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You are the judge of your performance. In sum, you cannot be said to have knowledge of a fact unless you can exploit it; the process of exploitation is itself an intelligent operation.
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Email required Address never made public. Name required. The problem of other minds is compounded by even more serious difficulties given certain assumptions about the way language works. Proponents of the Official Doctrine are committed to the view that mental discourse serves to designate items that carry the metaphysical and epistemological load of that doctrine. For, according to the Official Doctrine. Ryle is often given credit for having shown some of the many difficulties in substance or Cartesian dualism.
But the arguments in The Concept of Mind warn of difficulties for any account that takes mental conduct terms to discharge their explanatory role by signifying inner processes: whether irreducibly mental or at bottom physical.
Both picture the truth-makers of our claims about other minds or our ascriptions of mental predicates as hidden and thus in practice if not in principle as inaccessible. The Official Doctrine construes this feature as a special mental accompaniment.
But if this is a mistake, it is a big one; for it is made not only throughout various sub-branches of philosophy but also in collaborating disciplines. The idea, for example, that intelligence involves physically realised, non-introspectible theoretical computational operations is one of the founding blocks of the cognitive sciences. This picture of how rational abilities in general are to be explained, including the ability to speak a language, was called into question by Ryle in a number of early papers especially in a, ostensibly reworked as the second chapter of a, and in b and Intelligent behaviours cannot be explained, in general, by assuming that theoretical operations have gone on behind the scene, since those operations themselves can be intelligent or non-intelligent.
The supposition that intelligent behaviour always requires prior or even contemporaneous theoretical operations launches a vicious regress of theoretical operations. Thus, it must be allowed that some intelligent behaviour is not the outcome of prior theoretical operations. The role of the rules, standards, or norms that govern our practices should neither be exaggerated nor underestimated. For Ryle as for Wittgenstein , rules are codifications or distillations of normative practices that are already up and running.
As Ryle aptly quips,. The crystallisation of performance-rules in rule-formulae is, in some cases, a product of studies in the methodology of the practices in which they have already been applied and not the condition of their being applied. In other words: there must be a way of applying a rule that does not require the prior consultation of an expression of that rule.
Close attention to the cases in which we credit someone for her performance shows that it is often enough for her merely to have satisfied certain criteria or for her performance to have lived up to the relevant standard. Close attention to the cases in which we require not only that she satisfy certain criteria but also that she apply the criteria by using an expression of a rule to guide her shows that the latter is in fact a separate skill, which we only sometimes but importantly not always demand of the one we wish to credit for her performance.
It would be a category mistake to imagine that the ticket itself plays a role in the explanation of the train journey on the same level as the pistons, levers, and tracks. But just this type of category error seems to be made by those who construe the relevant mental phenomena, including understanding, as inner causal events. So Ryle on this account is to be construed as offering a dispositional analysis of mental statements into behavioural ones.
It is conceded that Ryle does not confine his descriptions of what the agent will do under the circumstances to purely physical behaviour—in terms, say, of skeletal or muscular descriptions—but is happy to speak of full-bodied actions like scoring a goal or paying a debt. In sum, the standard interpretation of Ryle construes him as offering a somewhat weakened form of reductive behaviourism whose reductivist ambitions, however weakened, are nonetheless futile.
Although it is true that Ryle was keen to point out the dispositional nature of many mental concepts, it would be wrong to construe him as offering a programme of analysis of mental predicates into a series of subjunctive conditionals.
If you dispute my characterisation of someone as believing or wanting something, I will point to what he says and does in defending my particular attribution as well as to features of the circumstances. But our practice of giving reasons of this kind to defend or to challenge ascriptions of mental predicates would be put under substantial pressure if the Official Doctrine were correct.
For Ryle to remind us that we do, as a matter of fact, have a way of settling disputes about whether someone is vain or whether she is in pain is much weaker than saying that a concept is meaningless unless it is verifiable; or even that the successful application of mental predicates requires that we have a way of settling disputes in all cases.
Showing that a concept is one for which, in a large number of cases, we have agreement-reaching procedures even if these do not always guarantee success captures an important point, however: it counts against any theory, say, of vanity or pain that would render it unknowable in principle or in practice whether or not the concept is correctly applied in every case.
And this was precisely the problem with the Official Doctrine and is still a problem, as I suggested earlier, with some of its contemporary progeny. Ryle attempts a dissolution of these types of dilemma by rejecting the two horns; not by taking sides with either one, though part of what dissolution requires in this case, as in others, is a description of how both sides are to be commended for seeing what the other side does not, and criticised for failing to see what the other side does.
The attraction of behaviourism, he reminds us, is simply that it does not insist on occult happenings as the basis upon which all mental terms are given meaning, and points to the perfectly observable criteria that are by and large employed when we are called upon to defend or correct our employment of these mental terms.
The problem with behaviourism is that it has a too-narrow view both of what counts as behaviour and of what counts as observable. The attraction of Cartesianism is that it recognizes in a way the behaviourist does not that there may be crucial differences between creatures who—on a certain restrictive notion of behaviour—do indeed behave identically. The problem with Cartesianism is that it attempts to account for these differences by hypothesizing the existence of occult or hidden causes.
In an attempt to defeat the Cartesian or Platonist and remind us that mental predicates have perfectly ordinary standards of application, Ryle focuses on what is observable. It is part of his war against what is not only occult and observable only through introspection but also against what is hidden from the viewpoint of a third-party observer. Surely, as his earlier critics pointed out and as those who see him as a behaviourist ignore some of the phenomena he allows will reintroduce a realm of private occurrences dreams and imaginings will be the paradigm case.
Not simply as Ayer suggests because the phenomena do not command the stage of a private theatre: in the sense that no one else can tell us about them they are in that respect private. Nor does this sort of privacy usher in the semantic consequences of the Official Doctrine. There will indeed be cases in which only the agent can say whether she is pondering, imagining, dreaming, letting her mind wander, calculating, solving, planning, or rehearsing. But the sort of privacy in which only she can say whether she was doing any of these or other particular things is not the sort of privacy that gives rise to philosophical conundrums like the problem of other minds and the problem of necessarily private languages.
The way to bring out the difference is to note that part of the point of trying to establish laws is to find out how to infer from particular matters of fact to other particular matters of fact, how to explain particular matters of fact by reference to other matters of fact, and how to bring about or prevent particular states of affairs. But it is like a law-sentence insofar as its role is not or not primarily one of describing or reporting, or stating that some object has such-and-such an attribute or stands in such-and-such a relation with another object.
Nor could it be. To adopt a couple contemporary turns of phrases, the warrants or inference tickets provided are therefore pro tanto and occasion-sensitive. In any case what would be the point or the theoretical utility of discovering what is hidden? Ryle suggests the utility would consist only in its entitling us to do just that predicting, explaining, and modifying which we already do and often know that we are entitled to do.
This immediacy is already enough to be philosophically perplexing, but not only do we know differently from others what we think, hope, and feel, we are also, in normal circumstances, regarded as knowing best. Furthermore, if we do enjoy certain mental attributes, we are expected to know that we do: our mental states are salient to us. To what extent does this explanatory puzzle arise because of a tacit allegiance to Cartesianism?
We have already seen how the epistemological consequences of the Official Doctrine lead to the problem of other minds. The other side of the Cartesian coin seems to put us in an especially privileged position with respect to our own minds. For, if ascribing mental predicates to others is problematic, according to the Official Doctrine, ascribing them to ourselves is problem-free.
Immediacy, authority, and salience are features of the epistemology of self-knowledge that the Cartesian view is best-placed to accommodate. Ryle would see this contemporary expression of the problem of self-knowledge as a result of the conflation of various suspect philosophical tendencies.
One of these has its roots in the epistemological strand of the Official Doctrine; another is the tendency of philosophers to underestimate the many-layered complexity of mental discourse. This includes the refusal to acknowledge that the same sentence may have different elasticities or kinds of jobs, as well as the tendency to favour sentence-jobs of informing, describing or reporting over those, for example, of explaining, exhorting, encouraging, or admonishing.
Sorting out this confusion puts what can genuinely be called self-knowledge on relative parity with other-knowledge. But once the nature of this protection is understood, philosophical perplexity should be extinguished, not kindled. Nor does Ryle deny that usually when we witness something, or feel something, or act in such-and-such a way we are able, when asked, to give a correct account of it.
He denies that these uses commit us to the existence of pictures or images that we contemplate or tunes that we hear: rather than construe someone who pictures his nursery as the spectator of a resemblance of his nursery, he should be construed as resembling a spectator in his nursery a, This has to do with her propensity to avow moods, feelings, inclinations, intentions, desires, and so forth. One striking feature of avowals is that they seem to enjoy a special kind of security from epistemic assessment or criticism.
For Ryle,. Ryle warns against construing the fact that avowals are unassailable as indicating that there is special kind of knowledge in play. From the fact that these utterances are protected from epistemic assessment or criticism it does not follow that we have a special kind of knowledge about them; any more, says Ryle, than it follows from the fact that someone is not a quack doctor that he is a good doctor: for he may not be a doctor at all b, For with the idea of knowledge comes the idea of truth, of justification, of representation, of description, of taking closer looks, etc.
When lying, feigning, etc. The question of his being wrong as measured against some additional standard may not arise. If he is not wrong in saying that he is in pain because he can only be lying or insincere in the ways that we are imagining have been ruled out it does not follow that he has a special kind of knowledge. Rather, it would be more appropriate to say that questions of knowledge are here out of place.
The discussion of avowals, then, illustrates yet another elasticity or sentence-job for certain mental expressions. Indeed, it may be both a description and a complaint a , Many contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind and self-knowledge, accepting a modern variant of the assumptions of Cartesianism, are committed to the view that in using mental predicates, we or the subject attribute s to the subject a mental state or condition of which her subsequent behaviour is a causal, contingent manifestation.
But once the assumption is made that mental verbs function to pick out such underlying states or events, then seemingly incompatible demands are placed upon these states and the traditional philosophical problem of self-knowledge is revealed. Construed as speaking from and expressing an occurrent state the speaker is authoritative; construed as speaking from or referring to a dispositional state she is not.
Since the way out of this puzzle is not merely a rejection of the para-mechanical hypothesis, Ryle suggests a different diagnosis:.
Furthermore, the first personal pronoun has different elasticities of use. In other contexts such pronouns cannot be so replaced. It makes perfect sense to say that I caught myself just beginning to dream, but not that I caught my body beginning to dream, or that my body caught me doing so ….
The puzzles are multiplied rather than solved when we talk of the Self as akin to a business—with, for example, an executive branch and subordinate departments—or a University—with warring or collaborative Faculties representing mental capacities. For though we can catch hold of our streams of thoughts, and we can comment on this awareness, and perhaps even reflect upon our self-comment, and then regret having spent so much time in self-reflection, …—we can never capture the last episode of self-awareness, until another one comes along which will, though capturing the last, will itself be elusive.
And yet it is never very far ahead; indeed, sometimes it seems not to be ahead of the pursuer at all. Neither functions as names. They indicate the person who utters it or the time it is uttered. They are the same in kind as the higher-order acts and attitudes exhibited in the dealings of people with one another.
Indeed the former are only a special application of the latter and are learned first from them. If I perform the third order operation of commenting on a second order act of laughing at myself for a piece of manual awkwardness, I shall indeed use the first personal pronoun in two different ways …. Because of this target, many of his reminders about how mental expressions are used point to the kinds of circumstances and performances that would satisfy them: often these include what others suitably trained have no trouble seeing.
But he was dissatisfied that in this work he left out some of the cardinal uses of concepts of thinking, in which there may be no performances for others to witness. Certainly, the concept of thinking applies to observable performances. There is a host of widely different sorts of toiling and idlings, engaging in any one of which is thinking. Ryle rejects the view that thinking is symbol manipulation: indeed, he denies that words, phrases or sentences are symbols, if symbols are to be understood as proxies or as representations for something else perhaps that which the word is alleged to designate.
Thinking, in the sense of pondering, calculating, and musing, is not reserved for the labour of trying to decide things. An architect can think out his plan while manipulating toy bricks as can a sculptor plan a statue in marble by modelling a piece of plasticine. Additional labours might be necessary to put these plans into words. In general, thinking should not be equated with using language.
Our ordinary ways of describing our ponderings and musings tend to be graphic and not literal. They should be histories, not chronicles, and as such the plot should be told in abstraction from any particular stream-of-consciousness reports of detail we may recall.
But there can be thinking where there is no talking or even the attempt to talk. A symphony is not composed in English or German, it has no translation, and there is no evidence for or against it.
Thus, although it is an important truth that the products of thinking may be publishable truths or falsehoods and not unshareable introspectibles , this is true for only some types of thinking b, When the thinking does result in propositions or sayings, however, the temptation is on the one hand toward excessive inflation, and on the other toward excessive deflation.
For the result is not merely a string of words linked together in a grammatically well-formed sentence. In recognising this truth, however, we are tempted toward the view that bits of language are only necessary as the interpersonal vehicles of objective Meanings that are thinkable, in principle, to any hearers or readers of any nationalities.
In owning a penny, the duplicationist is right in saying I own more than a mere metallic disc; but the reductionist is also right in rejecting the idea that I own two things: a mere disc and a non-metallic, unpocketable yet marketable cargo.
The word I employ is not a noise and something else as well; nor is just a noise. Just as a penny is not just a disc and nor is it a disc and something else as well, so a word is not just noise, but nor is it a noise and something else as well. The penny is an institutionally-qualified enabling instrument that I can use for specific sorts of transactions. The word is a complexly qualified noise, endowed with a quite specific saying-power, endowed by institutional regulations, accumulating public custom, pedagogic disciplines, and so on.
Even if it is true that Le Penseur is saying things to himself, this description fails because it stops just where it ought to begin. A thick description may be that he is trying to find out whether or not the things that he is saying will lead him where he wants to go:.
If Le Penseur is trying to find the proof of a new theorem then he is working on a higher accomplishment-level than he is in trying to teach his student his proof when he has got it; just as trying to teach it is on a higher-sophistication level than that on which his students are working in trying to master it.
On its thinnest description, Le Penseur may be muttering to himself a few geometrical words or phrases, just as on its thinnest description a penny is a piece of metal.
But to say that that is not all he is doing or that that is not all the penny is is consistent with saying it is the only thing he is doing or with denying that the penny is a piece of metal and something else as well. Thinking can be saying things to oneself under a thin description. Ryle was unhappy with the treatment he gave of the concepts of sensation and perception in The Concept of Mind.
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