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RETHINKING RYLE
A Critical Discussion of The Concept of Mind
Julia Tanney
I I N T R O D U C T I O N
Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind was published in 1949 both to wide acclaim and to general bemusement. It was anticipated by its critics as a book that would, if not set the agenda for philosophy of mind, then at least preoccupy it for the then foreseeable future. Now, more than sixty years after its initial publication, we are in a better position to appreciate its legacy. Although Ryle published on a wide range of topics in philo- sophy (notably in the history of philosophy—especially Plato—and in philosophy of language), including a series of lectures centred on philo- sophical dilemmas, The Concept of Mind remains his best known and most important work. Through this work, Ryle is thought to have accomplished two major tasks. First, he was seen to have put the final nail in the coffin of Cartesian dualism. Second, as he himself anticipated, he is thought to have argued on behalf of, and suggested as dualism’s replacement, the doctrine known as philosophical (and sometimes analytical ) behaviourism. Sometimes known as an ‘ordinary language’, sometimes as an ‘analytic’, philosopher, Ryle—even when mentioned in the same breath as Wittgenstein and his followers—is considered to be on a different, somewhat idiosyncratic (and difficult to characterise), philosophical track. To credit Ryle with demolishing substance dualism and paving the way for behaviourism is to underestimate his achievement. Hardly anyone
working in philosophy of mind today takes seriously the view Ryle describes in his book as ‘the official doctrine’—the view he ridicules as ‘the myth of the ghost in the machine’. It is widely agreed that the chaff of philosophical behaviourism has long been discarded while the wheat has been appropriated by the philosophical doctrine of functionalism. Func- tionalism in one of its many forms is widely accepted in the philosophy of mind today (and it gains its appeal by appearing as the best philosophical articulation of underlying assumptions in the cognitive sciences). It is a view that is thought to have saved the ‘reality’ of the mental from the ‘eliminativist’ or ‘fictionalist’ tendencies of behaviourism while acknow- ledging the insight (often attributed to Ryle) that the mental is importantly related to behavioural output or response (as well as to stimulus or input). According to a reasonably charitable assessment, the best of Ryle’s lessons has long been assimilated while the problematic has been discarded. If there are considerations still brewing from the 1930s and 1940s that would threaten the orthodoxy in contemporary philosophy of mind, these lie somewhere in the work of Wittgenstein and his followers—not in Ryle. I shall argue that the view just outlined, although widespread, repre- sents a fundamental misapprehension of Ryle’s work. First, the official doctrine is dead in only one of its ontological aspects: substance dualism may well have been repudiated but property dualism still claims a number of contemporary defenders. Indeed, both non-reductive and reductive physicalists are entangled in a metaphysical overgrowth whose roots are firmly established in the soil of the official doctrine. The problem of finding a place for the mental in the physical world, of accommodating the causal power of the mental, and of accounting for the phenomenal aspects of consciousness are all live problems in the philosophy of mind today because they share some combination of the doctrine’s ontological, epistemological, and semantic assumptions. So the time has come to pay new attention to Ryle’s little understood ‘dissolution’ of the mind–body problem. Second, and importantly, Ryle is not a philosophical behaviourist—at least he does not subscribe to any of the main tenets associated with that doctrine as it is known today. One may be confused by this if one is also confused about Ryle’s conception of philosophy. If one identi- fies him as an ‘analytic philosopher’ and thinks that the only proper goal of philosophy (attainable if not in practice at least in ideals) is definitional analysis then the association with behaviourism (in at least one of its many x RETHINKING RYLE
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, grâce à Ryle, a familiar view, which has widely become known as Cartesianism in Anglo-American philosophy. It has distinctive ontological, epistemo- logical, and semantic commitments. The ontological commitment The ontological strand of the view is that there are two different kinds of things, body and mind, that are somehow harnessed together. The one exists in space and is subject to mechanical or physical laws and the other one is not in space and is not subject to these laws. And yet the mind and body influence each other. What the mind wills, the legs, arms and the tongue execute; what affects the ear and the eye has something to do with what the mind perceives; grimaces and smiles betray the mind’s moods and bodily castigations lead, it is hoped, to moral improvement.^2 The view that mind and body are somehow fundamentally different or distinct, but none the less interact, leads to the philosophical conundrum known as the mind–body problem. For contemporary philosophers of mind, the mind–body problem no longer involves construing the mind as an independent substance. But working out the relation between mental and physical properties remains for certain philosophers an urgent project. Through the 1970s and 1980s and down to this day, the mind–body problem— our mind–body problem—has been that of finding a place for the mind in a world that is fundamentally physical. The shared project of the majority of those who have worked on the mind– body problem over the past few decades has been to find a way of (^2) The Concept of Mind (subsequent pagination refers to this edition, unless otherwise stated), 2. xii RETHINKING RYLE
accommodating the mental within a principled physicalist scheme, while at the same time preserving it as something distinctive—that is, without losing what we value, or find special, in our nature as creatures with minds.^3 Today the mind–body problem is often put in the form of an inconsistent triad. The mental and the physical are distinct; mental events or states are causally efficacious (they causally interact with physical and other mental events and states); and physics is a causally closed system (causal explan- ations of events are completely describable in the language of physics). The acceptance of any two of these statements seems to require the denial of the third. Yet, each statement on its own seems true. Various solutions to the mind–body problem have been offered; most of them attempt to reconstrue the first statement to allow a mental difference within a broadly monistic, physicalist ontology. Functionalism, coupled with a minimal commitment to physicalism, is the most widely held view today, but how it resolves the mind–body problem is still in need of clarification.^4 One may wonder whether Ryle’s arguments against the official doctrine might also apply to those who have given up on full-blown substance dualism but who none the less remain mystified how to find a place for the mental in the physical world. After all, even within the terms of the official doctrine the differences between the physical and mental were not only represented as differences inside the common framework of the categories of thing and stuff , but also, Ryle says, of attribute, state, process, change, cause , and effect. Not only were minds thought to be things, but different sorts of things from bodies, so were mental processes thought to be causes and effects ‘but different sorts of causes and effects from bodily movements.’^5 Minds were represented as extra centres of causal processes, rather like machines but also considerably different from them. The official doctrine, says Ryle, involved a para-mechanical hypothesis. Today, mental processes are thought to be special orders of causal processes, perhaps like the symbol manipulations in computational devices but (^3) Jaegwon Kim, Mind in a Physical World—An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation (A Bradford Book, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000), 2. (^4) See Kim, ibid. , where he describes in clear terms what the problem is and defends a (functional-reductive) version of physicalism as a solution to the problem. (^5) The Concept of Mind , 9. RETHINKING RYLE xiii
for the mental in the physical world and the problem of mental causation —still survive today. The epistemological and semantic commitments If the ontological commitments of the official doctrine lead to the mind–body problem, its epistemological commitments lead to a different conundrum. According to the traditional view, bodily processes are external and can be witnessed by observers, but mental processes are private, ‘internal’ as the metaphor goes (since mental processes are not supposed to be locatable anywhere). Mental processes or events are supposed, on the official view, to be played out in a private theatre; such events are known directly by the person who has them either through the faculty of introspection or the ‘phosphorescence’ of consciousness. The subject is, on this view, incorrigible—her avowals of her own mental states cannot be corrected by others—and she is infallible—she cannot be wrong about which states she is in.^10 Others can know them only indirectly through ‘complex and frail inferences’ from what the body does. It is worth putting Ryle temporarily aside and pausing to consider just what is sensible and what is not about this aspect of the official doctrine. There are, to be sure, certain mental phenomena for which something like this picture is correct. Consider one’s report that one is silently humming a tune to oneself or one’s description of last night’s dreams. It would be difficult to deny that there are episodes (hummings in the head, dreams) that these are reports or descriptions about ; so, too, would it be difficult to deny a kind of privacy which (in normal circumstances) makes the subject ‘authoritative’ and ‘incorrigible’ about whether or not such episodes occurred and about their character. Although Ryle does not deny— indeed he frequently peppers his discussions with—such episodes as hummings or dreaming, he seems to many (including his later self) to go too far in The Concept of Mind to minimize or downplay their existence. I shall argue later that such episodes can—indeed, must—be acknow- ledged within a reasonable view of the mind, but in order to understand Ryle’s attitude, it is important to note that the official doctrine does not (^10) The admission that there may be some mental states (as Freud has shown) that are not within the sight of our ‘mental eye’ as such is a mere variation, rather than a major deviation, Ryle points out, from the basic framework of the official doctrine. RETHINKING RYLE xv
merely acknowledge the existence of mental episodes of this kind; it takes them to be paradigmatic of all ‘mental states’ or ‘mental events’ (where these expressions have become accepted as the general placeholders for the supposed referents of all (or most) mental predicates). That is, the official doctrine assimilates all mental phenomena to these imaginative, or as some would say today, conscious (and occasionally unconscious) ‘experiences’. Not only is what you say about your imaginings and the subject of your dreams protected by correction from others and thus entitled to a special authority, so, too, is what you say about your sensa- tions and emotions, and even what you say about your beliefs, desires, fears, hopes, wants, proclivities, and character-traits.^11 But if all mental phenomena are to be assimilated to episodes like dreaming or the imagining of sounds and colours ‘in one’s head’, this raises a problem of how we tell that others have the right mental accom- paniments to be credited with having minds. It would be possible, on this view, for others to act as if they are minded, but for them to have none of the right conscious ‘experiences’ accompanying their actions for them to thus qualify. Perhaps we are in much the same position as Descartes, who thought it made sense to wonder whether these creatures are autom- ata instead. The epistemological commitments of the official doctrine lead to the philosophical conundrum known as the problem of other minds. 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—and Ryle is primarily interested in what he calls ‘mental conduct verbs’—picks out or refers to items that carry the metaphysical and epistemological load of that doctrine. The verbs, nouns and adjectives, with which in ordinary life we describe the wits, characters and higher-grade performances of the people with whom we have do, are required to be construed as signifying special episodes in their secret histories, or else as signifying tendencies for such episodes to occur.^12 (^11) I pass over here Ryle’s criticism that the official doctrine mistakenly construes our avowals or reports of such episodes as issuing from a special sort of observation or perception of shadowy existents. (^12) The Concept of Mind , 5. xvi RETHINKING RYLE
(in part) only knowable by me. Such expressions made by you mean something (in part) only knowable by you. So now, not only do I not know if it is a person (as opposed to an automaton) with whom I attempt to communicate; I cannot be said to understand much of what my inter- locutor is saying or perhaps even that it intends to communicate with me in the first place. The problem of other minds was at centre stage of discussions in philosophy of mind in the 1950s before the mind–body problem attracted the wider audience. The problem of other minds is this: if certain aspects of the official doctrine are correct and minds consist of episodes that are only privately knowable, then we need to rethink our claim to know (with certainty) that other minds exist. The thought at the time was that this was an intolerable conclusion, so philosophers set about to show how the claim to have knowledge of other minds is none the less justified. But though no longer at the centre, the problem of other minds lurks in the background of recent discussions of ‘phenomenal consciousness’, which inherit the epistemological and semantical aspects of the official doctrine. Consider, for example, whether it is possible that a person may enjoy colour experiences within a spectrum of colours that is systematically inverted with respect to another’s and thus ‘really see red’ even though she (correctly) uses the word ‘green’ to identify green things. Or consider the possibility of ‘zombies’ who are our behavioural duplicates but who enjoy no conscious experiences, and thus are not really conscious, have no sensations, feelings, or other mental states. Both (alleged) possibilities are thought to present a problem for relational theories of mind such as behaviourism and functionalism which ignore the phenomenal aspects of conscious experience.^14 To be sure, the literature surrounding these particular discussions is not about the problem of other minds, or of how we would know that we were encountering a zombie or someone with colour spectrum inversion since it is conceded from the beginning that there would be no way of knowing. (Interestingly—and alarmingly— this is no longer thought to be intolerable.) But the semantic/epistemo- logical aspects of the official doctrine survive in thought experiments that require the existence of mental episodes that are only privately knowable (^14) It has also been suggested as a problem for non-relational theories such as physicalism on the grounds that it is not clear how to view the relation between physical and phenomenal properties either. See Thomas Nagel’s ‘What’s It Like to be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review , vol. 83, 1974, 435–50. xviii RETHINKING RYLE
and further construe these episodes as essential parts of the meanings of mental expressions. 15 Ryle’s criticism of the official doctrine begins by pointing out an absurdity in its semantic consequences. If mental conduct verbs pick out ‘occult’ causes then we would not be able to apply those verbs as we do, so something must be wrong with a theory of mental phenomena that renders so inadequate our everyday use of these verbs. For, according to the official doctrine when someone is described as knowing, believing or guessing some- thing, as hoping, dreading, intending or shirking something, as design- ing this or being amused at that, these verbs are supposed to denote the occurrence of specific modifications in his (to us) occult stream of consciousness.^16 Ryle’s criticism of the view is that if it were correct, only privileged access to this stream of consciousness could provide authentic testimony that these mental-conduct verbs were correctly or incorrectly applied. ‘The onlooker, be he teacher, critic, biographer or friend, can never assure himself that his comments have any vestige of truth.’ And yet, it was just because we do in fact all know how to make such comments, make them with general correctness and correct them when they turn out to be confused or mistaken, that philosophers found it necessary to construct their theories of the nature and place of minds. Finding mental-conduct concepts being regularly and effectively used, they properly sought to fix their logical geography. But the logical geography officially recommended would entail that there could be no regular or effective use of these mental-conduct concepts in our descriptions of, and prescriptions for, other people’s minds.^17 Consider, for example, the widely-held supposition that a mental mechanism of some kind accounts for the difference between free, (^15) For further discussion, see my ‘On the Conceptual, Psychological, and Moral Status of Zombies, Swamp-Beings, and Other “Behaviourally Indistinguishable” Creatures’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , vol. LXIX, No. 1, July 2004, 173–86. (^16) The Concept of Mind , 5. (^17) Ibid. , 5. RETHINKING RYLE xix
‘ghostly’ they are none the less on this contemporary view just as occult (to us) as streams of another’s consciousness are on the official view. As causal mediators between sensory input and behavioural output, the ‘truth-makers’ that this theory says lie behind our descriptions of others as in pain, or as wanting to watch the news, or as believing that it is time for the show to start, remain in practice hidden. Thus, at best, such descriptions can only be good guesses or hypotheses in a mental explan- ation in which the observable behaviour is a contingent effect. At worst, such descriptions merely gesture at the real, underlying (presumably physical) explanation. But to view all our ascriptions of mental predicates as good guesses or hypotheses, or as merely gesturing at a more satisfy- ing underlying, physical explanation would be to undermine their explanatory role in the common, non-theoretical practices in which they are made. The upshot of Ryle’s argument is that theories about the nature of the alleged referents of the mental concepts we employ in our ordinary everyday commonsense practices cannot make a mystery of this employ- ment without threatening to rob the theories of their subject matter. The question, ‘How do persons differ from machines?’ arose just because everyone already knew how to apply mental-conduct concepts before the new causal hypothesis was introduced. This causal hypoth- esis could not therefore be the source of the criteria used in those applications.^21 Philosophers interested in providing theories about the nature of mental phenomena will baulk at the idea that their ‘causal hypotheses’ are to be construed as the source of criteria used in the application of mental concepts. They would prefer to be seen as making claims—empirical claims—about the nature of these concepts’ referents. The difficulty with this rejoinder is that the scientific/metaphysical realism that underpins it —that ordinary mental concepts purport to refer to items or properties whose nature is open to empirical investigation—is precisely what Ryle is challenging. It should be clear at least that whatever the theories proposed, they must have some relation to these criteria, or else how could it be claimed they are theories about seeing , or believing , or any other of (^21) The Concept of Mind , 11. RETHINKING RYLE xxi
the ordinary phenomena that we express using mental concepts?^22 How ought we to view the relation between the everyday use of mental con- cepts with their many-layered criteria of application and the theoretical hypotheses about the alleged referents of such concepts—when the theories conflict with the criteria?^23 There are some philosophers who have argued that empirical hypoth- eses in psychology or in the cognitive sciences should be allowed to appropriate commonsense mental concepts for their own scientific pur- poses even if the result conflicts with the ordinary use of these concepts. 24 There are also philosophers who have argued that work in the cognitive sciences will provide philosophers with the ‘constitutive’ story about the nature of the mind or of mental properties and some of these have argued that theories providing worthwhile reductions can conform to everyday thinking in most cases without conforming in all; they may in some cases rectify commonsense, naïve judgments.^25 The relation, then, between the ordinary uses of mental conduct terms and their uses under any proposed revision is still a live one. And Ryle’s reminders of how these concepts are used, what we normally appeal to when we wish to defend or explain this use, and of what we need them for, are therefore as important now as they were sixty years ago. This investigation of their use—a cartographic exploration of the logical geography of expressions in which these mental concepts figure—may, in the end, tell against a proposed theory about the nature of their putative referents.
I I I B E H AV I O U R I S M
In the last section of The Concept of Mind Ryle concedes that the general trend of his book is bound—harmlessly—to be stigmatised as behaviourist; (^22) By ‘criteria’ I just mean the kinds of considerations or reasons we give (and these will be diverse and depend on the circumstances) to explain, correct, challenge, and defend a particular application of the relevant concept. (^23) The problem is considerably worse for philosophers whose theories put heavier constraints on what is required for mentality; e.g., type-type identities between mental and physical properties, or a special history or evolution required of the alleged representations. (^24) Analogy: the identification of water and H 2 O is for scientific purposes and need not constrain the way ordinary folk use the term ‘water’. (^25) David Papineau, for example, has made this suggestion in ‘Doubtful Intuitions’, Mind and Language , vol. 11, no. 1 (March 1996), 132. xxii RETHINKING RYLE
The imputation of a motive for a particular action is not a causal inference to an unwitnessed event but the subsumption of an episode proposition under a law-like proposition [.. .]^30
... consciousness and introspection cannot be what they are officially described as being since their supposed objects are myths [.. .]^31 ... the concept of picturing, visualising, or ‘seeing’ is a proper and useful concept... its use does not entail the existence which we contemplate or the existence of a gallery in which such pictures are ephemerally suspended [.. .]^32 Ayer goes on to say that for a behaviourist programme to succeed, it has to be shown that mental talk can be reformulated in such a way as to eliminate any reference to an inner life. And yet The Concept of Mind abounds with such references. Ryle concedes the existence of an inner mental life, when he says, for example, that ‘Much of our ordinary thinking is conducted in internal monologue or silent soliloquy, usually accom- panied by an internal cinematograph-show of visual imagery’^33 or that exercises of knowing-how ‘can be overt or covert, deeds performed or deeds imagined, words spoken aloud or words heard in one’s head, pictures painted on canvas or pictures in the mind’s eye.’^34 So just what is Ryle up to? In order to answer this question, it may be worthwhile comparing Ryle’s project of mapping mental discourse with the doctrine of logical behaviourism which held a (very brief) attraction for the positivists of the Vienna Circle. Philosophers such as Carnap, Neurath, and Hempel were interested in rejecting the prevailing view of the time that there is an ‘impassable divide’ in principle between natural sciences on the one hand, and those of the mind, society, or culture on the other. 35 The view of the time was that culture, society, and mind were subjects imbued with mean- ing, requiring ‘empathic insight’, ‘introspection’, and other devices for ‘understanding the sense of meaningful structures’, while the natural (^30) Ibid. , 87 (^31) Ibid. , 149 (^32) Ibid. , 234 (^33) Ibid. , 28; although he later warns (in chapter 8) against a certain construal of this. (^34) Ibid. , 46 (^35) See Hempel’s ‘The Logical Analysis of Psychology’, reprinted in Ned Block, Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980). xxiv RETHINKING RYLE
sciences were subjects that could be studied by a combined use of descrip- tion and causal explanation. The positivists’ aim was to defend the view that ‘all of the branches of science are in principle of one and the same nature’: namely, branches of physics, which was hailed as the ‘unitary science’.^36 The difference between natural and social sciences, according to their view, is not a matter of one domain being essentially semantically- free and the other being semantically-laden, but is based on differences of methodology and interest. According to the positivists, psychology belongs with the science of sociology (the science of historical, cultural, and economic processes) which can be shown, insofar as its statements are meaningful, to be ‘physicalist’. In the early days of logical behaviour- ism, this meant that the meaningful statements of the special science could be translated, without loss of meaning, into statements that do not contain psychological concepts, but only the concepts of physics. According to the logical behaviourists, knowing how we would check whether a statement is true or false is to know what the statement means. Or: the meaning of a statement is its method of verification.^37 Just as the sentence ‘This watch runs well’ is shorthand for a host of statements having to do with the mechanism of the watch, and this mechanism’s relation to the hands on the face of the watch, their relation to numbers, and their relation to the movement of the planets, psychological state- ments, like ‘Paul has a toothache’, are similarly abbreviations for sets of physicalist statements purged of psychological terms, which may be used to verify (or falsify) the sentence. Any psychological statement that is meaningful is an abbreviation of the physicalist statements that would verify or falsify it, and is thus translatable into (a set of) such statements. Mental constructs, in their legitimate use, appear only as abbreviations in physicalist statements. Ryle’s view is standardly characterised as a weaker or ‘softer’ version of this doctrine. According to this standard interpretation, Ryle’s view is that statements containing mental terms can be translated, without loss of meaning, into subjunctive conditionals about what the individual will do in various circumstances. So Ryle (on this account) is to be thought of (^36) Ibid. , 21. (^37) For Ryle’s criticisms of verificationism see ‘Unverifiability by Me’ (first published
- and ‘The Verification Principle’ (first published 1951). Reprinted in Collected Papers Volume 2 (Routledge, Abingdon, 2009), 126–136 and 300–306. RETHINKING RYLE xxv
his discussion of dispositions in The Concept of Mind. In describing simple dispositions, Ryle says, such as the brittleness of glass or the smoking habit of a man, it is easy to unpack the hypothetical proposition implicitly conveyed in the ascription of the dispositional properties, since these are ‘single-track’ dispositions, ‘the actualisations of which are nearly uniform’.^41 But the practice of considering such simple models may lead, he says, to erroneous assumptions. Many disposition-concepts are not as easy to unpack since they are determinable concepts: their actualisations can take ‘a wide and perhaps unlimited variety of shapes’. When an object is described as hard, we do not mean only that it would resist deformation; we mean also that it would, for example, give out a sharp sound if struck, that it would cause us pain if we came into sharp contact with it, that resilient objects would bounce off it, and so on indefinitely. If we wished to unpack all that is conveyed in describing an animal as gregarious, we should similarly have to produce an infinite series of different hypothetical propositions.^42 Ryle goes on to say that the ‘higher-grade’ dispositions of people with which he is concerned are in general not single-track, but dispositions the exercise of which are indefinitely heterogeneous. When Jane Austen wished to show the specific kind of pride which characterised the heroine of ‘Pride and Prejudice’, she had to represent her actions, words, thoughts and feelings in a thousand different situ- ations. There is no standard type of action or reaction such that Jane Austen could say ‘My heroine’s kind of pride was just the tendency to do this, whenever a situation of that sort arose.’^43 Ryle embraces, in the passages cited above, each of the points that would defeat soft behaviourism. He agrees that a description of what may be involved in unpacking a dispositional predicate may be infinitely long (because of its unlimited variety of shapes; but also, he need not deny, because an ascription of a mental concept to another will be defeasible in (^41) The Concept of Mind , 31. (^42) Ibid. , 32. (^43) Ibid. , 32. RETHINKING RYLE xxvii
an open-ended set of circumstances); and he argues that an elucidation of pride, for example, will include not only actions and words, but thoughts and feelings as well. This alone should dampen any inclination to interpret Ryle’s discussion of ‘multi-track’ dispositions as committing him to a thesis about the translatability of mental statements or even to the weaker idea that there are logical entailments between statements containing mental predicates and those containing behavioural (including action) predicates. Ryle insists in The Concept of Mind that there is a kind of logical mistake involved in conjoining or disjoining ‘the mind exists’ and ‘the body exists’ in the same sentence, for the expressions use different senses of ‘exist’. The thought that the mind must simply be the body; that mental processes simply are physical processes; that mental properties just are patterns of behaviour; and that mental talk just is abbreviated physical talk are guilty of making this mistake.
... the ‘reduction’ of mental states and processes to physical states and processes presuppose the legitimacy of the disjunction ‘Either there exist minds or there exist bodies (but not both)’. It would be like saying, ‘Either she bought a left-hand glove and right-hand glove or a pair of gloves (but not both)’.^44 Nor, as Ayer correctly points out, is there any sign that Ryle wants to deny the ‘reality’ of mental processes, or that he holds a fictionalist or instrumentalist view about them as has often been alleged of various forms of behaviour- ism. On the contrary, early in the first chapter of the book Ryle warns the reader against interpreting him in this way: doing long division and making a joke are both examples, he says, of mental processes. Further, calling Ryle a behaviourist also fails to do justice, not only to his rejection of ‘isms’ in philosophy^45 but also to his conception of philosophy as the dissolution of dilemmas.^46 So what are we to make of Ryle’s discussion of dispositions, if not as setting the stage for a softened version of logical behaviourism? Ayer suggests an answer in his essay: (^44) The Concept of Mind , 12. (^45) ‘Taking Sides in Philosophy’ (first published 1937); reprinted in his Collected Papers Volume 2, op. cit. , 160–177. (^46) Dilemmas , The Tarner Lectures (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1954). xxviii RETHINKING RYLE
