Gilbert Ryle

In this paper I begin by explaining what epistemic injustice is and what ordinary language philosophy is. I then go on to ask why we might doubt the usefulness of ordinary language philosophy in examining epistemic injustice. In the first place, we might wonder how ordinary language philosophy can be of use, given that many of the key terms used in discussing epistemic injustice, including ‘epistemic injustice’ itself, are not drawn from our ordinary language. We might also have doubts about (...) the usefulness of ordinary language philosophy in this area, given ordinary language philosophers’ aversion to theory. Finally, we might have doubts about the usefulness of ordinary language philosophy due to the fact that the study of epistemic injustice is clearly a study of practical matters concerning the way the world is and has been historically. If ordinary language philosophy is just concerned with grammar, what use can it be to practical and social philosophy concerning current issues? In response to these worries, I demonstrate the usefulness of ordinary language philosophy in practice by applying the insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alan R. White to a problem that Miranda Fricker raises, but does not answer: about whether there is a confidence condition on knowledge. I also make use of Gilbert Ryle's distinction between ‘the use of ordinary language’ and ‘the ordinary use of an expression’ to show that the terminology used in examining epistemic injustice is ordinary in some sense. (shrink)

This article is an annotated bibliography, listing and discussing research by, on, and in dialogue with Gilbert Ryle. It contains sections on Ryle's biography, his monographs and collected papers, overviews of Ryle's work, as well as sections on his thinking about philosophical method, ancient philosophy, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics.

This article argues that Iris Murdoch, who was supervised by John Wisdom during her 1947–48 fellowship at Newnham College Cambridge, went on to practice philosophy in a recognizably Wisdomian manner in her earliest paper, “Thinking and Language” (1951). To do so, I first describe how Wisdom understood philosophical perplexity and paradox. One task that linguistic philosophers should take up is to investigate the concrete cases that give paradoxical philosophical statements their sense and to sift the truth they contain from the (...) distortion. I then show how this vision informed his critical reception of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind as well as his own investigation of the Hidden Stream Paradox. Finally, I trace a similar approach to Murdoch's discussions of a paradox I call the Coarse Net Paradox. Recognizing Murdoch's intellectual inheritance from Wisdom enables us to see a thus‐far overlooked connection between Murdoch and the tradition of linguistic philosophy. (shrink)

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, (...) we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, we evaluate (...) Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

In Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee reveals that American man of integrity Atticus Finch harbors deep-seated racist beliefs. Bob Ewell, Finch's nemesis in To Kill a Mockingbird, harbors the same beliefs. But the two men live out their shared racist beliefs in dramatically different fashions. This article argues that extant dispositionalist accounts of belief lack the tools to accommodate Finch and Ewell's divergent styles of believing. It then draws on literary and philosophical character studies to construct the required tools.

This paper reconstructs Susan Stebbing’s account of intelligent dealing with a problem and defends this account against charges that it relies on a “censurable kind” of intellectualism. This charge was made in Stebbing’s own time by Laird and Wittgenstein. Michael Kremer has recently made the case that Stebbing is also a proximate target of Gilbert Ryle’s attack on intellectualism. This paper argues that Stebbing should indeed be counted as an intellectualist since she holds that intelligent dealing with a problem requires (...) propositional thought. Yet, for Stebbing, thinking is an activity of a whole person and is enabled and constrained by their dispositions. This complex picture of a thinker enables Stebbing’s account to resist arguments targeting certain forms of intellectualism such as Ryle’s regress argument. It also helps her to respond to the charge that she overemphasizes the importance of intellectual failures. On the picture that emerges, Stebbing offers a strikingly modern epistemology that incorporates the social features of a person as well as their purely intellectual features. (shrink)

Tennis champion Maria Sharapova has a habit of grunting when she plays on the court. Assume that she also has a habit of hitting the ball in a certain way in a certain situation. The habit of on-court grunting might be bad, but can the habit of hitting the ball in a certain way in a certain situation be classified as intelligent? The fundamental questions here are as follows: What is habit? What is the relation between habit and skill? Is (...) there such a thing as intelligent habit? In this paper I expound the nature of habit by developing and defending a Rylean conception of habit, according to which an acquired disposition is a habit if and only if the manifestation of the disposition is repeated, automatic, and uniform. One implication of this conception is that there is no such thing as intelligent habit. A practical application in athletic expertise is that sport coaches can help athletes go beyond repeated, automatic, and uniform dispositions in sport. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Gilbert Ryle’s account of misleading expressions, which is rightly considered a milestone in the history of analytic philosophy, is continuous with Brentano’s. Not only did they identify roughly the same classes of misleading expressions, but their analyses are driven by a form of ontological parsimony which sharply contrasts with rival views in the Brentano School, like those of Meinong and Husserl. Section 1 suggests that Ryle and Brentano share a similar notion of analysis. Section 2 spells (...) out the notion of misleading expression by means of the surface-grammar/truth-conditions distinction, which I argue is implicit in their accounts. Section 3 zooms in on a specific class of misleading expressions, namely expressions about ficta. Finally, Section 4 draws the consequences of what precedes for a correct understanding of the notion of meaning. (shrink)

To Occamize a nominal expression N is to show that, despite grammatical appearances, N does not name, or denote, an entity. This article argues that the Occamization of ‘meaning,’ which was central to Gilbert Ryle’s meta-philosophy, had already been advanced by Franz Brentano. The core thesis of the article is that Brentano’s notion of ‘content,’ albeit different from that of linguistic rules, does a similar job of eliminating expendable entities. If the meaning of a linguistic expression is not an entity (...) at all, then the question as to what kind of entity it is—what I shall call the Locke-Frege problem—turns out to be a pseudo-problem and is better dispensed with. (shrink)

This paper aims to shed light on an underexplored aspect of Gilbert Ryle’s interest in the notion of “knowing-how”. It is argued that in addition to his motive of discounting a certain theory of mind, his interest in the notion also stemmed (and perhaps stemmed more deeply) from two ethical interests: one concerning his own life as a philosopher and whether the philosopher has any meaningful task, and one concerning the ancient issue of whether virtue is a kind of knowledge. (...) It is argued that Ryle saw know-how as crucial in both respects and that he continued to be interested in these ethical issues throughout his career. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle famously wrote that practical knowledge (knowing how) is distinct from propositional knowledge (knowing that). This claim continues to have broad philosophical appeal, and yet there are many unsettled questions surrounding Ryle’s basic proposal. In this article, I return to his original work in order to perform some intellectual archeology. I offer an interpretation of Ryle’s concept of action that I call ‘adverbialism’. Actions are constituted by bodily behaviours performed in a certain mode, style or manner. I present various (...) challenges to adverbialism – scenarios in which it seems we publicly behave one way, but privately feel another. And I offer a response – Ryle’s stated practice of re-describing those situations in ways that pose no threat to his adverbialism. I also present an interpretation of practical knowledge in Ryle’s work. Knowing how is a special kind of action, undertaken only when we progressively self-modify our behaviours in the presence of new challenges or opportunities. (shrink)

This is an introduction to the debate about Know-how.

Many psychologists studying lay belief attribution and behavior explanation cite Donald Davidson in support of their assumption that people construe beliefs as inner causes. But Davidson’s influential argument is unsound; there are no objective grounds for the intuition that the folk construe beliefs as inner causes that produce behavior. Indeed, recent experimental work by Ian Apperly, Bertram Malle, Henry Wellman, and Tania Lombrozo provides an empirical framework that accords well with Gilbert Ryle’s alternative thesis that the folk construe beliefs as (...) patterns of living that contextualize behavior. (shrink)

This is a précis of my book "Know-how as Competence. A Rylean Responsibilist Account".

What does it mean to know how to do something? This book develops a comprehensive account of know-how, a crucial epistemic goal for all who care about getting things right, not only with respect to the facts, but also with respect to practice. It proposes a novel interpretation of the seminal work of Gilbert Ryle, according to which know-how is a competence, a complex ability to do well in an activity in virtue of guidance by an understanding of what it (...) takes to do so. This idea is developed into a full-fledged account, Rylean responsibilism, which understands know-how in terms of the normative guidance and responsible control of one's acts. Within the complex current debate about know-how, this view occupies a middle ground position between the intellectualist claim that know-how just is propositional or objectual knowledge and the anti-intellectualist claim that know-how just is ability. In genuine know-how, practical ability and guiding intellect are both necessary, but essentially intertwined. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions of knowledge how typically focus on the question whether or not knowing how to do ϕ consists in propositional knowledge, and divide the field between intellectualists and anti-intellectualists. This way of framing the issue is said to derive from Gilbert Ryle. I argue that this is a misreading of Ryle, whose primary interest in discussing knowledge how was not epistemological but rather action-theoretical, whose argument against intellectualism has for this reason been misunderstood and underestimated, and whose positive view (...) aims to chart a middle course between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. (shrink)

In his recent article, titled ‘Royaumont Revisited’, Overgaard challenges Dummett's view that one needs to go as far back as the late nineteenth century in order to discover examples of genuine dialogue between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy. Instead, Overgaard argues that in the 1958 Royaumont colloquium, generally judged as a failed attempt at communication between the two camps, one can find some elements which may be utilized towards re-establishing a dialogue between these two sides. Yet, emphasising this image of Royaumont (...) as a kind of battleground between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy obscures the plurality of philosophical approaches involved. Royaumont was the meeting point of more than two philosophical traditions, as can be shown by the divergent interests of its participants. Thus, though the potential for rapprochement between Oxford ‘linguistic philosophy’ and a certain strand of phenomenological thought may indeed be found among the discussions that took place during the colloquium, one should keep in mind that such rapprochement took place in the context of a meeting between, among others: continental ‘analytics’, Anglophone non-‘analytics’, French historians of philosophy, ‘analytic’ opponents of Oxford philosophy, Franciscan phenomenologists, and Oxonians who called their work ‘phenomenology’. (shrink)

This compilation of references includes all references for the knowledge-how chapters included in Bengson & Moffett's edited volume. The volume and the compilation of references may serve as a good starting point for people who are unfamiliar with the philosophical literature on knowledge-how.

How should we understand knowledge-how – knowledge how to do something? And how is it related to knowledge-that – knowledge that something is the case? In this paper, I will discuss a very important and influential aspect of this question, namely the claim – dubbed ‘Intellectualism’ by Gilbert Ryle – that knowledge-how can be reduced to knowledge-that. Recently, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson have tried to establish Intellectualism with the aid of linguistic considerations. This project – Linguistic Intellectualism – will (...) be criticized on three levels. First, I will reconstruct and object to Stanley and Williamson’s positive argument in favour of Intellectualism. Second, I will assess their view of the relationship between knowledge-how and practical ability and argue that their stance is not well-motivated. Third, I will discuss their criticism of Ryle’s objection against Intellectualism. After distinguishing between different versions of Ryle’s argument, I will show that its strongest version is both immune to the objection by Stanley and Williamson and a decisive argument against their own theory. Given that Intellectualism fails for these three reasons, I finally draw on a broader reading of Ryle in order to develop the beginnings of a positive account of knowledge-how and its relationship to knowledge-that. (shrink)

The mechanistic concept of the body, as inherited from René Descartes, has generated considerable trouble in philosophy—including, at least in part, the mind-body problem itself. Still, the corps mécanique remains perhaps the most prevalent though least examined assumption in recent philosophy of mind. I discuss two notable exceptions. Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty rejected this assumption for surprisingly similar reasons. Writing at about the same time, though in different languages and in very different circles, they each attempted to articulate a (...) non-mechanistic concept of the body by stressing the importance of skill: skillful behavior constituting cognition in Ryle’s case, and the skill body constituting perception in Merleau-Ponty’s case. In this article, I turn to their cautions and insights. By drawing out the relation between these two seemingly unrelated theorists, I hope to show that together Ryle and Merleau-Ponty have much to offer philosophy today. (shrink)

The Concept of Mind is the best known and the most important work of Gilbert Ryle. Ryle is thought to have accomplished two major tasks. First, he was seen to have put the final nail in the coffin of Carteisan dualism. Ryle rejects Descartes’ dualistic theory of the relation between mind and body. This doctrine of separation between mind and body is referred by Ryle as “the dogma of the ghost in the machine.” Second, he himself anticipated and suggested dualism’s (...) replacement, the doctrine known as philosophical (sometimes analytical) behaviourism. This is an attempt of this paper is to draw outlines of his criticism of Dualism his dispositional theory of mind and how it is relevant in today’s philosophy of mind. (shrink)

It is the intention of this paper is to introduce some contemporary relevance of Descartes’ dualism with special reference to Gilbert Ryle’s criticism. Ryle’s explicit target in The Concept of Mind is what he calls the “official doctrine”, which results, he tells us, at least in part from Descartes’ appreciation that Galilean methods of scientific discovery were fit to provide mechanical explanations for every occupant of space, together with Descartes’ conviction that the mental could not simply be a more complex (...) variety of the mechanical. Whether or not every aspect of the resulting “two-world” view is properly attributed to Descartes. It is familiar view, which has widely become known as Cartesianism in Anglo-American philosophy. It has distinctive ontological and epistemological commitments. (shrink)

In this thesis I examine the view—known as intellectualism—that knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that, or propositional knowledge. I examine issues concerning both the status of this view of knowledge-how and the philosophical implications if it is true. The ability hypothesis is an important position in the philosophy of mind that appeals to Gilbert Ryle’s famous idea that there is a fundamental distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that. This position appears to be inconsistent with the truth of intellectualism. However, I demonstrate (...) in this thesis that the ability hypothesis can be restated using the intellectualist view of knowledge-how. With regards to the status of intellectualism, I argue that the two main traditional arguments against intellectualism do not succeed. I also provide new and, I claim, successful arguments against intellectualism. These arguments point to a new view of knowledge-how that is distinct from both the standard intellectualist and Rylean views of knowledge-how. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to critically examine the Ryle’s conception of “Descartes Myth”. Ryle has two objectives in his book The Concept of Mind: (i) to refute a current philosophical theory about mind. (ii) to substitute at least in blue print, a satisfactory alternative. This paper gives a descriptive analysis of what Ryle calls Descartes-Myth and arguments for it. Conclusion of this paper drawn as he does not succeed in dispelling the myth but only substitutes a peculiar logical (...) monism for Descartes’ Myth. (shrink)

The paper argues that Daniel Dennett’s reductive account of consciousness in Consciousness Explained goes against theoretical commitments driving much of his previous work. I focus on considerations for the plurality of distinctive explanation of ourselves, as they have been articulated in Dennett's earlier work, and argue that Dennett's reductive framework is not adequately supported in the face of these considerations. The paper details tensions in Dennett’s work and shows how Consciousness Explained departs from the diagnoses of the mind/body problem offered (...) by Ryle, Wittgenstein and Sellars with which Dennett casts it as continuous. (shrink)

This paper argues that the behaviorist label yields a caricature of Ryle's position in The Concept of Mind that cannot be adequately fleshed out by reference to the larger corpus of Rylean texts. On the interpretation of Ryle that I offer here, he is best characterized as an "ontological agnostic." Ryle's aim, I believe, is to develop a nondenotational theory of meaning for mental-conduct terms--a theory of meaning which does not presuppose any metaphysical or ontological theory and, hence, does not (...) presuppose behaviorism. (shrink)