postwar schools inphilosophy of mind, Fodor'srepresentationalism andWilfrid Sellars'sfunctionalism, posited precisely the internal cognitive states that Ryle had argued against. PhilosopherDaniel Dennett, a student of Ryle's, has said that recent trends inpsychology such asembodied cognition,discursive psychology,situated cognition, and others in thepost-cognitivist tradition, have provoked a renewed interest in Ryle's work. Dennett provided a sympathetic foreword to the 2000 edition ofThe Concept of Mind.[28]
AuthorRichard Webster endorsed Ryle's arguments againstidealist philosophies, suggesting inWhy Freud Was Wrong (1995) that they implied that "theories of human nature which repudiate the evidence of behaviour and refer solely or primarily to invisible mental events will never in themselves be able to unlock the most significant mysteries of human nature."[29]
The first coinage in print of 'thick concept' was due to Bernard Williams, [...] However, Gilbert Ryle was the first to use the phrase 'thick description' to describe ideas in this general ballpark. A thick description is a more specific sort of description that one needs in order to categorize an action, personality trait, or other such thing. Ryle used this phrase in two papers from the late 1960s, although the idea runs through much of his work.
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