The Concept of Mind Quotes

“A person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“The vain man does not think he is vain.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“Minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just bits of not-clockwork. As thus represented, minds are not merely ghosts harnessed to machines, they are themselves just spectral machines. . . . Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements. I shall argue that these and other analogous conjunctions are absurd.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“Philosophers, chiefly since Descartes, have in their theories of knowledge and conduct operated with a concept of consciousness which has relatively little affinity with any of the concepts described above. Working with the notion of the mind as a second theatre, the episodes enacted in which enjoy the supposed status of ‘the mental’ and correspondingly lack the supposed status of ‘the physical’, thinkers of many sorts have laid it down as the cardinal positive property of these episodes that, when they occur, they occur consciously.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“The tangle of largely spurious problems, known as the problem of the Freedom of the Will, partly derives from this unconsciously stretched use of ‘voluntary’ and these consequential misapplications of different senses of ‘could’ and ‘could have helped’.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“For making mistakes is not an exercise of competence, nor is the commission of slips an exercise of knowledge how; it is a failure to exercise knowledge how.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“But when a person has done the right thing, we cannot then say that he knew how to do the wrong thing, or that he was competent to make mistakes.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“If you do not divulge the contents of your silent soliloquies and other imaginings, I have no other sure way of finding out what you have been saying or picturing to yourself. But the sequence of your sensations and imaginings is not the sole field in which your wits and character are shown; perhaps only for lunatics is it more than a small corner of that field. I find out most of what I want to know about your capacities, interests, likes, dislikes, methods and convictions by observing how you conduct your overt doings, of which by far the most important are your sayings and writings.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“Certainly there are some things which I can find out about you only, or best, through being told of them by you. The oculist has to ask his client what letters he sees with his right and left eyes and how clearly he sees them; the doctor has to ask the sufferer where the pain is and what sort of a pain it is; and the psychoanalyst has to ask his patient about his dreams and daydreams.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“In making sense of what you say, in appreciating your jokes, in unmasking your chess-stratagems, in following your arguments and in hearing you pick holes in my arguments, I am not inferring to the workings of your mind, I am following them. Of course, I am not merely hearing the noises that you make, or merely seeing the movements that you perform. I am understanding what I hear and see. But this understanding is not inferring to occult causes.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“I discover that there are other minds in understanding what other people say and do.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“The author is leading and the spectator is following, but their path is the same.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“Knowing how to apply maxims cannot be reduced to, or derived from, the acceptance of those or any other maxims.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“Intelligent' cannot be defined in terms of 'intellectual' or 'knowing how’ in terms of 'knowing that’; 'thinking what I am doing' does not connote 'both thinking what to do and doing it'. When I do something intelligently, i.e. thinking what I am doing, I am doing one thing and not two. My performance has a special procedure or manner, not special antecedents.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“In consciousness, self-consciousness and introspection he is directly and authentically apprised of the present states and operations of his mind. He may have great or small uncertainties about concurrent and adjacent episodes in the physical world, but he can have none about at least part of what is momentarily occupying his mind. It is customary to express this bifurcation of his two lives and of his two worlds by saying that the things and events which belong to the physical world, including his own body, are external, while the workings of his own mind are internal. This antithesis of outer and inner is of course meant to be construed as a metaphor, since minds, not being in space, could not be described as being spatially inside anything else, or as having things going on spatially inside themselves.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“When a boy begins to notice that he is fonder of arithmetic, or less homesick, than are most of his acquaintances he is beginning to be self-conscious, in this enlarged sense.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“A natural counterpart to the theory that minds constitute a world other than ‘the physical world’ is the theory that there exist ways of discovering the contents of this other world which are counterparts to our ways of discovering the contents of the physical world.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“The fact that Plato and Aristotle never mentioned them in their frequent and elaborate discussions of the nature of the soul and the springs of conduct is due not to any perverse neglect by them of notorious ingredients of daily life but to the historical circumstance that they were not acquainted with a special hypothesis the acceptance of which rests not on the discovery, but on the postulation, of these ghostly thrusts.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“If ordinary men never report the occurrence of these acts, for all that, according to the theory, they should be encountered vastly more frequently than headaches, or feelings of boredom; if ordinary vocabulary has no non-academic names for them; if we do not know how to settle simple questions about their frequency, duration or strength, then it is fair to conclude that their existence is not asserted on empirical grounds.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“I must however make it clear from the start that this refutation will not invalidate the distinctions which we all quite properly draw between voluntary and involuntary actions and between strong-willed and weak-willed persons. It will, on the contrary, make clearer what is meant by ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’, by ‘strong-willed’ and ‘weak-willed’, by emancipating these ideas from bondage to an absurd hypothesis.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“For this theory is just another unsuccessful attempt to wriggle out of a perfectly mythical dilemma.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“Roughly, execution and understanding are merely different exercises of knowledge of the tricks of the same trade.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“Of course, to execute an operation intelligently is not exactly the same thing as to follow its execution intelligently. The agent is originating, the spectator is only contemplating.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“The competent critic of prose-style, experimental technique, or embroidery, must at least know how to write, experiment or sew. Whether or not he has also learned some psychology matters about as much as whether he has learned any chemistry, neurology or economics.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“Nor does this understanding require a prolonged grounding in the not yet established laws of psychology. Following the moves made by a chess-player is not doing anything remotely resembling problematic psychological diagnosis.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“Nor does this understanding require a prolonged grounding in the not yet established laws of psychology.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“Drill dispenses with intelligence, training develops it.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

“When I do something intelligently, i.e. thinking what I am doing, I am doing one thing and not two. My performance has a special procedure or manner, not special antecedents.”
― Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind