Abstract
Ryle received an education typical for an Oxford philosopher at the beginning of the last century. He had a thorough training in classics, learning ancient languages for five terms and classical philosophy and history for another seven.
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References
The interest in abstract objects reached its peak in the 1980s, some ten years after the publication of Dummett’s Frege: Philosophy of Language, which includes an extensive chapter on ‘Abstract Objects’ (see Dummett 1973, pp. 471–511)-see e.g. Künne 1982, Zalta 1983 and Hale 1987.
Ryle’s first (symposium) article was ‘Negation’ (1929b).
A similar argument was suggested by Frank Ramsey in ‘Facts and Propositions’ (Ramsey 1978, pp. 40–57). See ch. 1, § 7, (iv), (b).
Similarly, Wittgenstein, we might remember, believed that to ‘arrange things experimentally’ is the differentia specifica of language (see Wittgenstein 1979e, p. 13); and that this is an exclusive privilege of language. See on this ch. 3, § 7, (ii).
In a symposium with G. E. Moore. Moore’s contribution to the symposium was discussed in ch. 1, § 8, (ii).
A similar view was recently suggested by Richard Rorty. See Rorty 1979, p. 292.
This argument was used by both Frege and Wittgenstein (see Wittgenstein 1922, 4.002), but in terms of language, not of ideas. Strawson’s use of it is discussed in ch. 6, § 3, (v)-(vi).
The problem of the mind’s creativity was central for Frege and Wittgenstein. Later it was also central for Davidson and Dummett. See on this § 7, (iv), as well as ch. 7, § 4, (iii).
An understanding also held by Peter Strawson, for example, in Strawson 1992c, p. 35.
This thesis was advanced by Quine only in the 1950s. Incidentally, Ryle’s criticism of Vienna’s principle of verifiability became public in the same year the Cambridge man G. A. Paul criticised sense-data (see Paul 1936). Apparently Ryle already knew Wittgenstein’s criticism of private languages, set out in The Blue Book, and was seeking convincing arguments against them. Once more, Ryle was quick to feel the turn of the current in the philosophy of the day.
I have already discussed this understanding of language-functioning of Ryle’s (as developed in ‘Are There Propositions?’) in § 1, (iii).
Incidentally, Ryle, together with Russell, had ‘been most helpful by lending works of Frege that were otherwise almost unobtainable’ to Max Black and Peter Geach when they translated Frege in the late 1940s (Frege 1952, p. v).
This shows how fatally false was Fodor and Katz’s statement that ’[flor the ordinary-language philosopher a theory of language is first and foremost a theory of words…. For the positivists, on the other hand, a theory of language is in the first instance a theory of sentence and sentence structures’ (Fodor and Katz 1964, p. 3). According to this view, Ryle (!) was not an ordinary language philosopher.
In ‘Discussion of Rudolf Carnap: “Meaning and Necessity”’ (1949b), Ryle states that Frege (!) accepted the ‘Fido’—Fido theory of meaning (see pp. 226 ff.). Today, however, we all know that the absolute champion of the context principle was Frege. This point shows that, despite his later sympathy with Frege, Ryle’s knowledge of this Jena logician was rather poor.
In fact, Ryle’s style was nothing else but Wittgenstein’s way, as discussed in ch. 3, § 3, (vi).
Here Ryle’s philosophy of language diverges from that of Austin. Incidentally, the two ordinary language philosophers were conscious of this difference. In ‘Autobiographical’, Ryle wrote: ‘I doubt if there would have been very much overlap between his thoughts and mine’ (1970, p. 14). The point is that, while following Frege (via Russell and Wittgenstein, as seen above), Ryle’s interest in language is focused on that which is ‘in breach of ‘logical syntax“; and of the outcasts it focussed especially on the trouble-makers and the paradox-generators…. Austin’s main interests, however, were in the dictions which constitute communications between persons’ (pp. 14–15). Ironically, this was due to Frege’s influence again, but pertaining to another belief of his.
The tension between Ryle and Austin is well documented. Ayer, for example, has noted that Ryle ‘disliked Austin and was not influenced by him’ (Ayer 1985, p. 135). Ryle’s pupil Bernard Williams remembers that he ‘always dissociated himself from the minute interest in fine points of usage which some of his colleagues displayed’ (Williams 1979, p. 6).
Incidentally, this was not the first time Wittgenstein had accused other philosophers of plagiarizing his ideas. In the early 1930s he accused Carnap of stealing ‘his ideas concerning physicalism, ostensive definition, the nature of hypothesis, and the distinction between the “formal mode” and the “material mode of speech”’ (Uebel 1995, p. 327).
This statement of Ryle’s shows as false Dummett’s belief is that no single work of the ‘linguistic philosophers’ ‘depend[s] upon their theory of the nature of philosophy’ (Dummett 1960a, p. 434).
Only dreaming is absent, perhaps because of the difficulties this category presents. It was analysed by Wittgenstein’s pupil Norman Malcolm in Malcolm 1959, but this work was widely disclaimed.
Stuart Hampshire has noted that the method of the book can be termed ‘not Two Worlds, but One World’ (Hampshire 1950, p. 238). Here we see a side of the method which Ryle follows in The Concept of Mind: anti-duplicationism.
This point of Ryle’s is close to a point of Wittgenstein’s in § 202 of the Investigations, according to which “`obeying a rule” is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule.’
That Ryle’s main argument in The Concept of Mind is the ‘regressus argument’, stating that ‘the hypothesized cognitive processes generate a vicious regress of explanation’, was noted in Williams 1980, p. 211.
In contrast, for Wittgenstein ‘the teaching of [at least a primitive] language is not explanation, but drill [Abrichten]’ (Wittgenstein 1953, § 5; my translation).
A case often discussed by the later Wittgenstein, for example in Wittgenstein 1953, § 182.
It was developed in parallel by J. L. Austin, and is actually the central idea of Oxford linguistic philosophy. This method is not to be confused with the general method that Ryle shared with Wittgenstein, of which we spoke in § 3, (i).
For Ryle’s philosophy as ‘Nicomacheanised De Anima’ see 1968, p. 107; see also Owen 1977, p. 266.
Cf. John Wisdom’s ‘contemplation of possibility’ (Wisdom 1952, pp. 6, 33).
Later Donald Davidson, among others, found good arguments for the opposite view. See Davidson 1980, pp. 3–19.
This theory was developed against W. D. Ross’s assumption that motives are ‘some sort of an internal prod or a jab that goes off just before I do something’ (Ryle 1986, pp. 129–130). See Ross 1939, pp. 114–15.
Already in 1936 it was noted that there is a ‘difficulty of understanding what anyone is saying who says that there are such things as sense-data’ (Paul 1936, p. 61).
This view is close to Aristotle’s, by whom ‘knowledge is conceived as capacities and not as “knowing that something is the case”’ (Rao 1994, p. 57).
As already noted (in ch. 2, § 6, (vi)), in a sense, philosophical logic of necessity leads to philosophical psychology. Appalling as this conclusion may appear for such authors as Frege, the philosophical development of Russell, Wittgenstein and Ryle demonstrates this quite well.
It is important to notice that a year earlier (in 1953), two works setting out the same objective were published—Wittgenstein’s Investigations and Wisdom’s Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis.
This was criticised by J. L. Austin thus: ‘The idea that these arguments add up to a single logical method and tend to a single clear-cut conclusion looks like an afterthought and seems an illusion’ (Austin 1950a).
As a matter of fact, the later Ryle saw his philosophical practice as making some ‘expansions, extensions and new applications of… Russell’s history-making Theory of Types’ (1979a, pp. 20, 17). According to him, the latter makes nothing else but tests and examines the logical powers of concepts and statements.
Later Dummen called such a position a ‘strong form of temporal anti-realism’. See ch. 7, § 5, (v).
This understanding is directed against the acceptance of ‘truth-making’. For its defence see Simons 1982; for criticism see Milkov 1997b.
The second dilemma, not discussed here, is Achilles and the Tortoise (pp. 36–53).
This dilemma is also analysed in Strawson’s Skepticism and Naturalism, a book reminiscent of Ryle’s Dilemmas in many ways. See ch. 6, § 8, (i).
Ryle gives a similar example twenty years later in ‘Thought and Imagination’. A child and a man look in different ways at a plank of wood that they come across by the roadside (see 1979e, p. 60).
Thirty years later Ryle put his methodological problem as follows. We must avoid ‘what Peter Medawar has called the “nothing-buttery” on the one side and what Descartes, if he’d been sensible, would have called “as-wellism” on the other’ (1986, p. 144).
A similar view is developed in John Wisdom’s paper ‘Epistemological Enlightenment’ (Wisdom 1971).
Nevertheless, they are ‘more nearly right than the appeasers who try to blend the operations of the one party with the operations of the other’ (p. 114).
In fact, the only place where Aristotle tries directly to solve a philosophical problem with the help of a mathematical solution—not of formal-logical one is his definition of moral virtue as ‘a mean’, defined in mathematical terms (Eth. Nic., I109a26).
This opposition is reminiscent of that of Wittgenstein’s between ‘stationary meaning’ and ‘dynamic meaning’. See ch. 3, § 6, (iii).
The point that Plato was not a Platonist, just as Marx had denied being a Marxist, is also to be found in 1954a, p. 14.
This conclusion was severely criticised. I. M. Crombie, for example, noted: ‘What I cannot believe… is that in these early dialogues Plato was interested simply in representing dialectical arguments, not in purveying doctrine’ (Crombie 1969, p. 366).
Ryle’s criticism of Platonic foundationalism was apparently inspired by his critical attitude towards any form of ontology—a position he had already embraced in his criticism of Husserl (in 1946).
Recently this point was criticised by G. Vlastos, who specified that in Ryle’s Plato’s Progress ‘the elenctic arguments in Plato’s earlier dialogues are [falsely] represented as “specimens of eristic contests”’ (Vlastos 1994, p. 136).
Ryle’s translation. Cf. John Wisdom’s leitmotif of ‘paradox and discovery’, as developed in Wisdom 1965, analysed in Milkov 1997a, ch. 4, § 7.
One of the critics of Plato’s Progress disagrees on this point: ‘It is hard to imagine the dialogues being recited, and we have distinct evidence that books were available and read. Recitation and books and reading are interdependent rather than mutually hostile’ (Rankin 1967, p. 111).
The comparison between chess-playing and playing the games of philosophy was often made by the middle-generation analytic philosophers, for example, by Max Black (see Black 1986, pp. 36 f.).
J. L. Austin, for example, was discontented with the fact that Ryle ‘preaches with the fervour of a proselyte a doctrine of “one word”. Yet what has ever been gained by this favourite philosophical pastime of counting words?’ (see Austin 1950a).
The method of investigating philosophical problems with the help of literature was later employed by Martha Nussbaum (see Nussbaum 1990, Nussbaum 1994). Another philosopher who used it was Richard Rorty (see Rorty 1989).
It is intriguing how close Ryle is here to Dummett. Despite the critical words of Dummett against Ryle, the fact is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s both Ryle and Dummett were interested in the creative mind.
In the analytical tradition the study of this problem has a long history. It includes Stebbing 1936, Stebbing 1939 and Flew 1975.
See Chomsky 1966, Chomsky 1968. In fact, intellectual creativity was also analysed by Frege, Wittgenstein and John Wisdom.
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Ryle, G. (2003). The Analytical Method Explained. In: A Hundred Years of English Philosophy. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 94. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0177-8_5
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