Gilbert Ryle (19 August 1900, Brighton – 6 October 1976, Oxford), was a British philosopher, a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers that shared Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems,^[1] and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine". Some of his ideas in the philosophy of mind have been referred to as "behaviourist." Ryle's best known book is The Concept of Mind (1949), in which he writes that the "general trend of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be stigmatised as 'behaviourist'."^[2] Ryle, having engaged in detailed study of the key works of Bernard Bolzano, Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, himself suggested instead that the book "could be described as a sustained essay in phenomenology, if you are at home with that label."

Life[link]

Ryle was born in Brighton, England in 1900 and grew up in an environment of learning. His father was a Brighton doctor, a generalist who had interests in philosophy and astronomy, and passed on to his children an impressive library. Ryle was educated at Brighton College, and in 1919, he went up to Queen's College at Oxford, initially to study Classics but was quickly drawn to Philosophy. He would graduate with first class honours in 1924 and was appointed to a lectureship in Philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. A year later, he was to become a tutor. Ryle remained at Christ Church until World War II.^[3]

A capable linguist, he was recruited to intelligence work during World War II, after which he returned to Oxford and was elected Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He published his principal work, The Concept of Mind in 1949. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1945 to 1946, and editor of the philosophical journal Mind from 1947 to 1971. Ryle died on 6 October 1976 at Whitby, North Yorkshire.^[3]

His brothers John Alfred (1889–1950) and George Bodley (1902–1978), both educated at Brighton College as well, also had eminent careers. John became Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge 1935-45 and physician to King George V. After serving as Director of Forestry first for Wales and then England, George was Deputy-Director of the Forestry Commission 1963-65 and awarded the CBE.

His grandfather was John Charles Ryle, the first Anglican Bishop of Liverpool and 19th century evangelical leader.

Philosophy as Cartography[link]

Ryle believed it was no longer possible for a philosopher to believe that it was the task of a philosopher to study mental as opposed to physical objects. However, in its place, Ryle saw the tendency of philosophers to search for objects whose nature was neither physical nor mental. Ryle believed, instead, that “[p]hilosophical problems are problems of a certain sort; they are not problems of an ordinary sort about special entities.”^[3]

Ryle offers the analogy of philosophy as being like cartography. Competent speakers of a language, Ryle believes, are to a philosopher what ordinary villagers are to a mapmaker. The ordinary villager has a competent grasp of his village, and is familiar with its inhabitants and geography. However, when asked to interpret a map for the same knowledge he has practically, the villager will have difficulty until he is able to translate his practical knowledge into universal cartographal terms. The villager thinks of the village in personal and practical terms while the mapmaker thinks of the village in neutral, public, cartographical terms.^[5]

By "mapping" the words and phrases of a particular statement, philosophers are able to generate what Ryle calls "implication threads." In other words, each word or phrase of a statement contributes to the statement in that, if the words or phrases were changed, the statement would have a different implication. The philosopher must show the directions and limits of different implication threads that a "concept contributes to the statements in which it occurs." To show this, he must be "tugging" at neighbouring threads, which, in turn, must also be "tugging." Philosophy, then, searches for the meaning of these implication threads in the statements in which they are used.^[6]

[edit] The Concept of Mind

In The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle admits to having been taken in by the body-mind dualism which permeates Western philosophy, and claims that the idea of Mind as an independent entity, inhabiting and governing the body, should be rejected as a redundant piece of literalism carried over from the era before the biological sciences became established. The proper function of Mind-body language, he suggests, is to describe how higher organisms such as humans demonstrate resourcefulness, strategy, the ability to abstract and hypothesize and so on from the evidences of their behaviour.

He attacks the idea of 17th and 18th century thinkers (such as Descartes) that nature is a complex machine, and that human nature is a smaller machine with a "ghost" in it to account for intelligence, spontaneity and other such human qualities. While mental vocabulary plays an important role in describing and explaining human behavior, neither are humans analogous to machines nor do philosophers need a "hidden" principle to explain their super-mechanical capacities.

Ryle asserted that the workings of the mind are not distinct from the actions of the body. They are one and the same. Mental vocabulary is, he insists, merely a different manner of describing action. He also claimed that the nature of a person's motives is defined by that person's dispositions to act in certain situations. There are no overt feelings, pains, or twinges of vanity. There is instead a set of actions and feelings that are subsumed under a general behavior-trend or propensity to act, which we term "vanity."

Novelists, historians and journalists, Ryle points out, have no trouble in ascribing motives, moral values and individuality to people's actions. It is only when philosophers try to attribute these qualities to a separate realm of mind or soul that the problem arises. Ryle also created the classic argument against cognitivist theories of explanation, Ryle's Regress.

Criticisms[link]

One theme of The Concept of Mind is that dualism involves category mistakes and philosophical nonsense. Category mistakes and nonsense as philosophical topics continued to inform Ryle's work. Students in his 1967-8 Oxford audience would be asked rhetorically what was wrong with saying that there are three things in a field - two cows and a pair of cows. They were also invited to ponder whether the bung-hole of a beer barrel is part of the barrel or not.

A distinction deployed in The Concept of Mind, between knowing-how and knowing-that (e.g., knowing how to tie a reef knot and knowing that Queen Victoria died in 1901), has attracted independent interest. See, for example, Jason Stanley & Timothy Williamson, 'Knowing How', Journal of Philosophy, 98 : 8, 2001.

Ryle took a narrow view of the scope of philosophy. Philosophy, for Ryle, did not extend beyond the philosophy of mind, philosophical logic, and the philosophy of language. Ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics were 'philosophy' only by a strained courtesy and a burdensome historical tradition.

Legacy and reputation[link]

Ryle's notion of thick description, from "The Thinking of Thoughts: What is 'Le Penseur' Doing?"^[7] and "Thinking and Reflecting", has been an important influence on cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz.^[8]

The Concept of Mind was recognized on its appearance as an important contribution to philosophical psychology, and an important work in the ordinary language philosophy movement. However, in the 1960s and 1970s the rising influence of the cognitivist theories of Noam Chomsky, Herbert A. Simon, Jerry Fodor and others in the neo-Cartesian school became predominant. Chomsky even wrote a book entitled Cartesian Linguistics. In philosophy the two major post-war schools in the philosophy of mind, the representationalism of Jerry Fodor and the functionalism of Wilfrid Sellars posited precisely the 'internal' cognitive states that Ryle had argued against. However as influential modern philosopher and former student Daniel Dennett has pointed out, recent trends in psychology such as embodied cognition, discursive psychology, situated cognition and others in the post-cognitivist tradition have provoked a renewed interest in Ryle's work. Dennett has provided a sympathetic foreword to the 2000 edition of The Concept of Mind.^[9] Ryle remains a significant defender of the possibility of lucid and meaningful interpretation of higher-level human activities without recourse to an abstracted soul.

Richard Webster endorsed Ryle's arguments against mentalist philosophies, suggesting that they implied that "theories of human nature which repudiate the evidence of behaviour and refer solely or primarily to invisible mental events will never in themselves be able to unlock the most significant mysteries of human nature."^[10]

Writings[link]

Books[link]

• The Concept of Mind (1949)
• Dilemmas (1954), a collection of shorter pieces
• Plato's Progress (1966)
• On Thinking (1979)

Notes and references[link]

External links[link]

• Gilbert Ryle in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Gilbert Ryle at PhilosophyPages.com
• About Ryle's Concept of Mind
• Ordinary Language, the Philosophical Review LXII (1953)
• Symposium: Use, Usage and Meaning. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 35 (1961): 223-242. (with J. N. Findlay)
• The Electronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy - Issue dedicated to Ryle
• Profile at UXL Newsmakers

Peter Millican

Peter Millican (born March 1, 1958) is Gilbert Ryle Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Hertford College, University of Oxford, and Reader in Early Modern Philosophy at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. His primary interests include the philosophy of David Hume, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, and epistemology. Millican is particularly well known for his work on David Hume, and from 2005 until 2010 was Co-Editor of the journal Hume Studies. He is also an International Correspondence Chess Grandmaster, and has a strong interest in the field of Computing and its links with Philosophy. Recently he has developed a new degree programme at Oxford University, in Computer Science and Philosophy, due to accept its first students in 2012.

Education[link]

Peter Millican attended Borden Grammar School in Kent, United Kingdom. He read Mathematics and then Philosophy and Theology at Lincoln College, Oxford from 1976–1980. Staying at Lincoln College, Millican took the Philosophy B.Phil in 1982 (with a thesis in Philosophical Logic). Millican later obtained his Ph.D. with a thesis on Hume, Induction and Probability, and also a research M.Sc. in Computer Science, while employed at Leeds.^[1]

Academic career[link]

After teaching at the University of Glasgow from 1983, Millican was appointed in 1985 to a permanent Lectureship at Leeds University, teaching both Computing and Philosophy. After 20 years at Leeds, in 2005 Millican was appointed as Gilbert Ryle Fellow in Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford, promoted to Reader in Early Modern Philosophy in 2007, and Professor of Philosophy in 2010.^[1] In 2009, he was appointed as the first "David Hume Illumni Fellow" at Edinburgh University, a visiting position that he has occupied during 2010-11.^[2]

Research[link]

Millican is best known for his research on David Hume, notably on the development of Hume's philosophy, and on the interpretation of his writings on induction and causation. In a 1995 paper,^[3] Millican gave a detailed analysis of Hume's famous argument concerning induction, aiming to reconcile its apparent sceptical thrust with Hume's clear endorsement of inductive science: the previous interpretations that he was attacking had either condemned Hume as an inconsistent sceptic, or denied the scepticism entirely. His 2002 collection included a paper refining his analysis, and arguing against recent revisionary non-sceptical interpretations (particularly those proposed by Don Garrett and David Owen) - this debate is still ongoing. The collection brought together a range of papers by eminent Hume scholars that emphasised the distinctive importance of Hume's work in the 1748 Enquiry.^[4] Millican's first chapter also developed an overall view of the Enquiry as presenting an implicit "manifesto for inductive science", with the controversial implication that the Enquiry, rather than the Treatise, should be taken as presenting Hume's definitive perspective on these things.

More recently, Millican has published a series of substantial papers with the aim of deciding the so-called "New Hume" debate, which has been the most prominent controversy in Hume scholarship over the last 20 years ("New Humeans" take Hume to be a believer in a form of causation that goes beyond the constraints of his famous "two definitions of cause"). The first of these appeared in a 2007 collection on the debate,^[5] the second in the July 2009 issue of Mind (journal), and the third (responding to replies) in a 2010 collection on causation.^[6] The Mind paper concludes that "the New Hume interpretation is not just wrong in detail - failing in the many ways documented above - but fundamentally misrepresents the basis, core, point and spirit of Hume's philosophy of causation".^[7] A reviewer of the third paper judges that "Millican convincingly argues that none of his opponents' attempts to [answer his criticisms] is plausible. I am not alone in thinking the New Hume debate has run its course; as Millican says at the end of his essay, 'it is time to call it a day' (p. 158)."

Much of Millican's other research, while not itself historical, has focused on Humean topics such as induction, probability, and philosophy of religion, but also on philosophy of language. His most significant non-Humean papers are on the logic of definite descriptions (1990), the morality of abortion (1992), and Anselm's Ontological Argument (2004).".^[8]

Philosophy and computing[link]

As an educator, Millican's most distinctive contributions have been on the interface between Computing and Philosophy, devoting most of his career at Leeds to developing the teaching of Computer Science and programming to students in the Humanities.^[1] More recently, he has championed a new degree in Computer Science and Philosophy at Oxford University (see Degrees of the University of Oxford), which is due to start in 2012. To encourage students in the Humanities to get involved in Computing, Millican developed a number of user-friendly software teaching systems.

Obama autobiography controversy[link]

In 2008 and 2009 some Republican commentators advanced claims that Obama's autobiography, Dreams from My Father was written or ghost-written by Ayers. In a series of articles in American Thinker and WorldNetDaily, author Jack Cashill claimed that his own analysis of the book showed Ayers' writing style, and backed this up citing analyses by American researchers using Millican's Signature software. In late October 2008, shortly before the US Presidential election, US Congressman Chris Cannon and his brother-in-law attempted to hire Millican to prove Ayers' authorship using computer analysis. Millican refused after they would not assure him in advance that his results would be published regardless of the outcome.^{[9][10][11][12]} After some analysis Millican later criticized the claim, saying variously that he had "found no evidence for Cashill's ghostwriting hypothesis", that it was "unlikely"^[13] and that he felt "totally confident that it is false".^[11]

Main publications[link]

• "Content, Thoughts, and Definite Descriptions", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 64 (1990), pp. 167–203

• "The Complex Problem of Abortion", in Philosophical Ethics in Reproductive Medicine (co-edited by Millican with D. Bromham, M. Dalton, and J. Jackson, Springer Verlag: 1992), pp. 161–88.

• "Hume's Argument Concerning Induction: Structure and Interpretation", in David Hume: Critical Assessments, edited by Stanley Tweyman (Routledge, 1995), vol. 2 pp. 91–144 978-0-415-02012-1

• The Legacy of Alan Turing, volume 1 (Machines and Thought [1]) and volume 2 (Connectionism, Concepts, and Folk Psychology [2]), (both co-edited by Millican with Andy Clark, Oxford University Press: 1996)

• "The Context, Aims, and Structure of Hume's First Enquiry", in Reading Hume on Human Understanding (2002, below), pp. 27–65

• "Hume's Sceptical Doubts concerning Induction", in Reading Hume on Human Understanding (2002, below), pp. 107–73

• "Critical Survey of the Literature on Hume and the First Enquiry", in Reading Hume on Human Understanding (2002, below), pp. 413–74

• Reading Hume on Human Understanding: Essays on the First Enquiry (Oxford, Oxford University Press: 2002) [3]

• "The One Fatal Flaw in Anselm's Argument", Mind 113 (2004), pp. 437–76

• Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2007) [4]

• "Humes Old and New: Four Fashionable Falsehoods, and One Unfashionable Truth", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 81 (2007), pp. 163–99

• "Against the New Hume", in The New Hume Debate, revised edition, edited by Rupert Read and Kenneth Richman (Routledge: 2007), pp. 211–52 978-0-415-39975-3

• "Hume, Causal Realism, and Causal Science", Mind 118 (2009), pp. 647–712

• "Hume, Causal Realism, and Free Will", in Causation and Modern Philosophy, edited by Keith Allen and Tom Stoneham (Routledge: 2010), pp. 123–65 [5]

• "Twenty Questions about Hume's 'Of Miracles'" in Philosophy and Religion, edited by Anthony O'Hear (Cambridge University Press: 2011), pp. 151–92 [6]

Chess career[link]

Millican played chess over-the-board in his youth, and captained Oxford University to victory in the National Chess Club Championship in 1983.^[14] He later turned to correspondence chess, becoming British Champion in 1990.^[15] This brought him the British Master title, and he then became an International Master in 1993 by winning his Semifinal group in the 19th World Correspondence Championship. With an international rating of 2610 (ranked 31 in the world), Millican was invited to play in the NPSF-50 "super tournament" (the first-ever Category 15 tournament, with an average rating over 2600).^[16] By coming fifth - after Ulf Andersson, Gert Jan Timmerman, Joop van Oosterom, and Hans-Marcus Elvert de:Hans-Marcus Elwert, Millican qualified in 1997 as an International Correspondence Chess Grandmaster.^[17] Analyzed the Double Muzio chess opening in detail, asserting equality.^[18]

External links[link]

• Personal Website
• Staff Homepage at Hertford College, Oxford
• Website on his work on David Hume
• Website on his work on Philosophy and Computing

References[link]