Gilbert Ryle

Family Gilbert Ryle's father, Reginald John Ryle, was a Brighton doctor, a generalist who had interests in philosophy and astronomy, passing on to his children a large library. Gilbert's father was a son of John Charles Ryle, the first Anglican Bishop of Liverpool. The Ryles were Cheshire landed gentry; Gilbert's elder brother, John Alfred Ryle, of Barkhale, Sussex, became head of the family. Gilbert Ryle's mother, Catherine, was daughter of Samuel King Scott (younger brother of the architect Sir George Gilbert Scott) by his wife Georgina, daughter of doctor William Hulme Bodley, and sister of architect George Frederick Bodley, himself a student of Sir George. Cousins of the Ryle family thus include the haematologist Ronald Bodley Scott, architect George Gilbert Scott Jr., founder of Watts & Co., and his son, Giles Gilbert Scott, designer of the Battersea Power Station. Early life and education Gilbert Ryle was born in Brighton, England, on 19 August 1900, and grew up in an environment of learning. He was educated at Brighton College and in 1919 went up to The Queen's College at Oxford to study classics, but was soon drawn to philosophy. He graduated with a "triple first"; he received first-class honours in classical Honour Moderations (1921), literae humaniores (1923), and philosophy, politics, and economics (1924). Career In 1924, Ryle was appointed lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. A year later, he became a fellow and tutor at Christ Church, where he remained until 1940. In the Second World War, Ryle was commissioned in the Welsh Guards. A capable linguist, he was recruited into intelligence work and by the end of the war had been promoted to the rank of Major. After the war he returned to Oxford and was elected Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He published 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. Ryle was the subject of a portrait by Rex Whistler, which he said made him look like "a drowned German General". Michael Dummett recalls Ryle's complaint, adding "but that was exactly what he did look like". He was a lifelong bachelor, and in retirement he lived with his twin sister Mary. ==Work==

Ryle has been characterized as an "ordinary language" philosopher, a style of philosophy he helped pioneer. According to Bryan Magee, Ryle's paper "Systematically Misleading Expressions" (1931) contains the "first clear public statement of the view of philosophy that has come to be known as Linguistic Philosophy", while G.J. Warnock says of his book, The Concept of Mind, that "it was one of the first, and hence has been one of the most widely influential, attacks in the new style upon an old family of problems". The Concept of Mind In The Concept of Mind, Ryle argues that dualism involves category mistakes and philosophical nonsense, two philosophical topics that continued to inform Ryle's work. He rhetorically asked students in his 1967–68 Oxford audience 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 bunghole of a beer barrel is part of the barrel or not. Knowing-how and knowing-that A distinction deployed in The Concept of Mind, between 'knowing-how' and 'knowing-that', has attracted independent interest. This distinction is also the origin of procedural (knowing-how) and declarative (knowing-that) models of long-term memory. This distinction is widely accepted in philosophy. By mapping the words and phrases of a particular statement, philosophers are able to generate what Ryle calls implication threads: 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. and "Thinking and Reflecting". According to Ryle, there are two types of descriptions: • thin description: surface-level observations of behaviour, e.g. "His right hand rose to his forehead, palm out, when he was in the vicinity of and facing a certain other human." • thick description: adds context to such behaviour. Explaining this context necessitates an understanding of the motivations people have for their behaviours, as well as how observers in the community understand such behaviour: "He saluted the General." ==Legacy==

Ryle's notion of thick description Peter Strawson, a contemporary of Ryle, paid tribute to him by noting that "by reason of his energy, his authority, and his vision—besides the brilliance and inventiveness displayed in his own philosophical writing—contributed perhaps more than any other single person to the flowering of the subject in England in the years after the war". The Concept of Mind was recognised on its appearance as an important contribution to philosophical psychology, and an important work in the ordinary language philosophy movement. But 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. The two major postwar schools in philosophy of mind, Fodor's representationalism and Wilfrid Sellars's functionalism, posited precisely the internal cognitive states that Ryle had argued against. Philosopher Daniel Dennett, a student of Ryle's, has said that 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 provided a sympathetic foreword to the 2000 edition of The Concept of Mind. ==Works==

• 1949. The Concept of Mind • 1954. Dilemmas: The Tarner Lectures 1953, a collection of shorter pieces • 1962. A Rational Animal, Auguste Comte Memorial Lecture delivered on 26 April 1962 at the London School of Economics and Political Science • 1966. ''Plato's Progress'' • 1971. Collected Essays 1929–1968, in two volumes, 57 essays • 1977. Contemporary Aspects of Philosophy, editor • 1979. On Thinking ==References==