Gilbert Ryle

Thinking and Reflecting

Just as there was a vogue at one time for identifying thinking either with mere processions or with more or less organised processions of images, so there is a vogue now for identifying thinking with something oddly called ‘language’, namely with more or less organised processions of bits of French or English, etc.

Use, usage and meaning

In 1932 Mr (now Sir) Alan H. Gardiner published The Theory of Speech and Language (Clarendon Press). A central theme of his book was what, with some acknowledged verbal artificiality, he labelled the distinction between ‘Language’ and ‘Speech’. I shall draw, develop and apply this distinction in my own way.

Mowgli in Babel

Res Cogitans is a stimulating and exasperating book. Again and again Vendler makes new breaks through the crusts of meaning-theory, epistemology and Cartesian exegesis; and then, through these breaks, pulls out plums that had rotted off their trees many summers ago. Out of his valuable improvements upon Austins locutionary taxonomy he rehashes the most romantic things in the Meno and the Meditations . In Chomskys wake, he effectively assails Skinnerian stimulus-response learning-theory; but then, in Chomskys wake, he surrenders learning-theory to Skinner, finding a shelter for just a few epistemic pets in a Darwinianized doctrine of racial concept-inheritance that is, pace Chomsky, unfenced even from Book I of Lockes Essay . Vendlers powerful chapter ‘On What One Knows’ blocks for good current attempts to reduce knowing to an elite suburb of believing; yet the books central concept of Thinking is so glued to the ‘that…’-clause that thinking is, by implication, denied to Beethoven and Capablanca, as well as to us when doing our undoctrinal car-driving, translating, verse-composing and aporia -tackling.

Fifty Years of Philosophy and Philosophers

The foundation of the (now Royal) Institute of Philosophy coincided with my own entry into the ranks of academic philosophers. It may therefore on this special occasion be of some interest if I cast some retrospective glances at philosophys daily life in and after the middle 1920s. I shall not steal from the proper hands the task of sketching the history of the Royal Institute itself; but I have some now fairly rare qualifications for describing the philosophical world into which it was born.

An appeal to language

It should be noticed that while ordinary folk, magistrates, parents and teachers, generally apply the words ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ to actions in one way, philosophers often apply them in quite another way.