Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

Ryle thought that he had eschewed this picture, but that he was unable to do so is shown by his attempt to show, paradoxically and fruitlessly, that there were no such things as incorrigible reports. Ryle was afraid that if there were any such reports, then something like (P) would have to be true in order to explain their existence. For he thought that if there were such a thing as an ability to make incorrigible noninferential reports on inner states, this would show that someone who knew nothing of behavior could know everything about inner states, and thus that Descartes was right after all. He rightly criticized the usual Cartesian account of introspection as a piece of “para-optics,” but he did not have another account available and thus was forced into the impossible position of having to deny the phenomenon of privileged access altogether. He devoted the least convincing chapter of The Concept of Mind (“Self-Knowledge”) to the paradoxical claim that “the sorts of things that I can find out about myself are the same as the sorts of things that I can find out about other people, and the methods of finding them out are much the same.”10 The result was that many philosophers who agreed that Ryle had shown that beliefs and desires were not inner states agreed also that he had left raw feels untouched, and thus that a choice still had to be made between dualism and materialism.11

September 18, 2020. Not bad yet. Page 101. Ryle is wrestling with Descartes Which shows the relevance of Descartes still.