Gilbert Ryle’s arguments aim to undermine both dualism and idealism. In the rest of this book, I seek to assess just how strong his arguments really are. It is necessary first of all, however, to examine Ryle’s general view of philosophy. For he thought that metaphysics, in the sense of a general theory of the nature of reality, is a fairly useless or even impossible undertaking. That would make my project superfluous. I try to show that no thinking person can really escape some sort of metaphysics (some theory of what kinds of things really exist), and that Ryle himself actually had one, which was some sort of common-sense (or ordinary language) philosophy. So the question of metaphysics is important and unavoidable – and I think the reason why many people are materialists is that they do not take the metaphysical question seriously enough.
I may seem to have come a long way from Ryle’s The Concept of Mind. But the point has been to see how Ryle’s denial of inner processes is almost the exact opposite of the idealist claim that it is just such inner processes, culminating in intelligent consciousness, that form the core and the inherent teleological aim of reality.
Most of our ideas and beliefs are pretty much determined by the very first steps of thought we take. Ryle starts The Concept of Mind with a set of philosophical assumptions or premises that are going to guide everything else he says. What I have been trying to do is to show that those premises are far from obviously true. For lots of philosophers, they are obviously false. Only if you accept them as true will the rest of Ryle’s book seem convincing – in fact, it will come to seem pretty obvious, and we might wonder why nobody thought of it before.
But you can get out of Ryle’s system by rejecting his first assumptions. What I have done is to set out some alternative assumptions that other philosophers make. There are living philosophers who still follow each of the alternatives that I have outlined. I myself am convinced that some version of idealism is true, and I am attracted to some key ideas of process philosophy. I am pretty sure that materialism is false.
Philosophy, it must be said, is not good for decisiveness. If you have a reasonably open mind, you will probably be persuaded by every new philosophy book you read – at least for a day or two. But as you get to know more and more theories, and you see all the good arguments philosophers can find for them, you get less and less able to decide which one is true. I once asked a very well known philosopher of religion whether he believed in God. “Well,” he said, “as a Catholic I do, but as a Buddhist I don’t.” “But are you a Catholic or a Buddhist?” I rather foolishly asked. To which his reply was, “Sometimes.” I suppose that in his Buddhist moods he could have quoted the Buddha and said, “I am and I am not, and it is not the case that either I am or that I am not.” But that would not have been much better.
I actually find the indecisiveness of philosophy rather helpful. Sometimes you just have to make decisions and stick by them. But it can be helpful to remember that we are rarely as certain as we think we are, and our own basic philosophical beliefs are rarely as obviously true as we pretend they are. Maybe the best we can do is to say which beliefs seem to us most obviously false and which seem most appealing, and admit that not everyone is going to agree with our decisions.
So I suppose the minimum thing I would say about Ryle is that his view is not as obviously true as he thinks it is – although it is not quite clear that he always thought it was obviously true. He did confess to me that on one occasion he thought he might have had a mental image. But then he recovered his composure and decided that he had only formed the belief that he had nearly had a mental image, without actually having nearly had one.
Gilbert Ryle was a common-sense philosopher – except that, because he was after all an Oxford man, he probably thought that only the members of Oxford Senior Common Rooms really possessed common sense. Most other people are superstitious and deluded most of the time. And that is the trouble with common sense. It is just not very common. What most common people think is mostly nonsense. But there is no system of philosophy that calls itself “common-nonsense” philosophy. At least the nonsense talked by philosophers is not common. And the common sense that philosophers share is very unlike what common people think.
Ryle was a leading member of a common-sense school that is sometimes called “ordinary-language philosophy”. We must remember that this is Oxford ordinary language, and it uses words that most people have never heard of. Philosophers of this school do not try to find out exactly what common-sense beliefs might be. Instead they talk about how people actually use language. They do not of course actually go out onto the streets and listen to ordinary people talking. The unwritten union rules of British universities state that only sociologists are allowed to do that. What philosophers must do is to sit in armchairs and think about people talking.
It turns out that as long as these imaginary people keep talking, everything goes reasonably smoothly. But when they start to think about what they are saying, things go horribly wrong. Then they start to ask questions like, “What did I mean by what I just said?” But in order to answer this question they first have to know what they mean by meaning. As they cannot work this out, because they are not quite sure what the question means, what they say quickly becomes meaningless. And philosophy is born.
It is a bit like riding a bicycle. If you just keep peddling, you will get along nicely. But if you ask yourself exactly how you keep your balance, you will probably fall off while you are trying to work it out. Most philosophers are like cyclists who fall off their bicycles, because they cannot work out exactly how they manage to stay on them.
So the job of ordinary-language philosophers is to stop people asking philosophical questions. Wittgenstein, a leading exponent of this type of philosophy, though regrettably he was based at Cambridge, thought that it was ridiculous to claim to be a professional philosopher – it was equivalent to claiming to be a professor of nonsense and grammatical mistakes. Unfortunately he was a professional philosopher and so were many of his pupils. They remained sane, when they did, by claiming that all other philosophers were talking nonsense, but that they had seen through the nonsense, and their job was simply to stop people being deluded by philosophers. They largely succeeded and in consequence they have largely become extinct. There was nothing left for philosophers to do.
On trying not to have a philosophical theory
Ryle and Wittgenstein both wrote so beautifully and were such commanding personalities that this became a dominant form of common-sense philosophy in mid-twentieth century Britain. It is common-sense because it refuses to invent grand theories about the universe just as a result of sitting in an armchair and thinking, and it insists on the diversity and flexibility of language, not as a clue to the ultimate nature of reality, but as a natural expression of human social behaviour.
The killer question, however, is this: it is said that philosophical theories arise out of misinterpretations of language use. But isn’t that a philosophical theory? It is, after all, an important insight that language has many different functions, that we learn it from others in a particular social context, and that a large part of its use is practical or action-guiding, not theoretical or descriptive. That is a view about what language is and about how it relates to the real world. It is a pragmatic theory, implying that the relation is one of usefulness, that there are many sorts of usefulness (depending on what we want it to be useful for), and that preferences and interests may well differ from one society, time, and place, to another.
This theory also claims that most traditional philosophical problems, like that of materialism versus idealism, determinism versus free will, passion versus reason or the subjectivity versus the objectivity of values, result from misinterpretations of language. I guess most philosophers who take one of these positions would be annoyed at being told they had merely made some kind of grammatical mistake. They think they are disagreeing about what is the case, even though with these sorts of question it does not seem possible to decide with certainty what the case is.
Philosophy deals with undecidable yet apparently factual questions, which sometimes have great practical consequences. One of those, which I spent some time on in earlier chapters, is whether observed objects remain the same when they are not observed. Ryle might say that is an unreal question, since it only arises in philosophy seminars, which can seem pretty unreal occasions. Professor Ayer, however, believed that the answer to that question was very important. Ayer agreed with the realists that what we see is what there is, but added that what there is is nothing except what we see. The idea of a world of unobserved physical objects is a logical construct, invented for pragmatic reasons – it helps us to find our way around the world if we pretend that it is really there. But if we realize that it is not really there, we will see that there is no point in talking about it or in discussing its hidden nature. All our language will be concerned with what we see, hear, touch or smell, and not with supposed hidden or “‘supernatural” realities.
Ayer summed this up with what he called the “verification principle” – the meaning of a statement is the method of its verification. To put it another way, if you cannot see or smell something, it makes no sense to talk about it. This is no doubt why Ayer never paid much attention to what other people thought. He couldn’t smell their thoughts, so it was meaningless to talk about them. This philosophy got rid of most traditional philosophical questions by showing that they were not just grammatical mistakes; they were actually meaningless.
It follows that both Ryle and Ayer thought that each other’s beliefs were mostly meaningless. Ayer was sure that it was nonsense to talk about unverifiable objects (like Ryle’s unvoiced thoughts), and Ryle was sure that it was nonsense to talk about “sense-data” (like Ayer’s smells). It is not surprising that they could not understand each other. They each thought the other’s beliefs were not just mistaken. They were literally nonsensical.
This situation provides a clue to the real nature of philosophy. Philosophers do not deal with particular factual questions, where everybody agrees what a “fact” is, and how to decide whether something is a fact or not (for example, whether light moves in a straight line or not). Philosophers deal with questions about what general scheme of concepts most adequately makes sense of the world. They deal with general conceptual frameworks for understanding and interpreting the world. Anybody who has a different conceptual framework will seem to them to be talking nonsense.
Such frameworks differ considerably from one another. Some think that in the end we should rely on common-sense beliefs and not be led astray by weird theories. Others (sometimes the same people on different days) think that many common-sense beliefs are actually based on linguistic mistakes and that we need a bit of linguistic hygiene to eliminate such mistakes. Some think that, whatever common sense says, we should only trust our sense-perceptions, which tell us how things really exist. Others think that only sense-perceptions really exist and there is nothing else to tell. And yet others, influenced by modern physics, think that we should not rely on either common sense or on sense-perception, since the real world is very much stranger than we think and wholly unrepresentable by the senses.
What is the evidence for the truth of such views? There is nothing that would conclusively settle a dispute between them. However hard Ayer tried to get Ryle to have some sense-data, Ryle would refuse to have them. Not only that, Ryle would deny that there were any such things, even though Ayer was having them all the time. This is clearly not a matter of evidence. It is a matter of which most basic or general concepts we are going to use to interpret our experience. Of course arguments can be presented for and against such basic interpretations, and those arguments seek to show that one favoured view presents an interpretation of the data of human knowledge that is adequate, comprehensive, consistent, fruitful, elegant, and appealing, while all other views are nonsensical – or, it might be more tolerant to say, less adequate interpretations of reality.
My dispute with Ryle, which I probably only have any hope of winning because he is safely dead, is a philosophical debate in this sense. It is not about the ordinary usage of words or about how best to tidy up the informal grammar of our language. It is a dispute about what human persons really are. It is about whether what is of unique importance about human persons is their possession of a rich inner mental life, over which they have some degree of responsible control, and which is quite different in character from and irreducible to the law-governed motions of physical particles in space. It is, to put it in more traditional (though almost universally misunderstood) terms, about whether it is helpful to speak of the human soul as what makes humans of distinctive value and significance.
Ryle and dualism
The Concept of Mind is largely devoted to arguing that the “Cartesian myth” of humans as “ghosts in mechanical machines” is nonsensical, and to proposing a different model of human beings as social animals exhibiting distinctive kinds of intelligent behaviour. The stress is on the primary importance of publicly observable behaviour. But it is not empiricist in the narrow sense that confines all knowledge to immediate data of the senses. Indeed it regards talk of “immediate data of the senses” as artificial and misleading jargon invented by philosophers, when we should just say that sometimes we hear and see things without using telescopes or microscopes.
If Ryle’s book convinces, it is not because it provides hitherto unconsidered evidence. It is because it gives a convincing model for understanding human beings as evolved social animals. This fits well with evolutionary biology, with an interest in social psychology and anthropology, and with a general loss of belief in a “soul” which is only possessed by human beings, marking them out as totally different in kind from all other animals. It is also a very non-mechanistic and non-reductionist view, and so makes it possible to retain a form of humanism, stressing the distinctiveness and importance of human capacities and excellences.
Ryle’s view, largely shared by Wittgenstein, is proposed as a perspective from which to perceive human nature, and it has been influenced by many converging strands of new factual knowledge, new capabilities, and novel evaluations in rapidly developing social systems. Philosophy changes as previous basic interpretations are felt to be inadequate in some way. It is the fate of each philosophical insight to become the nonsense of its succeeding generation. Descartes celebrated the birth of the new science in the seventeenth century, but Ryle set out to show that the Cartesian philosophy was nonsensical. Perhaps Ryle knew that the same thing was bound to happen to him.