Collected Papers, Volume 2: Collected Essays 1929 - 1968

556 Pages·2009·2.03 MB·English

by  Gilbert Ryle

Collected Papers
Volume 2
Gilbert Ryle was one of the most important and yet misunderstood philos-
ophers of the twentieth century. Long unavailable, Collected Essays 1929–1968:
Collected Papers Volume 2 stands as testament to the astonishing breadth of
Ryle’s philosophical concerns.
This volume showcases Ryle’s deep interest in the notion of thinking and
contains many of his major pieces, including his classic essays ‘Knowing How
and Knowing That’, ‘Philosophical Arguments’, ‘Systematically Misleading
Expressions’ and ‘A Puzzling Element in the Notion of Thinking’. He ranges
over an astonishing number of topics, including feelings, pleasure, sensation,
forgetting and concepts, and in so doing hones his own philosophical stance,
steering a careful path between behaviourism and Cartesianism.
Together with the first volume of Ryle’s collected papers and the new edition
of The Concept of Mind, these outstanding essays represent the very best of
Ryle’s work. Each volume contains a foreword by Julia Tanney, and provide
essential reading for any student of twentieth-century philosophy of mind and
language.
Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy
and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, an editor of Mind and a president
of the Aristotelian Society.
Julia Tanney is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Kent and has
held visiting positions at the universities of Picardie and Paris-Sorbonne.

COLLECTED PAPERS
VOLUME 2
Collected Essays 1929–1968
Gilbert Ryle
First published 1971 by Hutchinson
This edition published 2009 by Routledge
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© 2009 The Estate of Gilbert Ryle: Hertford College, University of Oxford
© 2009 Julia Tanney for Foreword
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any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
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ISBN10: 0–203–87530–8 (ebk)
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C
ONTENTS
Foreword vii
Introduction xx
1 Negation 1
2 Are there propositions? 13
3 Systematically misleading expressions 41
4 Imaginary objects 66
5 ‘About’ 86
6 Internal relations 89
7 Mr Collingwood and the ontological argument 105
8 Back to the ontological argument 120
9 Unverifiability-by-me 126
10 Induction and hypothesis 137
11 Taking sides in philosophy 160
12 Categories 178
13 Conscience and moral convictions 194
14 Philosophical arguments 203
15 Knowing how and knowing that 222
16 Why are the calculuses of logic and arithmetic
applicable to reality? 236
17 ‘If’, ‘so’, and ‘because’ 244
18 Heterologicality 261
vi CONTENTS
19 Thinking and language 269
20 Feelings 284
21 The verification principle 300
22 Thinking 307
23 Ordinary language 314
24 Proofs in philosophy 332
25 Pleasure 339
26 Sensation 349
27 The theory of meaning 363
28 Predicting and inferring 386
29 On forgetting the difference between right and
wrong 394
30 A puzzling element in the notion of thinking 404
31 Use, usage and meaning 420
32 A rational animal 428
33 Abstractions 448
34 Thinking thoughts and having concepts 459
35 Teaching and training 464
36 Thinking and reflecting 479
37 The thinking of thoughts: What is ‘le Penseur’
doing? 494
Index 511
F
OREWORD
The first article in this collection appeared 20 years before the 1949
publication of The Concept of Mind and it and those that follow deal with
a question that occupied Ryle in the 1920s and 30s: ‘What constitutes
a philosophical problem; and what is the way to solve it?’ (1970, 12)
Having produced various papers, responses, articles and discussion notes
on philosophy’s proper goals and methods, Ryle decided—when invited
to contribute to Hutchinson’s Philosophical Library series—the time was right
to ‘exhibit a sustained piece of analytical hatchet-work being directed
upon some notorious and large-sized Gordian Knot.’ (ibid) Thus Ryle
went straight to work on The Concept of Mind demonstrating the method he
had long, in these early papers, described and defended.
In retrospect, this was a shame: though many read The Concept of Mind, far
fewer heard his papers or read his articles. Had the readers of the book had
a clear sense that Ryle’s method of analysis was a type of ‘conceptual
cartography’ they would have realised that Ryle did not construe the task
of analysis as did the early Russell and Moore—at least in terms of how
they characterised the task, if not in how they prosecuted it (Collected
Papers 1, 280). Ryle’s identification as a logical behaviourist—and thus the
mistaken assimilation of his work with that of the Vienna Circle—would
never have gained the momentum it did. For Ryle’s method reversed the
main assumptions of philosophy of language resurrected from Plato by
Mill—that the main function of words is to name or denote objects,
viii FOREWORD
qualities or relations—assumptions which Frege and Russell were just
beginning to question and which would later be altogether demolished by
Wittgenstein. Awareness of his work in logic and language would have
brought home how inapt is the description of Ryle as an empiricist or an
anti-realist about the mental or about dispositions. Indeed, familiarity
with his work in general would give one pause in describing Ryle as an
‘ist’ about anything.
In the articles in his Collected Papers Volume 2 we discover important leit-
motifs that occur throughout Ryle’s work: his interest in what accounts
for the difference between expressions that make sense or those that are
nonsensical; the role of philosopher as cartographer; the importance and
ubiquity of systematically misleading expressions; the inflections of mean-
ing or elasticities of significance that characterise words, phrases, sentences
and their paraphrases; the difficulty for thinkers in general and philosophers
in particular as they begin to think about and then wield their technical
tools to tackle abstract concepts; the relation between words, sentences,
concepts and propositions; and his introduction to philosophy of the
notion of thin and thick descriptions. These articles are a striking anticipa-
tion in print of the ideas and themes that also interested Wittgenstein
though the method and style of philosophising are Ryle’s inimitable own.
Sentences do not simply report and describe; only some words function
as names and then only some of the time. Ryle’s insistence on recognising
the indefinitely many other functions of expressions, as well as the possi-
bility of descriptions ascending an ever-increasing ladder of sophistica-
tion that would require an indefinite number of syntactically variegated
subordinate clauses to unpack, puts him well at odds with those who
hanker after an ideal of language as one suited to the aims of mathematical
logic. It puts him at odds with any philosophical position—including
today’s reductive ‘naturalism’—that attempts to force these expressions
and descriptions into the too few dockets that formal logicians have
to offer. Indeed much philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon tradition would
be transformed, if not decimated, if Ryle’s—and Wittgenstein’s
corresponding—lessons were heeded.
According to Urmson (1967, 269), ‘Systematically Misleading Expres-
sions’ was ‘easily the first, although incompletely worked out, version of a
view of philosophy closely akin to that which Wittgenstein was then
beginning to work out independently, and which is often spoken of as
having been first suggested by Wittgenstein.’ The thesis is that there are
FOREWORD ix
many expressions that occur in non-philosophical discourse which do not
present puzzles to those who use them. They do, however, tend to mislead
philosophers and others into thinking that (to adopt the way Ryle puts it
later) the work or job these expressions perform is of one kind rather
than another.
For example, ‘Carnivorous cows do not exist’ is a sentence that is nei-
ther false nor senseless; it presents no philosophical puzzle when used in
appropriate circumstances—for example, to reassure a child who is afraid
a cow might eat him. But sentences of the form ‘x exists’ and ‘x does not
exist’ tend to puzzle philosophers who makes the unquestioned grammat-
ical assumption—a major irritant for Ryle—that subject-predicate expres-
sions function by attributing a quality or property to an object, where the
object is what is supposedly signified by the grammatical subject. For such
expressions do not assert or deny of an object that it is non-existent; rather
they deny of cows that they have the property of being carnivorous.
The tendency to populate the world with imaginary objects derives, in
part, from a confusion about various ways of understanding the remark
that a proposition is about something, for if we persist in thinking that
both ‘Mr Pickwick visited Rochester’ and the philosophers’ sentence ‘Mr
Pickwick is an imaginary entity’ are about Mr Pickwick in the same sense
of ‘about’, ‘so long will people continue to suppose that there is a Mr
Pickwick somewhere—in Dickens’ head, perhaps, or in a mysterious
repository called an “universe of discourse.”’ (this edition, 70)1 In this
example we see a particular confusion that comes from conflating the
philosophers’ referential sense of ‘about’ with the way a sentence can be
about (in a different sense) its grammatical subject. Indeed, the
philosopher-logician is apt to get into trouble in forgetting the different
uses of ‘about’. For the notions they explicate—the logical subject, subject of
predicates, subject of attributes, substance, particular, term, constituent of a fact or proposition,
denotation, description, incomplete symbol and logical construction—all contain or
hinge on this word (86).
A number of statements—quasi-ontological, those allegedly about uni-
versals, descriptive, quasi-descriptive and quasi-referential ‘the’-phrases—
come under Ryle’s scrutiny because they tend to mislead with the same
consequences, for they all suggest the existence of special objects. Indeed,
1Unless otherwise stated, page numbers refer to this edition of Collected Papers
Volume 2.