Reading Gilbert Ryle's "Dilemmas"
Im proposing a reading group for Gilbert Ryles Dilemmas as a continuation of the exploration of Ordinary Language Philosophy that started in the discussion of Austins Sense and Sensibilia. However, this is a very different take on the idea, if it is any take on the idea; indeed, one could think that Ryle had never read or encountered Austin (just as there is no hint in Austins book that he had ever encountered Ryle).
The book is a series of lectures, delivered in 1953, so more than 10 years before Sense and Sensibilia and some 3 years after Ryles best-known book, The Concept of Mind (1949).
Here's a link to download the book. This is a .PDF from University of Milan. Seems Ok. -
Ryle's "Dilemmas"
The lectures are an exploration of a specific dilemmas, but not dilemmas in which two (or more) solutions are proposed to a given problem or question, such that if one is true, the other(s) is/are false. Presumably, since its just a question of evidence, there is no role for philosophy.
He is interested in disputes, which are not rival solutions of the same problem, but which seem to be irreconcilable with one another. (p.1) He gives three examples, all of which occur in the topics of the other lectures, to illustrate his general description:-
1. From one point of view, we find out what is there by perceiving. From the other point of view, that of the inquirer into the mechanism of perception, what we perceive never coincides with what is in the world. (p. 2)
2. We feel quite sure both that a person can be made moral and that he cannot be made moral; and yet that both cannot be true (p.4)
3. In the eighteenth and again in the nineteenth century, the impressive advance of a science seemed to involve a corresponding retreat by religion. (p.6)
There is a discussion of each example. It is typical of Ryle that his main aim is to bring out the variety of reasons why the issue is a dilemma.
Then he arrives at the topic of categories. This is quite extensive (pp. 8 11). He concludes with It follows directly that neither the propositions which embody such concepts nor the questions which would be answered, truly or falsely, by such propositions admit of being automatically entered into a ready-made register of logical kinds or types. (p.11) He resists fixed frameworks and careless generalization. He pulls the threads together on this page, and moves on to some remarks about philosophy and outlines of what his project is.
His claim is modest:- the most radical cross-purposes between specialist theories derive from the logical trickiness not of the highly technical concepts employed in them, but of the underlying non-technical concepts employed as well in them as in everyone else's thinking. (p.12) This focus on non-technical concepts (also identified as public concepts) is the nearest we get to any focus on anything ordinary. What he does say is that:- These inter-theory questions are not questions internal to those theories. They are not biological or physical questions. They are philosophical questions. (p.13)
It is striking that Ryle has not chosen any of the well-known philosophical dilemmas the feud, for example, between Idealists and Realists, or the vendetta between Empiricists and Rationalists. (p.13) In fact, of course, his examples all have connections to well-known philosophical issues. But they are re-cast into a different articulation. No doubt, this is to enable or compel us to approach them without the orthodox philosophical spectacles.
Ryle explains his approach with a metaphor:- A live issue is a piece of country in which no one knows which way to go. As there are no paths, there are no paths to share. Where there are paths to share, there are paths; and paths are the memorials of undergrowth already cleared. (p.13) Compare Wittgensteins remark that he does not know his way about and his desire for an oversight.
There is nothing specifically about ordinary language here. On the contrary, he includes technical, scientific or specialist concepts in his concerns it is a marked difference from Austin. He is analysing the issues with apparently little self-consciousness about his method. However, the last lecture will give us a more detailed discussion of that dilemma.
He ends with a few further remarks about philosophy and his final word is:- He (sc. Plato) was too much of a philosopher to think that anything that he had said was the last word. It was left to his disciples to identify his footmarks with his destination. (p. 14) That sounds like a warning to us all.
The lectures are:-
Dilemmas
'It Was To Be'
Achilles And The Tortoise
Pleasure
The World Of Science And The Every-Day World
Technical And Untechnical Concepts
Perception
Formal And Informal Logic
Just for fun, heres the Ngram for Ryle vs Austin:-
Ngram Ryle vs Austin
The book is a series of lectures, delivered in 1953, so more than 10 years before Sense and Sensibilia and some 3 years after Ryles best-known book, The Concept of Mind (1949).
Here's a link to download the book. This is a .PDF from University of Milan. Seems Ok. -
Ryle's "Dilemmas"
The lectures are an exploration of a specific dilemmas, but not dilemmas in which two (or more) solutions are proposed to a given problem or question, such that if one is true, the other(s) is/are false. Presumably, since its just a question of evidence, there is no role for philosophy.
He is interested in disputes, which are not rival solutions of the same problem, but which seem to be irreconcilable with one another. (p.1) He gives three examples, all of which occur in the topics of the other lectures, to illustrate his general description:-
1. From one point of view, we find out what is there by perceiving. From the other point of view, that of the inquirer into the mechanism of perception, what we perceive never coincides with what is in the world. (p. 2)
2. We feel quite sure both that a person can be made moral and that he cannot be made moral; and yet that both cannot be true (p.4)
3. In the eighteenth and again in the nineteenth century, the impressive advance of a science seemed to involve a corresponding retreat by religion. (p.6)
There is a discussion of each example. It is typical of Ryle that his main aim is to bring out the variety of reasons why the issue is a dilemma.
Then he arrives at the topic of categories. This is quite extensive (pp. 8 11). He concludes with It follows directly that neither the propositions which embody such concepts nor the questions which would be answered, truly or falsely, by such propositions admit of being automatically entered into a ready-made register of logical kinds or types. (p.11) He resists fixed frameworks and careless generalization. He pulls the threads together on this page, and moves on to some remarks about philosophy and outlines of what his project is.
His claim is modest:- the most radical cross-purposes between specialist theories derive from the logical trickiness not of the highly technical concepts employed in them, but of the underlying non-technical concepts employed as well in them as in everyone else's thinking. (p.12) This focus on non-technical concepts (also identified as public concepts) is the nearest we get to any focus on anything ordinary. What he does say is that:- These inter-theory questions are not questions internal to those theories. They are not biological or physical questions. They are philosophical questions. (p.13)
It is striking that Ryle has not chosen any of the well-known philosophical dilemmas the feud, for example, between Idealists and Realists, or the vendetta between Empiricists and Rationalists. (p.13) In fact, of course, his examples all have connections to well-known philosophical issues. But they are re-cast into a different articulation. No doubt, this is to enable or compel us to approach them without the orthodox philosophical spectacles.
Ryle explains his approach with a metaphor:- A live issue is a piece of country in which no one knows which way to go. As there are no paths, there are no paths to share. Where there are paths to share, there are paths; and paths are the memorials of undergrowth already cleared. (p.13) Compare Wittgensteins remark that he does not know his way about and his desire for an oversight.
There is nothing specifically about ordinary language here. On the contrary, he includes technical, scientific or specialist concepts in his concerns it is a marked difference from Austin. He is analysing the issues with apparently little self-consciousness about his method. However, the last lecture will give us a more detailed discussion of that dilemma.
He ends with a few further remarks about philosophy and his final word is:- He (sc. Plato) was too much of a philosopher to think that anything that he had said was the last word. It was left to his disciples to identify his footmarks with his destination. (p. 14) That sounds like a warning to us all.
The lectures are:-
Dilemmas
'It Was To Be'
Achilles And The Tortoise
Pleasure
The World Of Science And The Every-Day World
Technical And Untechnical Concepts
Perception
Formal And Informal Logic
Just for fun, heres the Ngram for Ryle vs Austin:-
Ngram Ryle vs Austin
Comments (157)
For example:
(13)
On the other hand, and with this I am in agreement, when he says that the disputes between Idealists and Realists or Empiricists and Rationalists do not matter (13), this supports my point. There is a seemingly endless set of divisions within and across these distinctions. The problems these disputes attempt to solve and problems they create.
With so little time on my hands , would like to nail down a remark by Wittgenstein that helps me get into the essential crux of the matter upon which to build subsequent structure , so as to recollect some way of commenting a-posterior .
Interesting forum from different points of tangency .gearing toward
Yes, and I have the impression that's a biig part of Ryle's reason for trying to find another way to articulate philosophical problems. More and more interpretations don't help - they're infected with the same problems. And philosophers are supposed to be very clear about things!
Quoting Fooloso4
I think you've got him upside down. He sets up his target:-
"Some loyal Aristotelians, who like all loyalists ossified their master's teaching, treated his list of categories as providing the pigeon-holes in one or other of which there could and should be lodged every term used or usable in technical or untechnical discourse. Every concept must be either of Category I or of Category II or ... of Category X. Even in our own day there exist thinkers who, so far from finding this supply of pigeon-holes intolerably exiguous, find it gratuitously lavish; and are prepared to say of any concept presented to them' Is it a Quality? If not, then it must be a Relation'."
... and knocks it down.
"In opposition to such views, it should suffice to launch this challenge: 'In which of your two or ten pigeon-holes will you lodge the following six terms, drawn pretty randomly from the glossary of Contract Bridge alone, namely "singleton", "trump", "vulnerable", "slam", "finesse" and "revoke"?' ........... The truth is that there are not just two or just ten different logical metiers open to the terms or concepts we employ in ordinary and technical discourse, there are indefinitely many such different metiers and indefinitely many dimensions of these differences". p.10
I must say, I sympathize with his impatience with systematizers. But I don't think that the hand-waving in the last sentence is helpful. Even if there is no systematic structure, it would be good to have some ideas about when and why two concepts should go into different categories. And one wonders why he suddenly stops talking about categories and starts talking about "metiers".
Wittgenstein is hard to nail down. He has several remarks about philosophy which are mostly different metaphors. "The point of philosophy is to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle" or "Back to the rough country!" I don't think you could get a consistent, complete definition from them.
Neither Ryle nor Wittgenstein are fans of essences.
Quoting Bella fekete
I'm sorry, I don't understand this.
As the engram shows, Ryle was well thought of in the Sixties and Seventies, but has scarcely dimmed since then. He occupies a singular place in the history of Philosophy, as what is misleadingly known as Ordinary Language Philosophy moved through considerations of intentionality into the recent work on Consciousness and Philosophy of Mind. Ryle is a progenitor of this path, his main contribution being the book The Concept of Mind, in which he coined the term "Ghost in the machine" and developed the philosophical notion of the "category mistake".
But here we have a discussion of what might loosely be called "domains of discourse", where what we have to say about a topic, considered in one way, is utterly at odds with what we have to say when we consider the very same topic in another way. We would talk of one having responsibility what one does, until we talk about what caused us to act, and responsibility no longer enters into the issue. We would talk about what we see or hear, until we talk about the physiology of perception, and cease to mention seeing and hearing, instead talking or nerves and physics. How can this be?
Perhaps I do, but when I ask:
Quoting Fooloso4
what I have in mind is the treatment of the categories of different disciplines, that, for example, as cited, there are according to him different "kinds" of thinking such as those he names, biology, physics, and philosophy. He says that the claims and counter-claims between them are not questions internal to those theories. But cross-disciplinary studies such as biophysics seems to contradict this. The boundaries are not natural or immutable. Understanding biology at some point requires an understanding of physics. Consider, for example, is the question regarding the determining factors between what is living and what is not a biological or a philosophical question? Is the question itself problematic because we lack the conceptual clarity this distinction presupposes? Is it exasperated by the assumption that there are conceptual and categorical boundaries to disciplinary domains? Does the question of life itself contain a category mistake in boundary cases?
Then perhaps he is on about something else.
-Banno
Boundary situations are it seems to me either all or none inclusively conceived , where the later leads to a reduction to none sense. As revolutionary pressures oblige further and further restructuring, the signs, the meanings or words become progressively tenuous.
Neither Ryle nor Wittgenstein are fans of essences.
-Ludwig V
/\ is apparently only the inverse of V that I thought indicated various metaphors , one conceivably signaling an inverse position.
I have no idea of the possible intervening variables to such predisposed structural problems, in line with the basically essentialist position taken by Wittgenstein where:
Ryle explains his approach with a metaphor:- A live issue is a piece of country in which no one knows which way to go. As there are no paths, there are no paths to share. Where there are paths to share, there are paths; and paths are the memorials of undergrowth already cleared. (p.13) Compare Wittgensteins remark that he does not know his way about and his desire for an oversight.
There is nothing specifically about ordinary language here. On the contrary, he includes technical, scientific or specialist concepts in his concerns it is a marked difference from Austin. He is analysing the issues with apparently little self-consciousness about his method. However, the last lecture will give us a more detailed discussion of that dilemma.
What I get from this is the last paragraph in which he looses the path where the ground below that can no longer can be recalled.
Which goes along you thought: way out of the fly- country and back to the rough country- ( he needs an oversight)
This comparison is actually grounded on an inverse topological layout,
An oversight and a return to the rough country cover a non too transparent intension to hold the object at bay, which seems to bear out with:
I think you've got him upside down. He sets up his target
Ludwig V
That series of conjectures is more convincing than not even by the progression within this here forum, of the con-foundation of intended disposition
I take it you use "topological" loosely, like some use "fractal" - both well-defined mathematical terms.
Quoting Bella fekete
??
Forum Tips and Tricks - How to Quote
-Fool
Is he? And what is that? Simply citing an article that goes beyond Ryle without identifying which of the issues in this debate are pertinent does not tell us what this something else he is on about is.
More helpful is what Ryle himself says in the section "The Origin of the Category- Mistake" from The Concept of Mind
(9)
Further on he says:
(11-12)
Banno
Is he? And what is that? Simply citing an article that goes beyond Ryle without identifying which of the issues in this debate are pertinent does not tell us what this something else he is on about is.
-Fooloso4
Sure , it may be merely a categorical error, but then again merely an effort to hide his uncommon defense of that unknown entity, which, not actually opposite to a mechanistic representation, may imply that it really no defense, because it really is presumed to be bounded by it.
This logical subtly was present ages ago in the the Eastern World, where such distinctions need not require a mechanistic interpretation.
I'm not following you. But that's OK, I am not a philosopher.
Those passages are surprisingly resonant for me. I have been making a very similar observation in another thread in respect of Descartes' Meditation #3, especially the pernicious consequences of Descartes' concept of 'spiritual substance'. I will try and find time to listen to some of the materials.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, that example confirms what the encyclopedia is pointing at. Ryle is pointing to an alternative way of looking at, and dissolving, certain kinds of puzzles. In "Dilemmas", he identifies them as puzzles about "public" concepts, i.e. those which we all, scientists or not, use all the time. In "Dilemmas" he labels them philosophical, and this example confirms that. Whether it is the end of the story is another question - few people seem to have raised that.
The cross-disciplinary studies you mention do not raise the same kinds of issues. We can say immediately that the concepts of physics are not "public" in the sense that Ryle is using the term. But we can go further.
Biology does indeed welcome physics, chemistry and similar disciplines. But it also welcomes inputs from psychology, sociology and other sciences. But, biophysics studies living organisms as physical systems, molecular biology studies them as chemical systems and so forth. All these contribute to biology, without being the whole of it. But they all apply to the organism whether it is living or dead. The category issue comes when you come to the contribution of psychology, which involves studying living organisms as living organisms. Psychology has nothing to say about a dead organism - it has become a purely physical entity and not an organism at all. That's where the category issue comes in. At least, that's how I interpret what Ryle says.
Quoting Bella fekete
You don't have him quite right. In the country that Ryle envisages, there is no path to recall. It is unexplored, unmapped. As he says "As there are no paths, there are no paths to share. Where there are paths to share, there are paths; and paths are the memorials of under-growth already cleared." You may be wondering what he would say about the efforts of philosophers before him. I think he would say that most of them are an undergrowth and need to be cleared away.
Quoting Bella fekete
Yes. But, then, in those systems, there is no concept that parallels the Western concept of the "mechanistic", so it's a tricky thing to negotiate.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. Descartes is Ryle's main quarry in "The Concept of Mind". He's taking on a wider range of issues here, and, perhaps elaborating his idea.
The idea that mental activity is somehow behavioral dispositions seems incoherent to me.
And somehow trying to save this view by pointing to how qualia comes from development is committing its own category mistake. We learn discrimination of red and not red or some such theyll say. That doesnt mean the qualia of red doesnt exist.
Emergentism and integration weasily conceits that always try to save the day as a spoon stirring dissolves the powder into the liquid as if magic. You cant emerge or integrate your way out of the hard problem. Homunculus Fallacies are pesky and near intractable.
Yes. I do think that this is the weakest point in the book. I much prefer the more complex - and elusive - ideas that emerged from Wittgenstein's private language argument. But the main point, which I think is precisely that qualia are not distinct objects in their own right, stands.
Qualia, so far as I understand them (which is not far) seem to me to be exactly like sense-data in that they are a label for something that "must be there". But the road there seems impassable to me.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes, I agree that they are not really satisfactory. But once one has seen the light about "qualia" it is hard to see what would satisfy the demand. That's how the hard problem of consciousness is created. Hardly a satisfactory solution itself.
But I don't think that Ryle plays that card in this book. I could be wrong.
Right. That's the point. Ryle separates the disciplines of biology, physics, and philosophy. As quoted above:
The assumption is that there are different kinds of thinking. In the terms of The Concepts of Mind, they are not of the "same logical type". It would be a category mistake then to address the claims and counter-claims of biology and physics as if they are of the same logical type. The development of cross-disciplinary studies such as biophysics, however shows that his assumption is mistaken. There are not fixed logical types of thinking.
What I am suggesting is that Descartes' mistake was not categorical in the sense of failure to recognize differences between fixed categories, but rather his mistake resulted from the application of the framework of the categories of his time. Ryle's own category mistake is in this way the same as Descartes, thinking in terms of the framework of the categories of his time.
This is my first time reading Ryle. I took it as an opportunity to fill in some gaps. To read some things I had intentionally neglected. My comments and questions are intended as a mode of inquiry.
Quoting Ludwig V
Perhaps this will become clear as I continue reading, but from the first lecture I do not see where he makes a distinction between public and private or how it comes into play.
Quoting Ludwig V
To the extent this is true doesn't it go against Ryle's move to keep them separate?
Quoting Ludwig V
It studies living organisms as biological systems, but makes use of the principles and methods of physics.
Quoting Ludwig V
Molecular biology studies biological organisms at the molecular level, but this does not mean that it studies them as chemical rather than biological systems.
There is, however, the question of whether biology can be reduced to chemistry and chemistry to physics. I won't address but, but will ask whether this is a biological or chemical or physical or philosophical question? Ryle, as quoted above, seems to regard it as a philosophical question. I don't think it can be divided categorically in this way. To do so would be a category mistake.
That's a very good characterization, from Ryle's point of view. The key is that Descartes thought in terms of different "substances" which is how people thought about this issue. One problem about this way of thinking is that there was never a satisfactory characterization (definition) of that term. Famously (as I expect you know), Locke was reduced to saying that substance was "something, I know not what". Berkeley leapt on this to deny that any such thing existed. Probably rightly. Effectively physics identified substance in terms of mass and extension (Locke's "primary qualities), which didn't help Cartesian dualism at all. Ryle is simply substituting "categories" in place of "substance", shifting the issue from one of metaphysics to one of language. What is at stake is the idea that the mind is an entity that exists in its own right, independently of physical objects.
Quoting Fooloso4
If that was all that was at stake, I would want to argue that one could not expect Descartes to think in any other way than in terms of the concepts available in his time. But Cartesian Dualism survived, so the issue survives, and Ryle's target is not just a change in ways of thinking.
Remember, for many people Dualism is the basis for survival after death, so you could argue that, for them, it is a question of life and death and even the existence of God. (Berkeley realized this and tired to stop the rot.)
Quoting Fooloso4
Well, Ryle argues that there are not a fixed number or type of categories, so he's pretty much on your page. (See pp. 8 (last line of page) to 11.)
Quoting Fooloso4.
I believe and hope that you won't regret filling in this gap - whether you agree with him or not.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes. In a sense, he's speaking metaphorically - there's a lot of metaphors in his writing. He means that only specialists use the "private" concepts, whereas everybody, including specialists, uses "public" concepts. He's just trying to carve out a field for philosophy, which is still trying to recover from the sciences spinning off as independent disciplines.
Quoting Fooloso4
Yes, that's a good way of putting it. But the subject matter of biology differs in important ways from the subject matter of physics, and applying only the methods of physics would ignore what makes living systems different from non-living systems. The methods of physics do not allow that distinction to appear. That's where the category question comes in. But he takes for granted that there is some such distinction to be drawn and that was contested then and still is.
Having said all of that, it is reasonable to notice that much has changed in ideas about inter-disciplinary studies since his time. The attempt to establish a field for philosophy at the foundations of the sciences and between the sciences attracted the attention of the specialists who rightly pointed out that specialist knowledge was required to discuss those issues and decided they could discuss them themselves. So philosophy of science, mathematics, etc have become sub-specialisms "between" philosophy and science and inter-disciplinary discussions are mostly dealt with between specialists without the benefit of philosophical intervention. So his remark that "These inter-theory questions are not questions internal to those theories." were not inappropriate at the time, but need heavy qualification now. To be fair, he recognizes the issue, at least partly on p. 12. But there, he also maintains his claim on the public concepts.
Such categorical shifts became necessary, to intentionally short cut the progress of evolving sciences, and so, short cuts indicated this inverse , axiomatic connection, perhaps felt to be of an essential meaningful process later on.
These cuts signify the virtually created meaning after the fact
Just mentioning and cut away as anyone s comprehension can not sway from a hardly conscious recollection.
The SEP article I linked shows the history of the approach Ryle adopted, presenting numerous examples where "intellectual positions are at cross- purposes", so it's not as if this never happens. Spotting category mistakes is part of the analytic toolkit.
Isn't launching into a criticism based on a single example from the introduction somewhat premature? The danger is that we trot out the pat rejoinders rather than pay attention to the text at hand. If it is your first time reading Ryle, then let's read Ryle.
The term 'substance' is problematic, but as you indicate it was not a problem unique to Descartes. Does Ryle others who use the term of making a category mistake? From what I cited above it does not seem that the category mistake was the use of the term.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, but this predates Descartes. He makes use of accepted duality of soul and body in order to say something substantially (pun intended) different.
Quoting Ludwig V
That the logical types or categories are not fixed in number is not the same thing as their being fixed, at least to the extent that biology and physics are different logical types.
I quoted from these pages above. Page 12 too.
Quoting Ludwig V
No regrets.
Quoting Ludwig V
Got it.
Quoting Ludwig V
This is why I asked earlier:
Quoting Fooloso4
I would not rule out the possibility that physics might contribute to this at some point.
As I said in a response to Ludwig:
Quoting Fooloso4
[Added. Quoting Ryle]
Quoting Banno
And why is that? You do not say. He does. As I understand it, it is because the solution is to be found by navigating the "public road" rather than the "private road" (@Ludwig V I should have picked up on that) of physics or biology. And so he concludes:
As the saying goes, paths are made by walking. His claim that:
(13)
This is questionable. Questioning something when and where it appears is not premature. When you claim that doing so "undermines Ryle's point", you sound like the Christian faithful who dare not question the Bible. The fact of the matter is, questioning is an effect and well regarded mode of seeking understanding. It does not undermine the text unless it is one's intent to do so. I do not.
Quoting Banno
A surprising comment coming from someone who responds to my questions taken directly from the text by citing the SEP instead of the text.
Quoting Banno
Indeed! Glad to see you have gotten around to paying a bit of attention to the text.
The quote is Ryle, not I; so it's not I who does not say. One charitably presumes that here, in the first chapter, he is setting a direction, on which he continues in the remainder of the book.
There's something disingenuous about launching into a critique in your first post. You seem to be treating an introductory remark as if it were the whole proposal.
But further, your critique looks misplaced.
Quoting Fooloso4
It seems from this that you think making a category error as carving stuff up wrong. I hope it's clear from the SEP article that it's more about taking a term from one category and misapplying it in another. It's not failing to clearly differentiate between colour and texture, but "the number two is blue". The "pat rejoinder" is to attempt to apply Ryle's own processing to himself, while apparently misunderstanding what that process is.
We might here agree to set aside these relatively pedantic issues and continue with the next lecture.
Ryle influenced Dennett who is a part of the "eliminativist materialism" notion.
According to IEP:
Quoting Hard Problem of Consciousness
So I guess, if you can't explain it, eliminate it. That thing you think you experience as "red" is not that. But then you get the problem of "illusion" which has to be explained. And the hidden dualism and homunculus continues! The illusion exists, and has to be explained qua the illusion. That is the THING to be explained. It is always somehow assumed in the premise, even by way of "it is learned" what "red" is. Well, what is it that this "learning" is DOING by causing "red" in its discriminatory fashion (red is not not-red, red is not green, red is not blue, etc.etc.)?
I agree. I'll post my summary later to-day.
The discussion of categories is complicated. But I think the basic idea is quite simple. Since Ryle wrote, there has been a lot of discussion and comment. There's a tendency to over-use and extend good ideas like this one - somewhat as since Kuhn invented paradigms, they seem to have appeared all over the place and are no longer the rare solutions to major issues - if you read the literature.
Formal logic consists of a variety of different kinds of symbol - variables for names and predicates, operators, quantifiers, truth-values etc. Each kind of variable has rule for its uses, which explain the contribution each makes to the meaning of the sentence or proposition they occur in. No kind of variable can make a sentence/proposition on its own; it is the combination of different kinds of variable that makes the sentence. Different kinds of variable are in different categories. (By the way, if I've understood the metaphor correctly, categories don't carve anything up. That privilege is reserved to concepts in certain categories. That is "category" is in a different category from "concept".)
Natural language has a huge variety of categories, but the principle is the same.
One demonstrates the rules for the use of words by showing when they are broken. So a category is revealed by sentences that seem grammatically well-formed, but are not merely empirically false, but nonsense.
Ryle's last lecture is entitled "Formal and Informal Logic". I'm sure this is the culmination of the series and that he will have a great deal more to say about this in that.
For what it is worth, I think that Ryle was mistaken about inter-theory negotiation. The development of scientific practice since he wrote shows that specialists are quite capable of sorting out inter-theory and inter-disciplinary issues, mostly in the context of specific problems. But I also think he is right to claim public concepts for philosophy, even though the border country between public and private is far from clearly demarcated.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. So let's look at the pudding that Ryle provides in the next lecture.
Why do some of these philosophers have a hard time with the idea of imaginary concepts?
A bald king of France drives them crazy. There does not exist a category of kings of France. Therefore any person of that category cannot exist. Any person said to be if that category, does not exist. Its like logicians would have a heart attack parsing out thousands of words to describe a fictional work. Gandalf would take up reams of ridiculous existential quantifiers! :sweat:
But he does say. And what he says is not to be found it what you quoted.
Quoting Banno
This is why attention should be paid to what is said in the beginning wherthe direction being set.
Quoting Banno
Yes, that is the question:
Quoting Fooloso4
Quoting Banno
When you misquote by leaving out the beginning of what I said it may look this way, but you carve it up wrong.
Quoting Banno
It should be clear from my quotes from Ryle himself that this point has been made.
This is why common examples such as "the number two is blue" are problematic. It has the advantage of illustrating a clear difference between categories, but with the exception of someone with synesthesia no one conjoins them. One might easily get the impression that philosophers waste their time with things that no one in their right mind would have the least concern with.
Quoting Ludwig V
I think they both do, but will focus on the second lecture.
The obsession with non-sense is an attempt to chart the limits of sense. One way of discovering a boundary is by probing beyond it.
@Ludwig V
Ryle's idea of logical consequences and practical inescapability reminds me of other distinctions made in determining principles of sufficient reason. Schopenhauer especially comes to mind. He made the distinction between the grounds of "knowing" and the grounds of "becoming". Knowing is basically about the realm of propositional reasoning and becoming is the realm of cause and effect of objects.
I liken Ryle's idea of a "contradiction" of an event that already occurred (e.g. Waterloo, your own birth, etc.), as similar to one I've raised on this forum before in a bit different way... Here is what I basically said:
We often think in counterfactual notions like, "What happened if I was born a different person?". But that is false (in the spirit of Ryle, "incorrect" or an "error" :smile:) to even think in those terms. Your identity is tied up in "you", so if another person was born, it would certainly not be "you". Could "you" have been born in other circumstances? It probably would not be you, if that was the case, is the point.
Well perhaps so. But this has nothing to do with Ryle - or Wittgenstein, either. Ryle does wish to eliminate Cartesian consciousness, but that's a different story because it's about a conception of consciousness, not consciousness. BTW I have very little time for Dennett's idea that consciousness is an illusion; he should have read Austin before developing that illusory idea.
But this is a side-issue. We're moving on.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes, some people do make a terrible meal of it. But they are mostly logicians. 'nuff said.
:lol: Yes, agreed with Dennett. I don't think it's totally disconnected from Ryle (perhaps in these lectures more so). Rather, if Ryle is against Cartesian consciousness, that usually implies a sort of rejection understanding of basic sensory things such as "red" and "sound", let alone more abstract things like "imagination". I'm sorry, you can't put that in the category of what, "behavioral disposition??"
Why on earth would that be true? What is a "rejection understanding"? All that is at stake is a philosophical theory, a way of thinking about things.
If someone explains to you about rainbows, are they denying the existence of rainbows? There are, or used to be, people who said that rainbows had been explained "away". Is that true? There are others who said that the scientific explanation "reduced" rainbows (to raindrops and light) and took away their magic. I maintain that nothing is "taken away". I'm even prepared to say that if you want magic, the process that produces rainbows should be magic enough for anyone.
Quoting schopenhauer1 No, I don't suppose it is, given that he was taught by Ryle. But it doesn't follow that whatever Dennett thought is something Ryle thought.
Should be rejection OF understanding...
Quoting Ludwig V
The way I interpret his "Cartesian" rejection, is that he is rejecting that subjective experiences as something that can be considered in the realm of science. Certainly if he means "Cartesian substance dualism" almost everyone can agree that can be jettisoned. I don't think people are going to say mental states are some sort of "substance" like an ectoplasm or some such. If he means in the broader sense, some sort of subjective experiential mental states altogether, then one is simply eliminating what is to be explained. Perhaps I misread it. He seems to reduce it to behavior. Behavior is something you can ascribe to processes like atoms, neurons and the like. What is behavior in terms of the actual experience of "red" or "red car", or all the perceptual things that one can have? Dennett takes it a step further I believe, and discusses optical illusions, and how the brain edits events. But that simply answers the wrong question (the hard problem). It's actually a category error of how the brain operates for why there is this illusory sense of the world or what this "is" other than a synonym for "illusion".
Since there are so many versions of it, he formulates his own. At a certain moment yesterday evening I coughed and at a certain moment yesterday evening I went to bed. It was therefore true on Saturday that on Sunday I would cough at the one moment and go to bed at the other. But if it was true beforehand - forever beforehand - that I was to cough and go to bed at those two moments on Sunday, 25 January 1953, then it was impossible for me not to do so. Whatever is, was to be. So nothing that does occur could have been helped and nothing that has not actually been done could possibly have been done. P.15
Now the conclusion of this argument goes directly counter to the piece of common knowledge that some things are our own fault, that some threatening disasters can be foreseen and averted, and that there is plenty of room for precautions, planning and weighing alternatives. P.16
Predestinationism is a different, though related, issue. (p.16) Nor is it about any actual (p.17) or possible (p.18) predictions that someone may have made. He does not seem to think that these are serious explanations, but rather background associations that may distract us from the core issue.
So he comes to the idea that fatalism is about truth and falsity.
The mistake here is to think that because 'true' and 'false' and correct' and incorrect' are adjectives, we tend to treat them as qualities or properties like sweet and white applied to sugar. But deceased', lamented' and extinct' are also adjectives, and yet certainly do not apply to people or mastodons while they exist, but only after they have ceased to exist. So we should think of correct' as a merely obituary and valedictory epithet, as fulfilled' more patently is. (p.20)
His next tactic is to suppose that someone produced the strictly parallel argument, that for everything that happens, it is true for ever afterwards that it happened. and points out that we dont make a similar argument in such cases. We confuse the logical necessity in the fatalists argument with causal necessity. (p.21)
So now he considers the notions of necessitating, making, obliging, requiring and involving on which the argument turns. (p. 22) He consider first how requiring and involving are related to causing and, not surprisingly, identifies more than one way that one truth may require or involve another. So he can extract the causal menace from the argument and leave only a trite and dull proposition behind.
So we come to the question what does logical necessity mean? Ryle argues that the fatalist argument tries to endue happenings with the inescapability of the conclusions of valid arguments. The fatalist has tried to characterize happenings by predicates which are proper only to conclusions of arguments. He tried to flag my cough with a Q.E.D. (p.24)
Ryles next move seems a bit strange. If a city-engineer has constructed a roundabout where there had been dangerous cross-roads, he may properly claim to have reduced the number of accidents. He may say that lots of accidents that would otherwise have occurred have been prevented by his piece of road improvement. But suppose we now ask him to give us a list of the particular accidents which he has averted. He can do nothing but laugh at us. (p. 24/25) How does this relate to fatalism? His conclusion is Averted fatalities are not fatalities. In short, we cannot, in logic, say of any designated fatality that it was averted-and this sounds like saying that it is logically impossible to avert any fatalities. (p.25)
He finally concludes The question 'Could the Battle of Waterloo have been unfought?', taken in one way, is an absurd question. Yet its absurdity is something quite different from the falsity that Napoleon's strategic decisions were forced upon him by the laws of logic. and that one cannot suppose that a specific event that did take place did not take place. (p.26)
His general diagnosis of the difference between future tense statements and present and past statements is Roughly, statements in the future tense cannot convey singular, but only general propositions, where statements in the present and past tense can convey both. Stated in isolation, this is hard to understand, but in context ( p.27), it makes more sense.
Now, he explains why he has chosen this dilemma for his first case (p.28) and then moves on to some general morals which can be drawn from the existence of this dilemma and from attempts to resolve it. It arose out of two seemingly innocent and unquestionable propositions,... (p. 29)
The big issue that this raises is How is it that in their most concrete, ground-floor employment, concepts like will be, was, correct, must, make, prevent and fault behave, in the main, with exemplary docility, but become wild when employed in what are mere first-floor generalizations of their ground-floor employments? (pp. 30/31) No answers here, but a promise of something of an answer later.
Two final issues. One is that what is involved here is not a collection of individual concepts, but teams or structures of concepts (pp. 31/32). The other is a re-iteration of the importance and inescapability of everyday, unofficial concepts, as opposed to the regulated and disciplined concepts of technical and scientific disciplines. (pp. 34/35)
I'm sorry. I don't have the bandwidth to take this on right now. I've already said that I don't think his version of behaviourism is satisfactory.
I rather like this. It raises more than one issue. Ryle was writing before possible world semantics gave us a way to formalise and so clarify such issues. But the point seems to remain.
So we can stipulate a possible world in which the crossroads were not replaced, and yet that does not help us in listing which fatalities were avoided. We can even stipulate a world in which the crossroads were not replaced, and yet the number of accidents was reduced.
Yes, I thought it was terrific! It seemed to me an application of the point that you can't identify a specific object and then say it doesn't exist.
He generalizes this when he says "Roughly, statements in the future tense cannot convey singular, but only general propositions, where statements in the present and past tense can convey both."
I'm bothered about someone having a heart attack, and getting to hospital where they prevent his death. Can we not say that his death was averted? Perhaps we can say that it was averted last Sunday, but not that his death last Sunday was averted.
Quoting Banno
You'll think I'm ill educated, but what I read here is "So we can envisage the possibility that (i.e. It is possible that) the cross-roads were not replaced and yet that does not help us in listing which fatalities were avoided. We can even envisage the possibility that (i.e. It is even possible that) the crossroads were not replaced, and yet the number of accidents was reduced." Am I missing anything relevant?
No problem, did you see my post on lecture 2 above?
It does seem to be a similar point. Except that Schopenhauer puts it in metaphysical mode, where Ryle puts it in linguistic mode and uses the idea of a categories. What the difference is and whether it matters is another issue.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Yes. I guess, from the problem you raise below, that you do recognize that Ryle is saying that there can't be a contradiction of an event, for the reason that Schopenhauer identifies.
On that, the identity of people has an additional complication, that they can decide what criteria of their own identity are important (to them) and those criteria may not be the same as the criteria used by everyone else. I think that many people must have the slightly dizzying experience of contemplating the possibility that their actual parents could have married - or whatever - someone else. I understand their bewilderment, though I don't think it is necessary.
I think its a huge issue and opens a can of worms but, I dont see how you can defend a claim that if you were born in different circumstances, then you would still be you; its is not even something you can entertain in any real sense beyond imagining after the fact.
I agree in the sense that it is a very difficult issue to give a clear answer to.
But what circumstances are sufficiently different to make a problem? For example, I might, quite easily, have been born five days before, or five days after, my actual birthday. That might well not be important. But suppose I discover that I was born a year later than I thought. Whether that matters or not (i.e. is sufficiently different to make a difference) is moot. The issue is further complicated by the fact that my parents, friends, society might decide differently from me.
Then there's the meaning of entertaining, never mind imagining, the possibility. I suggest that one could deduce some factual differences. If I had been born in India, I would be living in a very different climate and a very different society. The part that I cannot imagine, or even seriously entertain, is what difference that would make to "me". And here I remember Berkeley's "master argument", which points out that when imagining those circumstances, I will be imagining myself in those circumstances, not imagining the person I would (might) have been. (Berkeley uses this point for his own ends, but I think the point applies here, as well.)
When I said that the bewilderment is not necessary, I didn't mean that answers would be easy to come by, but that it is possible to reflect that it is, in one sense, up to me to decide what matters.
But I'm afraid that I can't pursue this right now. As I said before, I have limited bandwidth.
'No ear for tunes'.
[quote=Bateson]One of the first things that Russell and Whitehead observed in attempting this was that the ancient paradox of Epimenides - "Epimenides was a Cretan who said, 'Cretans always lie' " - was built upon classification and metaclassification. I have presented the paradox here in the form of a quotation within a quotation, and this is precisely how the paradox is generated. The larger quotation becomes a classifier for the smaller, until the smaller quotation takes over and reclassifies the larger, to create contradiction.[/quote]
[quote=Bateson]For the abstract presentation, consider the case of a very simple relationship between two organisms in which organism A has emitted some sort of sound or posture from which B could learn something about the state of A relevant to B's own existence. It might be a threat, a sexual advance , a move towards nurturing , or an indication of membership in the same species. I already noted in the discussion of coding (criterion 5) that no message, under any circumstances, is that which precipitated it.
There is always a partly predictable and therefore rather regular relation between message and referent, that relation indeed never being direct or simple. Therefore, if B is going to deal with A's indication, it is absolutely necessary that B know what those indications mean. Thus, there comes into existence another class of information, which B must assimilate, to tell B about the coding of messages or indications coming from A. Messages of this class will be, not about A or B, but about the coding of messages . They will be of a different logical type. I will call them metamessages.
Again, beyond messages about simple coding, there are much more subtle messages that become necessary because codes are conditional; that is, the meaning of a given type of action or sound changes relative to context, and especially relative to the changing state of the relationship between A and B. If at a given moment the relation be comes playful, this will change the meaning of many signals.[/quote] [My bold]
Emoticons are very often just such metamessage qualifiers that can indicate irony, or hyperbole, or indeed playfulness.
So my point is that "you" would not be "you" in any altered history of causation leading to "who" you are. You mentioned being born in a different country, different parents, etc. Do you see the contradiction here? If there was a set of people who were not your parents, or had children at a different time, whatever that person is, it would not be YOU! Even if you were conceived a few seconds later, it would NOT be YOU. Causally speaking, the argument is absurd that you could be anyone but YOU, if there were other circumstances. That isn't an identity issue, it's a causality issue. In that sense, this ties into Ryle's idea that Waterloo wouldn't EVEN be Waterloo if it was a different set of circumstances. You can only retrospectively imagine what someone who is NOW you, would have been like under different circumstances. But in a sense of actual personhood, that person who you are imagining could not have been the person who is doing the retrospective imagining!
I agree with what you say, particularly about the discovery that one's parents are not the people who are bringing you up. But I also think that minor variations do not make a difference. Are you seriously trying to tell me that if I had been born five minutes earlier, or five hours earlier, it would not have been me that was born? I concede that someone might decide to take it that way, but, under otherwise normal circumstances, most people, I am sure, would not.
Yes, I can think I can see what Bateson is getting at. Forgive me for being dense, but I'm not clear how this relates to Ryle's use of the idea.
1. In the first place, Ryles argument about the cross-roads ( pp. 24 27) is all very well. But I dont quite see how it affects the fatalists argument. Surely, I can say that the annual village fete will be held next Sunday afternoon, and it can be true! Whats more, if it rains and the fete is cancelled, I can say that the annual village fete was cancelled (or prevented, or averted). And I cant think of a reformulation that would work. I dont quite trust his generalization that future tense cannot refer to events that have not yet taken place. I see that it works in some contexts, but it doesnt follow that it works in all contexts.
2. The arguments he gives pp. 16 18 discuss the way that knowledge (especially Gods), and predictions, especially of anyone else are involved in the premiss of the fatalists argument. Then he gets to the hard core issue of truth and falsity. Now, Ive always believed that true and false are timelessly true. Thus Pythagoras theorem is not true at any particular time, or at all particular times. In the case of more ordinary truths, the tenses are embedded in the that-clause. (The fete will be held, is being held, was held) The truth predicate is in the timeless present. Thats where the problem originates. Ryle seems to want to bring that into doubt.
Hi first argument (pp.17 18) consider what might have been meant by a timelessly true proposition like Ryle will cough and go to bed on the evening of Sunday (day/month/year). Not an actual prediction, not an impersonal prediction (The forecast is for rain tomorrow), but a possible prediction (if anybody had predicted rain tomorrow, it would have come true.) He dismisses that, in an argument that is reminiscent of the argument in 1. But I dont think it is the slam-dunk that philosophers seek to achieve by relying on logic. (Slam-dunk is the point of logic, isnt it?)
His first move is There is something of a slur in false and something honorific in true, some suggestion of the insincerity or sincerity of its author, or some suggestion of his rashness or cautiousness as an investigator. p. 18. I would call this a sub-text, and likely dependent on context. It certainly isnt the kind of thing you expect to find in a philosophy text and it might be argued that it depends on context anyway. I think philosophers might want to call it part of the illocutionary force of a speech act and Ryle was writing well before they were invented.
He reinforces the point:- This is· brought out by our reluctance to characterize either as true or as false pure and avowed guesses. If you make a guess at the winner of the race, it will turn out right or wrong, correct or incorrect, but hardly true or false. p. 18 Well, I cant argue that he is wrong, and it would make sense if his sub-text is correct. But he recognizes at the top of p.19 that the sub-text he has proposed is not always there but nevertheless, makes a crucial move - But, for safety's sake, let us reword the fatalist argument in terms of these thinner words, 'correct' and incorrect'. Hm. Maybe.
Theres a persuasive paragraph on p. 20 about categories, but Ryle doesnt expect any more than our feeling more cordial to the idea that the right predicates to apply are correct or fulfilled, but not true.
From there we get to prophecies being fulfilled or not rather than being true or not, and so to the idea that the fatalists premiss is not, strictly speaking, true or not, but correct or fulfilled or not. I think he has shown that it is possible to present the fatalists premiss in that way, but not that it is impossible to present it in the fatalists way. Which is a step forward, but far from conclusive.
Quoting Ludwig V
[quote=Ryle]When considering the parents' duties, we have no doubt that they are to blame if they do not mould their son's conduct, feelings and thoughts. When considering the son's behaviour we have no doubt that he and not they should be blamed for some of the things that he does. Our answer to the one problem seems to rule out our answer to the other, and then at second remove to rule itself out too.[/quote]
Can you not see the same shape in this description as in my first Bateson quote about the lying Cretan? Two mutually undermining claims tied together in a knot like "the set of all sets that are not members of themselves".
Our moral judgement is made to judge itself unfavourably.
How do minor variations not make a difference? Certainly if the event of your parents conceiving 5 minutes earlier or later happened, a different set of gametes would be there, so "you" wouldn't be "you" any more. That would be another person. One that might not be on a philosophy forum to be so indignant about this. As far as being "born" five minutes earlier or later, I'm not even suggesting that kind of thing. Rather, I am simply suggesting that if you were conceived (not born) under any other circumstances, it's no longer "you" we are talking about. Now, after conception, we may start discussing ideas about identity.. In that case, indeed, we might have a "you" that was different from various contingent circumstances of place and happenstance. Perhaps a "you" that lived in India is different than a "you" somewhere else in some sense because you would have had a different course of events happen, even though much of your brain chemistry might react similarly to such events. But in that case. But I am not even going down that route. I'm simply saying, that there is no way you "could have" been any other person than "you".
Actually, now that I think of it, I am even saying that "you" couldn't even BE anything but what was conceived. If you had a different circumstances that necessarily entails you were conceived different, so.. forget the part about being born even in different circumstances. It's a non-starter! In that sense, this seems to align with Ryle's understanding of Waterloo after the fact versus before the fact. The event was necessarily entailed in its happening, otherwise it's a general possibility not tied to any identical entity in the world! You can't say something like, "What if Waterloo took place in America", because then that would not be all the things that made Waterloo Waterloo to begin with! That would be something else!
Thank you for drawing my attention to that case. I missed it because I was focused on the second lecture.
I had thought that there were two separate judgements (as suggested by Ryle's formulating the dilemma as from the parents' point of view or from the son's point of view) which contradicted each other. Hence "dilemma" instead of paradox.
On the other hand, there is a paradox in here, prompted by the paradox that if God wants to create moral beings, they need to create beings who will choose to follow their precepts freely. But then, there's an equivalent paradox that, as moral beings, we need to choose freely to follow god's precepts. There is the additional issue is that a "precept" that may be followed or not is probably not a precept, but advice or exhortation. The same could be said of parents and children - and indeed teachers and students.
This is a new thought to me.
The question now is whether Bateson (or you) think that all dilemmas are really paradoxes, or that paradoxes are one form of dilemma. Ryle, so far as I can see, seems to think that there are different forms of dilemma. I'm inclined to agree with Ryle.
I think that there are two issues at stake here.
One of them is the definition of identity. You seem to have what I think of a strict definition of identity. Any change is a change of identity. This follows from a strict application of the Identity of Indiscernibles and it seems to follow that the identity of anything consists only of a series of time-slices of what is represented as a single enduring object in "common sense". I don't share that view but recognize that the other view is, in some sense, possible, because I don't think that there is a conclusive refutation of it.
On the other hand, there is the fact that people, unlike beings and objects that are not self-aware, are capable of making choices about what changes in themselves make a difference to their identity and what changes do not. Their choices may not be the same as the choices of other people, and this may create problems. The decision that some change does not imply a change of identity, I characterize as deciding that change is "minor".
You identity the other issue by your comparison with Ryle's argument about Waterloo, which I think is correct, when you think about the problem before conception. But your strict view of identity seems to suggest that, once I am conceived, everything is inevitable and there are no possibilities - and no uncertainties - in my life. In other words, a fatalist view of my life.
And then there is your point:- Quoting schopenhauer1 To which I reply that is true. But the question is, who am I? I would ask, in addition, who decides who I am?
I don't think you're quite getting my argument. I am saying that it is a sort of contradiction (as implied by Ryle as well I think), to talk about YOU as anyone other than what YOU are (currently). In other words, you could NEVER have been anyone but what you are now when discussing your initial conception and birth. If a different sperm fertilized the egg, that would be someone else. Not you. If there was any other circumstance that changed the arrangement of the exact moment you were conceived, that would not have been YOU.
You can entertain the notion in your imagination of what it might have been like to grown up this way or that way, but that could never have actually been a reality. Because in reality, that would no longer be YOU, that would be some other person.
Just catching up with the preface. I find it ironic that the book is entitled Dilemmas when Ryle says his examples are only when two thinkers have divergent goals from the beginning (p. 1, emphasis added). Ryle wants to say philosophers only take themselves as conflicting when (unbeknownst to them it would seem) they are actually addressing two different problems (answering two different questions). Ryle does say it is not our logic, but our relationship to others that is the problem. (p.1)
We learned in reading Austin that we paint a picture as black-and-white in only taking into consideration one example rather than first looking at a variety of cases. Wittgenstein felt the same as Austin about variety but starts one step back to say that it is having a goal at all before you start (say, a requirement for crystalline purity. PI #107) that forces your mind into one picture (and maybe in this case, against another). Perhaps Ryle will say that we see others as rivals because of our pushing an agenda (goal) from the start, much as we fixate only on the example that makes our best case (pain, illusion, etc.) Hegel would say we are programmed to see things as dichotomies, and that the trick is to let things be what they are on their own (as will Heidegger) and from a larger perspective (as will Wittgenstein).
First Ryle describes the (imagined) fight of, lets call it, the skeptic, who takes there to be an unbridgeable crevasse (p. 2) between us and the world, and the naturalist, who picks up their utensils without doubt. But Ryle is not concerned about the minutiae of the supposed disagreement, only to find out why the two feel they are at odds (or perhaps why we take them to be at odds). Ryle does hint at how they cant actually connect enough to conflict because the skeptics case is based on reason (theoretical, p. 3), and there are no arguments for accepting the world.
Second is the argument without victor between free will vs. causation. He says no one wants further evidence (p.5) of either position but it is philosophys job to understand the rights and obligations (id) of the positions. He appears to be doing this in saying that a question about whether we can be moral is different than a question about whether an act was (morally) mine or determined by circumstances. (Id) In the same way a question of how we sensed something in a certain case is not answered by asking the question of how we sense at all. (p.5-6) I would venture that Ryle is highlighting confusion between a generalization and particular cases, but, too early to tell.
Lastly, he separates theology and science from tangling over truth by putting them in different categories because not only are their subject matters different, but also the kinds of thinking they require (p.8), meaning that their questions are different in their terms and concepts. (p.9) Ryle though is only saying that one question is not judged the same as another, because a category is only generally created by showing in detail how the metiers in ratiocination [means of reasoning] of the concepts under pressure are more dissimilar from one another or less dissimilar from one another. (p.11)
The most important thing here seems to be what is at stake (different than what each litigant feels is) and what considerations should matter in each case. (p.12), which appears will be a matter of the concepts of the highway, the underlying non-technical concepts employed as well in [technical theories] as in everyone else's thinking. (Id) So, @Ludwig V, I do take the focus on particulars, dichotomies, goals, means of reasoning, criteria of what matters, similarities and differences, case-specific categories, and considerations in each case, to be right up the same alley as Austin and Wittgenstein. But we shall see.
Well, this is just a special application of the general argument framed by the fatalist. I guess you are not impressed by Ryle's arguments. It would be interesting to know why.
At first sight, you seem to be applying a criterion of causal continuity between conception and now. That's an understandable choice and does presuppose that our identity is not what the identity of indiscernibles proposes. I have no problem with that. Whether your choice in this case is reasonable is another question.
Your formulation is a bit confusing, since your use of "anyone" suggests that we are talking about people, but your use of "what I am" suggests that you are talking about things. Since, at conception, I am not (yet) a person, you are not asking the interesting question, which is "WHO I am". The difference between those two questions needs a bit of sorting out before we could begin answering either question.
Most people take birth as the moment when a person's life begins, though they also accept that there's a long way before one becomes an adult, fully-grown person. The question of identity in the case of human beings is complicated for that reason.
Another reason why it is more complicated than you seem to allow that I can, and do, make decisions about my own identity, and, although one might say that those choices should be respected, other people also make decisions. Conflicts are, in some cases, very difficult to resolve.
That would be an interesting thread, but for this thread, the interesting and relevant question is why you are not impressed with Ryle's arguments against fatalism.
[quote=Ryle]
So the so-called world of science which, we gather, has the title to replace our everyday world is, I suggest, the world not of science in general but of atomic and sub-atomic physics in particular, enhanced by some slightly incongruous appendages borrowed from one branch of neuro-physiology.
[/quote]
[quote=Ryle]I am questioning nothing that any scientist says on weekdays in his working tone of voice. But I certainly am questioning most of what a very few of them say in an edifying tone of voice on Sundays.
[/quote]
What follows (P.75) is an extended analogy that has unfortunately been taken literally in the UK and the US, in the case of university colleges, and other institutions and become The social model that is taken to be the whole human political world. It was intended to show the folly of such thinking as applied to fundamental physics as a reductio ad absurdum. Alas, the argument from economic analogy now needs to be considered literally on its own merits as well.
I actually think I'm in agreement.
Quoting Ludwig V
So, I think you are again misconstruing what this claim is saying.
Can you explain exactly where the breakdown is?
Do you agree, a different set of gametes would be a different person? How can a differently conceived person, a person who is from a different set of gametes, ever be YOU? That would not be YOU. It's like you are taking the naive view that your "soul" or something like this is transposed into a different body. Is that what you are proposing? I don't think so, but I don't see any other way you can misconstrue this idea that a differently conceived person would not be you.
Yes. I was more interested in the differences between the three than the similarities. But I didn't mean to suggest that there were no similarities. I was, I admit, concerned to bring out how little OLP was ever a school or a movement in a conventional sense. So I wouldn't argue with what you say here.
However, I do think that Quoting Antony Nickles is a bit misleading. It took me a while to realize what was going on.
Ryle has a rather ornate style and a great fondness for metaphors, preferably a collection at the same time. Look at what he does in paragraph on p.1 seems to be para 3:-
"There often arise quarrels between theories, or, more generally, between lines of thought, ... A thinker who adopts one of them ... In disputes of this kind, we often find one and the same thinker - very likely oneself - strongly inclined to champion both sides. ... He is both well satisfied with the logical credentials of each of the two points of view, and sure that one of them must be totally wrong if the other is even largely right. The internal administration of each seems to be impeccable but their diplomatic relations with one another seem to be internecine."
I dont say hes wrong. On the contrary. But it is clear that the problem can be characterized at many levels, and no characterization seems to have any special place.
But you are right, actual people do have a special place. Theories can be compatible or incompatible, points of view contradictory, and so forth. But you can see where people are special in p.11 para. 2:- "Sometimes thinkers are at loggerheads with one another, not because their propositions do conflict, but because their authors fancy that they conflict. ... It can be convenient to characterize these cross-purposes by saying that the two sides"
Believing wrongly that propositions conflict is not something that theories or points of view can do. They can apparently conflict and who can grasp an apparent conflict except a person? A new meaning for "to err is human."
I Quoting Antony Nickles
This is right. He does say, in the first sentence of the same para. 3 p.1 " which are not rival solutions of the same problem, but rather solutions or would-be solutions of different problems, and which, none the less, seem to be irreconcilable with one another." But this is only the first version of what he says. Take the three examples he offers:-
Of the first case, he says "This point is sometimes expressed by saying that the conflict is one between a scientist's theory and a theory of Common Sense. But even this is misleading." He means that common sense is not a theory, so the issue is not a conflict between theories; I think he would express it as a conflict between points of view. I think also that it is important that the one actually undermines the other. By the way, I think that his formulation of this issue is different from the standard formulations, just because the skeptic does not feature; instead, we have a working physiologist. That helpfully (to me, at least) puts the argument in a different context.
Of the second, he says on p. 4 para 1:- "Consider, next, a very different sort of dilemma." and so it is. "We feel quite sure both that a person can be made moral and that he cannot be made moral; and yet that both cannot be true." This is not a conflict between theories with different goals; it is, I shall say, a conflict between points of view within common sense.
He introduces the third example on p. 6 para 3 with:- "I want now to illustrate this notion of litigation between theories or bodies of ideas with another well-known example in order to bring out some other important points."
In this case, there is certainly an issue about the pursuit of different agendas, but (and this is me speaking, not Ryle) they share an ambition - to explain everything in the terms that suit their business. Not quite Humes augmentation, but next door to it.
Ryle's discussion of categories is similarly confusing. At first sight, Ryle seems to think that this concept is cure-all and for a long time, I bought that story. But by the time he has finished his discussion (pp. 9 - 11), he has said that rejected any systematic classification of them and we are left with the concept as "not more than convenient". The real business is "showing in detail how the metiers in ratiocination of the concepts under pressure are more dissimilar from one another or less dissimilar from one another than the contestants had unwittingly supposed." as you said at the beginning of your post.
I could have fair hair and still be me. I could be six inches shorter than I am and still be me. I could have musical talent as opposed to competence and still be me. Minor changes don't matter. The issue is what features of me matter - and not all of them matter. You can decide as you wish, but others will decide as they wish.
By the way, almost all of my features are the result of a combination of genes and environment.
How do your examples address what you just quoted?
Malcolm tells the following story:
Well, I have quoted the bit I just quoted again here. You originally said that just after you quoted a long argument from me, trying to explain why I thought you were wrong. But all you give me is a claim that I am misconstruing the idea. There's no explanation of what the misconstruction is. So I have nothing to engage with (apart from the rather surprising remark that you agree with Ryle's argument against fatalism, again without explanation). But apparently you do not accept that what you say is an application of the fatalism argument to this special case, but you do not explain what the relevant difference is.
And so we go back and forth. To no purpose. What do you think is needed to break the cycle? From my point of view, it seems that I present examples to you that seem to me to be incompatible with what you say, but you ignore them, without explaining what is wrong with them. What do you think?
Yes, I've heard that story. As a result that quotation has become one of my favourites. But actually, you can't just go on about differences without acknowledging similarities. It's just that most philosophers like similarities and tend to ignore differences and panic when they are faced with them, fearing that they have encountered that boogey-man of all philosophy - a counter-example. But it's the combination that makes the world go round.
Because you haven't seemed to grasp the main point of my argument which is that if a set of parents, even your own, had two gametes that were different than the ones that created you, that is indeed a different person. This isn't even controversial. If 10 seconds later, the there was another sperm, that is no longer you. That was someone else. We'd have to establish we agree here.
Right. In order to show that things that look the same are different one needs to acknowledge similarities since they would not look the same if there were not similarities.
There you go again. I agree that you can call that a different person, but I claim that I can decide on a case-by-case basis whether the difference warrants a change of identity or not. In addition, I claim that a fertilized egg is not a person - yet.
Sure, if youre getting caught on conception versus birth, we can say, is going to be a different person once born. That isnt the substantive issue at hand. Its just agreeing that when that person is born it wont be you, and that this is a matter of fact and not interpretation. And thus, you cannot say I could have been born in x, y, x different scenarios because the initial conditions of that conception (and then birth) of that person would not be you. The reason I bring up conception is not because I think thats when someone becomes a person (personhood debate). Im not trying to debate the abortion issue. Im literally trying to explain how it is that this person who would be born would not be you (conceived in different conditions whereby the set of gametes was different than the ones that comprise you). So no, you could not have been born in a different scenario.
OK. I'll skip the issue whether the baby that is born is the person who will develop over the next twenty years or so. But there is a development process there which is recognized in most societies (all that I know of).
You have two criteria there. Suppose I had been born in different circumstances (but the same parents) and the same DNA. For example suppose I was born as a second child, not the first. Would I be the same person? I say, yes. What would you say?
On the other hand, I can imagine (just about) having been born in China in 1947. But that's imagining me born in China in 1947, or rather imagining being in the circumstances of China in 1947. I accept that I cannot imagine the person that would be me having been born in China in 1947.
My point here is that there is a wild forest of circumstances that might have been different. In some of them, I would be the same person. In others, I would not. In some, I might not be able to decide. For example, suppose I was born - same parents, same DNA - in 1947. I think that's undecidable.
Well, you are slightly moving the goal post. All I am establishing is that if the gametes are different than the one that was your set of gametes, whatever the case may be (whether they are similar to you or not), THAT person who was conceived a second before or after with different gametes is not you. I really want to establish THIS point, at the least. That THIS point is not a matter of debate or interpretation, but just a fact that that person born from a different set of gametes is not you.
The reason this is important, is that it then establishes some other more interpretive things. That is to say, you cannot in reality have a person born under different circumstances because those would almost certainly have been a different set of gametes, and hence a different person. If a matter of seconds matters to whether it being a different person, then all the other circumstances that led to the conception would also be different and almost certainly would be a different person. So you can only IMAGINE after the fact that you could be different, but not ever in fact be different.
After we establish this agreement (which I think you would be), then we can possibly get into arguments of identity after the conception/birth of the person. If the person born was from the same gametes as you, would that person in fact really "be" you with various changes in their upbringing, etc.. You can even at this point, ask about indiscernibles regarding twins or clones because those are about the same genetics, and same gametes. I think for example, the case of maternal twins (twins from the same cell that splits), proves that identity is not necessarily wrapped up in genetic origin, otherwise twins would be considered the same person, which would seem absurd. In order for a person to be identified as a separate "person" or "being", one would have to take into account that they have their own X to some degree (body, and/or mind). And then, that body or mind is subject to changing experiences that could alter the course of their outlook, life, personality, etc. At that point, you can argue identity. But in no way, a person born of different gametes, even given the same set of experiences, would be "you". It would be an approximately similar person, however. So being of the same gametes is necessary but perhaps not sufficient to identity.
That being said, a TON of counterfactual ideas about "being you" are discounted if you at least admit that prior to conception, there is no way any other set of circumstances would have been the YOU who is reflecting back on their counterfactual history because any slight change in the antecedent causes would have affected the set of gametes that would have been conceived, if they were to even be conceived at all.
That's what a discussion is about, surely. Listen to the other guy, adjust your view and on we go. With luck, we might even reach agreement!
However, we have some way to go, and I'm a bit concerned that this issue is clearly off-topic. One of us could start a different thread, and I think that would be a good idea. How about it?
I'll wait for you reply before actually replying to that message. You won't be surprised that I have a good deal to say.
For the moment, I notice that you don't say that the fertilized egg is me; I'm assuming that you mean that it is the origin of me.
And in response to Quoting schopenhauer1
That can't be true. A clone of me (such as a possible identical twin) would not be me, either. And if you look carefully at what is written about DNA, there is a possibiity (several million to one) that someone else might be born with the same DNA as me.
I admit that DNA is treated as a unique identifier for me. But this is an empirical relationship, like the supposed unique pattern of my fingerprints (or, I understand, my palm-print or ear-print). I mean that the uniqueness of DNA was established on the basis of our understanding of personal identity. So it doesn't establish any logical relationship.
Anyway, let me know about the new thread.
It looks like you didn't read this part here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
But yeah, I'll start a new thread then.
I did read it. But I guess I didn't pay enough attention to that last sentence.
-schopenhauer
Perhaps,, but even if its insufficient, it may ought to be more then sufficient.
-
I can't say this thread is working very well, but if two or three people are interested and actually reading the book, I'm perfectly happy to continue.
It is pretty clear that there is no reaction to lecture I, so I'm thinking of moving on to lecture II.
But I need some guidance, particularly from you, Antony. Are you cogitating any comment on lecture I? If so, I'm happy to wait. If not, perhaps it is time to move on.
Certainly if one can introduce these lectures succinctly and clearly express what Ryles main point is, this may help a little with engagement. His particular style of writing feels like a lot of foreplay without a crescendo.
I'll do my best. As to the problem with his style, I can understand that would be disappointing. Perhaps my introduction should make it clear what the climax is.
Oh by the way, what I am discussing versus a specific identity versus a general future event, is not so indirectly related to this passage in Ryle:
Without having read the whole of Lecture I, I want to point out that Ryle is actually using Austins and Wittgensteins methods. As I have not gotten to the part where Ryle points out how two arguments which we take to clash are merely answering different questions, as alluded to in the introduction, I dont think it is important (or it is at least premature) to consider the arguments themselves.
He is, however, making claims about the ordinary ways wein the quote belowhelp (or hurt) ourselves, contrary to fatalisms conclusion.
He is asking that the description of the mechanics of these acts be accepted on their face. Not that they are unassailable (foundational, undoubtable), say: because they are common sense or the opinion of ordinary people, but that the rationale to be made for these claims can only be done by yourself, to see for yourself; or to reject them, which is to say: point out how fault, forseeing, and actions to mitigate the foreseen, do not work this way, or that help in the face of destiny does not refute determinism.
He is pointing to what Wittgenstein will call the grammar of our activities (practices Witt says). And the method involves drawing out what we do by looking at what we would say, when
Thus he is claiming that how our relation to the future works is dependent on an individual (and not a force) making a guess. (Wittgenstein points out that belief, in one sense, works as a guess (a hypothesis, PI p.190) and not as an unjustified lesser claim to knowledge.)
You will note that the claim is that true and false are inappropriate, which is to say their implications do not apply, their criteria have nowhere to measure against, because our relation to the future is not a matter of knowledge (outside of science, which is based on repeatability, predictability; as maybe determinism would like itself to be).
Ryle is not as generous and skilled at drawing out the details of the argument for determinism as Austin was with perception (nor are these examples as various and in-depth), so I think there will be more to do in working out on what terms Ryle takes these views to stand, and thus how they miss each other from different perspectives, if that is the case.
That's fine by me. These summaries - at least in the case of this book - are not that easy to do, so I will appreciate having some extra time. That doesn't mean I don't appreciate your comments, for which I thank you.
I agree with you. The only thing I would add is that it is a surprise, at least to me, to realize that "While it, is still an askable question whether my parents are going to have a fourth son, he cannot use as a name the name 'Gilbert Ryle' or use as a pronoun designating their fourth son the pronoun 'he'. Roughly, statements in the future tense cannot convey singular, but only general propositions, where statements in the present and past tense can convey both. More strictly, a statement to the effect that something will exist or happen is, in so far, a general statement. When I predict the next eclipse of the moon, I have indeed got the moon to make statements about, but I have not got her next. eclipse to make statements about."
What is new to me is the idea that the future tense is different from present and past because we cannot refer to things that do not yet exist.
The first part of the third lecture is about a real chestnut. But it is rather hard to follow, in the sense that it is hard to see where he is going. I think it helps to start with his conclusion, his diagnosis of the problem.
His final remark is not a surprise Similarly (i.e. to the fatalists dilemma) here we have been talking, so to speak, in one breath with the sporting reporter of a newspaper, and in another breath with our mathematics master, and so find ourselves describing 1) a sprint in terms of numerators and denominators and 2) of relations between fractions in terms of efforts and despair. p. 53 (numbers and strikethrough mine).
On the previous page (52), we find the specifics We decide factual questions about the length and duration of a race by one procedure, namely measurement; we decide arithmetical questions by another procedure, namely calculation. But then, given some facts about the race (such as whether Achilles will win) established by measurement, we can decide other questions about that race (such as where and when Achilles will overtake the tortoise) by calculations applied to these measurements. The two procedures of settling the different sorts of questions intertwine, somehow, into a procedure for establishing by calculation concrete, measurable facts about this particular race. We have the pony in the harness that was meant for any such pony, yet we can mismanage the previously quite manageable pony in its previously quite manageable harness. His summary his helpfully simpler Two separate skills do not, in the beginning, intertwine into one conjoint skill.
(I think this is his gesture towards the mathematical solution of the problem by application of the calculus which demonstrates that we can calculate when Achilles will overtake the tortoise to any level of accuracy that we desire).
Going back a bit further he acknowledges the common ground between the two skills (p.48) in an important way we are, in all applications, thinking in terms of or operating with the same overarching notions of part, whole, fraction, total, plus, minus and multiplied by. He articulates the question (p.50), as How is (what we know quite well about the stages of an athlete's victorious pursuit) to be married with (what we also know quite well about the results of adding together a fraction of a whole, that fraction of the remainder, that fraction of the next remainder, and so on)?
He partially answers this question by pointing out:-
1) that never in this scenario is ambiguous between the harmless truism To say this (sc. that the sum of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 etc., never amounts to unity). is simply to utter the general proposition that any particular remainder-bisection leaves a remainder to bisect. and the alarming prophecy that if a silly computer were to attempt to continue bisecting remainders until he had found one which was halved but had no second half, his attempt would then go on to all eternity. p. 50/51.
He also, less transparently, finds an ambiguity between all as in the total when all the parts are added up and any. I dont quite understand it and cannot find a suitably brief quotation.
So thats my backwards summary of the part of his lecture that begins on p. 48 with:- Now let us draw some general lessons from this dilemma. Returning to the beginning, Ryles aim is getting us to see that the paradox hypnotizes us into seeing it only as an endless series. We need to appreciate two distinct points of view. One is the overview of the whole event (by a non-participant) and the other is the narrow view of a competitor in the race. He approaches this by considering dividing up a cake alongside dividing up the race. I think the point is that in dividing up the race, we tend to forget the overview of the whole; it is easier to keep the whole cake in mind because it is not a temporal process. Some of the points that I found helpful:-
1) On p. 42, he imagines that we might mark out the course by planting a flag at each point of the calculation. At the half-way mark, the quarter-way mark and so on. The method itself guarantees that there will always be a place for another flag, so we think that Achilles will never reach the tortoise. But if we reversed the process, would we be convinced that the race did not have a beginning?
2) Similarly Zeno, in his mentions of the successive leads to be made up by Achilles, is, though surreptitiously and only by implication, referring to the total two-mile course run by Achilles in overtaking the tortoise; or in other words, his argument itself rests on the unadvertised premiss that Achilles does catch the tortoise in, say, precisely two miles and in precisely one hour. p.44.
3) We need to see that there is a crucial difference between two questions To put a central point very crudely, we have to distinguish the question' How many portions have you cut off the object?' from the question 'How many portions have you cut it into?. (p. 46) In the first question, we have partly cut the cake and there is always part of it left. In the second question, we have cut the whole cake up.
Yes. That puts a different perspective on things. Very helpful.
Nice summary.
This is my reaction to Lecture III.
Ryle writes at the very beginning of Dilemmas, One familiar kind of conflict is that in which two or more theorists offer rival solutions of the same problem. In the simplest cases, their solutions are rivals in the sense that if one of them is true the others are false. It is strange that Ryle would not include the conflict found in Achilles and the Tortoise as an instance of rival theories having a clear winner. He says on p 36, It is quite certain that a fast runner following a slow runner will overtake him in the end and Nothing could be more decisively settled if you consider the speeds of each contestant and the ground in which they cover. How closer to the truth must we get? Our experience of such an event as well as our mathematical description of such an event is decisive. Clearly, we have an answer to the problem of who will win the race between Achilles and the Tortoise.
However, Ryle has something else in mind. He says, Yet there is a very different answer which also seems to follow with equal cogency from the same data. But what data is that? Surely not the data experimentally collected by watching a race between two such opponents. He must mean the data generated based on the hypothetical of an infinite number of steps bisecting and never reaching unity. Now if Ryle stopped here, I could understand because in a way one theory is beholden to an outcome of an actual race, while the other is beholden to the thought experiment where coherence and consistency rule the day. So, this goes along with Ryles idea that There often arise quarrels between theories, or, more generally, between lines of thought, which are not rival solutions of the same problem, but rather solutions or would-be solutions of different problems, and which, none the less, seem to be irreconcilable with one another.
So, why did Ryle not just declare a winner and be done with it? I believe Ryle is committed to showing that Zenos paradox does give us some kind of knowledge, although a more rationalistic kind. However, during this analysis, Ryle seems to oscillate between rationalism and empiricism. For example, take his interesting example of dividing up a cake, p 39:
But now suppose that the mother of a family chooses instead to circulate an uncut cake round the table, instructing the children that each is to cut off a bit and only a bit of what is on the plate; i.e. that no child is to take the whole of what he finds on the plate. Then, obviously so long as her instructions are observed, however far and often the cake circulates, there is always a bit of cake left. If they obey her orders always to leave a bit, then they always leave a bit. Or to put it the other way round, if they obey her orders never to take the whole of the last fragment, a fragment always remains untaken.
What is Ryle referring to here? To actual cake, or some abstract object call a cake? This is where I think Ryle presents a confusing picture. From p 40, The plate never stops circulating. After each cut there remains a morsel to be bisected by the next child. Obviously, the childrens patience or their eyesight will give out before the cake gives out. For the cake cannot give out on this principle of division. In one breath he seems to present an example that should reflect actual reality of bisecting a cake by children and is practically limited by the childs eyesight and patience. Yet, in the very next sentence talks about a cake that cannot give out on this principle of division. However, if it was an actual cake, and depending on how heterogeneous the cake was and how easily it can be divided, each morsel may not be the cake anymore, but a piece of fruit, sugar, salt, etc. At some point, it may become the actual ingredients we used to make the cake to start with. So, from this perspective, the cake gives out on the principle of division. But an idea of a cake that represents the general concept of object may be another story. Similarly, to how I described the Zeno paradox dilemma, one is beholden to the concept of division, and the other to the experiment of cutting up a heterogenous mixture of stuff.
Ryle concludes his analysis of the Zeno paradox with nor can he grasp the other abstract platitude that the portions cut off something at no stage amount to the whole of that thing. (p48) So, I guess we ended up in the same place in that Zeno is not answering the question who will win the race. But Ryle wants to say something additional, Zeno is putting forth an abstract platitude. But I say Zeno parades a metaphysical fiction disguised as a scientist hypothesis.
I've previously set out the story that the ordinary language philosophy in use here gave way to a return to more formal considerations, mostly as a result of developments in Logic. Part of that was Kripke's development of a formal semantics for modal logic. Ryle's position here seems to be reliant on a descriptive notion of naming, and would need some considerable re-writing in the light of the development of rigid designators. Some idea of the complexity involved can be gleaned from The Possibilism-Actualism Debate. I doubt it's a road we would want to go down here. @schopenhauer1's new thread shows how convolute that area becomes.
There are other issues. So I suspect the intersection example suffers from confusing modality with probability. We can't name the individual accidents that were avoided, but can still maintain that the overall probability of an accident was reduced.
Yes. That's because, of course, there are, ex hypothesi no individual (actual) accidents to be averted. I don't see that Ryle is at all confused here.
Quoting Richard B
Surely, you are missing the point here. No-one doubts who will win the race. The question is how Zeno makes it appear that there is some question about that. The answer is that he considers the race from a certain, misleading, point of view. Ryle's project here is to understand how that illusion is created. Wittgenstein speaks of conjuring tricks. Austin, in Sense and Sensibilia has similar, but less brutal, descriptions of the process.
Quoting Richard B
Ryle is not always precise in his language. "Data" just means the set-up of Achilles racing the tortoise
Quoting Richard B
Yes, I think that's exactly what Ryle is saying about this problem.
Quoting Richard B
Well, he wants to diagnose why anyone would have taken Zeno's problem seriously - and, by the way, Zeno also took this problem seriously in that he believes that all change, including motion, is an illusion.
I think there is a real problem here, and it needs to be acknowledged. You can calculate the time it takes for Achilles to complete the race and for the tortoise to complete the race, you; you can then compare the times and see that Achilles will win. But if you ask when (or where) Achilles will catch up and pass the tortoise, you can't - not accurately, as you can with the first calculation. The consolation prize is that you can calculate it to any degree of accuracy you like; but that didn't become possible until the calculus of infinitesimals was invented in the 17th century CE.
Quoting Richard B
Yes, Zeno's problem is purely theoretical not, in some sense of the word, real. Which is why it is so tempting to simply declare the winner.
Quoting Richard B
Well, yes. Zeno does have a metaphysical solution to the problem, which is to declare motion impossible. Philosophy has progressed to the point where we don't need to argue about that any more. Who says philosophy never makes any progress?
I should have been clearer, yes, the confusion is not Ryle's, but those who mistake the modal for the probable.
Yes indeed. My argument seems to parallel Ryle's that the future is more along the lines of "possiblism", and that even looking in the past, there could have been actual counterfactuals that could have happened. However, there are some things which are logically impossible because they require necessity. For example, prior to your conception, if there was any slight change to the gametes meeting, there was no person that was you. Most circumstances would lead to the outcome that if any slight circumstance changed prior to conception, then the current you would not exist to look back upon these counterfactual possibilities.
I know you don't want to get in the weeds, but that is exactly what I am contesting. Even if it was a slight second earlier or later, whatever that person becomes, it was/is not you.
Quoting Banno
Indeed it is a minefield, but now there's a whole thread devoted to it, if you want to take a stab at it. Obviously, with that article you referenced, this opens a tremendous can of worms and encompasses a whole lot of ideas in metaphysics, causality, necessity, identity, and the like.
One of the things that makes this hard to be a definite "rigid designation" is that it is conceivable that there is the ever so distant possibility that the same set of gametes could have been selected in some artificial way that was exactly the same as the ones that comprised the non-artificial version. So, is it conceivable that someone could still come about in a way that was different than the instant of the two gametes coming together? Perhaps. But then this brings up ideas of different causes for the same outcome... In other words, it may refute the claim that everything would have to happen as is prior to conception for you to have existed. However, in 99.99999999 cases, the circumstances would have had to be the same for you to have been conceived. How much does the limit have to reach 100% for it to considered a necessity that everything had to be exactly the same?
Quoting Ludwig V
I do not believe Ryle should have taken this paradox serious, nor anyone else for that matter. And if we are going to talk about "temptation", it should be to ask why would anyone be tempted to take this serious to begin with. Just because one presents a picture that is cogent does not mean it has any application in the real world. And it was Ryle who describe one kind of dilemma as "In the simplest cases, their solutions are rivals in the sense that if one of them is true the others are false." Here I argue that that this is a simple case of one line of thought as "true" and the other "false". How can anyone argue it has any application to the world we experience? Why is the appeal of our experiences not the deciding factor that drive us to say that this is a simple case that easily decides on "which is true" and "which is false"? Do weneed Ryle to take the extra step to "clarify the language" that this is actually an "abstract platitiude"? We can't trust our experience to dismiss Zeno, we need the extraordinary insight of Ryle to show us out of the fly-bottle so to speak.?
If I show Ryle a film of a race between Achilles and the Tortoise in which the Tortoise gets a lead, and by strategic camera angles and editing shows the Tortoise winning even though Achilles looks faster. The film certainly is not a logical impossibility. Do I need Ryle to help us understand that there should not be any confusion with what actually happens in such event?
Lastly, to say Zeno's problem is purely theoretical, I think is a bit incomplete. Zeno's argument is to show that all change/motion is an illusion, but this is not some fantasy world for Zeno, it is the actual world around us that seems to have change but is illusionary.
All I am saying is experience settles some questions not just lingustic analysis. And in this case, experience should be arbiter.
That's certainly true. I didn't distinguish carefully enough between Zeno's thinking and ours. We have the benefit of an established distinction between theory and practice, which didn't exist in Zeno's time.
Quoting Richard B
That's true. It would be interesting to know why you think that experience should be the arbiter in this case. By the way, I don't think that anyone thinks that Achilles won't overtake the tortoise.
Experience isn't a given. It needs interpreting. You experience the sun coming up over the horizon on Monday morning. You have the same experience on Tuesday morning. What tells you that it is the same sun and not a new one every day? How do you know that the sun doesn't rise, but the earth turns?
Quoting Richard B
Well, Zeno did. So have many other people. If you want to know why, read Ryle.
I think that the best answer to what you are saying is that the paradox isn't a problem. It's a puzzle. Whether it's a serious puzzle or not is another question. Whether it's an interesting puzzle is yet another question.
Yes. Isn't that implicit in "necessary but not sufficient"?
Quoting schopenhauer1
I would say it has to reach at least 100%. But maybe you don't?
Quoting Banno
I wish I had thought of that days ago. But I'm not sure it applies. Doesn't Ryle's argument about the future mean that rigid designators cannot be rigid in the future tense?
You seriously underestimate Zeno and others, especially his teacher, Parmenides. Zeno knew full well that when he walked he was able to go from one place to another. The larger problem is the relationship between thinking and being. Rather than attempt to resolve the interpretive problems I will frame the problem in the form of a question and in light of this turn to Zeno's a priori puzzle.
Is thinking the way to being or an impediment? (See Parmenides poem and the way of truth - alethia)
The Eleatic philosophers were said to hold that all things are one. Parmenides does not simply accept this, he inquires dialectically, treating it as a hypothesis. If all things are one then what follows?
If all things are one then it follows that there can be no motion. Can we reasonably argue that there is no motion? Zeno provides the arguments. We might say that he was misled by treating this a priori, but if all is one and thereby thinking and being are one, then this should make no difference.
Rigid designation is a bit tangential perhaps, but it can be pulled into this debate. As I see it, rigid designators are about invariant necessities involved in something's name. Generally this is "proper names" but can be expanded to scientific kinds and other things as well. So when someone is rigidly designating "Ludwig V", that means this person is Ludwig V in all possible worlds. Ludwig V is causally "linked" through a dubbing process that cannot be invariant across worlds.
In this sense, we can start making connections to this notion of identity, gametes, and temporal-causes. That is to say, the gametes combining in such a way at such and such instant (they usually go together, though in a fantastical conceivable way I can think of a way they might not), that it must be this event (and combination of gametes), invariant across all possible worlds. It is in a way, "rigidly designated" as "you". Across these worlds, you might have different hair colors, different ways in which you interacted with the environment, but what has to be invariant was the gamete combination at that instance of coming together for it to be you, and not someone who is just similar. Just as there is a causal link in Ludwig V with the person Ludwig V. The person Ludwig V is linked "as an individual person" by way of causal instance of gametes combining.
If the link is causal, it is empirical. Which means it is not necessary.
Quite so. But if he was misled, doesn't that suggest that the conclusion of the argument is wrong, or at least may be wrong? Does that really make no difference?
The causality is the necessity. That is similar to Kripke's causal-theory of proper names and use of rigid designators.
You say that as if it settled the matter. Is there a universal consensus that Kripke is necessarily right? That would indeed be remarkable.
No it is not. Someone brought up rigid designators (and thus Kripke).
I pointed to the fact that generally his work on rigid designators (he invented the term I think), involves proper names.
It has also been extended to natural kinds (like H20 necessarily being the term "water").
I remarked that rigid designators can be tied into identity of individual personhood by way of causal necessity (these two gametes meeting at a certain instant of time whether natural or artificially).
I'd also like to add, that perhaps it falls less under his proper names "necessity by way of causality across all possible worlds", and could simply fall under "necessity by way of natural kinds". One has a causal aspect to it (someone dubs an object in a speech act that then becomes the origination of the name tied to that person in a chain of events). The other seems to be essentialist in terms of something akin to "substance" (H20 is water). Interestingly, both can be the case in terms of individual personhood.
And did Kripke invent causal necessity as well?
If I am right in claiming that their methodological approach is dialectical then he was not misled. He was treating the claim that all is one as a hypothesis to be examined and if it was supported by reason. Pointing to experience in order to reject the claim begs the question of the unity of thinking and being. If they are the same then perhaps what should be rejected is what experience seems to show. Dialectical movement does not resolve things, it keeps them in play.
But perhaps, as Plato seems to suggest, he lacked the subtlety of Parmenides. Perhaps he did not treat this dialectically but either as a truth to be defended or as where reason leads us necessarily. In which case it seems plausible that he was misled by a priori reasoning. By what Kant would call the pure reason of metaphysics.
Yes, but I see no reason to take such a view seriously. The sentence "Ludwig may reply to this post later" is about you.
I'm puzzled. I thought Socrates/Plato invented dialectic. What's the evidence that any pre-Socratics knew about dialectics?
I'm not sure what you are implying here. Is this supposed to be sarcastic or something? I simply stated he invented the term "rigid designator" for the idea that a word attaches to an object in all possible world. In his version, it is through causal necessity.
This is quite problematic. I've been unable to follow what Ryle means here by "general" and "singular". The sentence "The next total lunar eclipse will occur on March 14, 2025" is about the Moon; and indeed it is about a single event. In what way is it general and not singular?
I've discovered that I'm a bit prone to being distracted by side-issues, so I won't ask what that means.
An apparent dig at Austin...?
It was a genuine question. I don't know what causal necessity means. I know what "I inherited my fair hair from my parents means." But then, I've been reading Hume.
I cannot give you a definitive answer on this. The following from the SEP entry on Zeno gives some indication why such an answer is not available:
If the Eleatic philosophers held the opinion that all is one then Zeno's argument could justifiably be regarded as endoxa rather than eristic. I added bolding to the quote above to help explain this distinction.
If you do a search you will find several articles that credit Zeno. But all this may be tangential to Ryle.
I find that hard to believe. Austin puts a lot of emphasis on the inter-connectedness of words. Austin would certainly consider "cause" and all sorts of related words at the same time, bringing out their differences and similarities, wouldn't he?
But then, a dig doesn't have to be fair.
Quoting Banno
Ryle does preface his articulation of the idea with "roughly", so it wouldn't be surprising to find deficiencies.
I got worried about that and came up with this:-
Quoting Ludwig V
But I can't work out a similar tactic for the lunar eclipse. The best I can do is a gesture. The eclipse is predictable, but does not yet exist (is not actual). When it happens, it will become real/actual and when it is over it will have been real/actual.
(My apologies to Austin. I couldn't think of a better way of putting that.)
OK. It is certainly possible that he was, and it is hard to be sure of anything about those very early philosophers. It just seems so odd that an argument that seems quite clearly to establish a conclusion should actually be intended to keep ideas in play. I suppose an argument for an absurd conclusion could be intended to provoke a response, rather than to establish a truth. But we'll never really know what Zeno intended.
Because of the lack of volition?
I think it true that there will be an eclipse in March, 2025. I might be wrong, but tif so the circumstances would be so extraordinary that the lack of an eclipse would be of little consequence. We'd have other problems. I think it true your companion's death last Sunday was averted. I don't think talking in this way invokes any ontological mystery.
Quoting Ludwig V
Since Kripke, It ain't necessarily so.
Well, if my attempt involves ontological mystery, I'll give up on it.
Quoting Banno
I'm glad that you don't think that it is like Hume's failure of the sun to rise tomorrow morning, which, it seems, will affect nothing else.
I agree that it is true that there will be an eclipse in March 2025. I suggest however, that the prediction that there will be an eclipse in March 2025 is neither correct nor incorrect, neither fulfilled or unfulfilled until April 2025. Will that do?
Quoting Banno
I've been thinking about precious little else for hours.
Quoting Banno
Very good. The prospect of an infinite regress of necessities is positively intimidating.
But seriously, who invented this idea, and is it proof against Humean scepticism? If not, why not?
The problem is that Zeno's writings do not exist except for fragments. There are various conflicting claims about what is was doing. I agree with your conclusion:
Quoting Ludwig V
Oh, I'll say it is correct - it's not wrong. But unfulfilled - yeah, ok.
Quoting Ludwig V
Thereby hangs a PhD - or a career.
After the cake has been passed around the family circle so that an infinite number of slices have been removed, there will be no cake left.
Achilles will pass the tortoise after an infinite number of steps, but after a finite time.
I'm just not seeing a problem here.
Thank you. I'm not the person to do that work. I think I'll remain respectfully sceptical.
Quoting Banno
Correct/wrong is a very intricate issue. Complete agreement is hard to find. But is his doctrine right enough to resolve the fatalist's argument?
I agree with what you say. My version of this is that Achilles may have to pass an infinite number of points to pass the tortoise, but he has the advantage that he can pass each point in an infinitesimal amount of time.
Would "Achilles runs faster past smaller distances" cover it?
It doesn't make any logical difference.
This lecture is a new departure. The previous two, it turns out, were exercises, now we get serious.
The last paragraph arrives at the expected conclusion that category mistakes are at the root of the issues. There is a new general moral Dilemmas derive from wrongly imputed parities of reasoning. (pp. 66-67)
Theres a qualification. But we must not be ungrateful to either of these borrowed trappings. We learn the powers of a borrowed tool side by side with learning its limitations, and we find out the properties of the material as well when we find out how and why the borrowed tool is ineffectual upon it, as when we find out how and why it is effectual. In the end we design the tool for the material-in the end, but never in the beginning. (p. 66) This is something rather different from the Concept of Mind, which seems to find no redeeming feature in the category mistake he is discussing there.
His aims also imply a more tolerant attitude to category mistakes. I want to exhibit how, at the level of thought on which we have first to think not just with but about even a quite commonplace concept or family of concepts, it is natural and even inevitable for us to begin by trying to subject it to a code or standard, which we know how to operate elsewhere. Dilemmas result when the conduct of the new conscript diverges from the imposed standard. (p. 55)
The first (and probably the most important) problem is:- I begin by considering a piece of theoretical harness which some pioneers in psychological theory, with natural over-confidence, formerly tried to hitch on to the notion of pleasure. Thinking of their scientific mission as that of duplicating for the world of mind what physicists had done for the world of matter, they looked for mental counterparts to the forces in terms of which dynamic explanations were given of the movements of bodies. (p. 56)
This turns out to mean:- Hence it seemed reasonable to set up as axioms of human dynamics such plausible, yet also unplausible, propositions as that all desires are desires for pleasure; that all purposive actions are motivated by the desire for a net increase in the quantity of the agent's pleasure or a net decrease in the quantity of his pain; and that the dynamic efficacy of one pleasure differs from that of another only if the former is bigger, i.e. more intense or more protracted or both than the latter. (p. 57)
The critique here centres on the comparison of pleasure with pain and hence the idea that is a sensation.
There is one other major target:- The problem in what sorts of terms human nature is to be described was at one time thought to be solved or half-solved by deliberately borrowing the idioms of politics. (p. 64) He admits that the metaphor is less popular than it used to be:- "This parallel strikes us nowadays as not much more than a striking and picturesque metaphor. (p. 64).
I cant resist commenting that there is also a tradition of running the metaphor the other way comparing the state to the individual rather the individual to a state. This makes it a most unusual example of metaphor. Whether this is explaining the unknown by appealing to something even more unknown or each casting light on the other, I cannot say. Teamwork, authority, and balance seem to be the themes either way.
The critique here is much briefer that the critique of the first idea. It centres on the idea that pleasure is an emotion.
Ryle doesnt explicitly discuss pleasure very much. He focuses instead on two other concepts which are, admittedly, closely related to pleasure - enjoyment or disliking:- The notions of enjoying and disliking are not technical notions. (p. 55) Enjoyment doesnt seem to have a single convenient opposite, and this may be why he chooses such an odd pairing.
His focus isnt obviously wrong, but one might wonder about other concepts in this family - delight, happiness, satisfaction, bliss, gratification, contentment, gladness, delectation. These, or at least some of them, might have broadened the discussion in a helpful way. On the other hand, he does mention the variety of contexts in which pleasure is discussed:- There are many overlapping fields of discourse in which, long before philosophizing begins, generalities about pleasure are bound to be mooted and debated. (p. 56). Im not sure how significant these points may be.
I continue to struggle with Chapter 2 unfortunately. I cant seem to see the truth or confused conflict between the two positions. I feel like Ryle does not do sufficient justice to developing the position of Determinism, even by drawing it out, as Austin does, only on the terms of ordinary criteria, nor by getting at why the Determinist wants or needs to hold the view they do, as Wittgenstein would. Ryle appears simply to subject Determinism to the judgment of common opinion, as a refutation, which simply overlooks what is important about or to Determinism. It does seem he thinks it is small potatoes; however, if Determinism is of little import, Free Will is trivialized as well (and isnt the real dilemma between those two?). Maybe I will come back to it, as I am at a loss to tie the discussion to any greater point, even though he did promise that the argument between the dilemmas themselves were not the matter at hand.
Ryle himself is uncharacteristically cautious about his arguments in this lecture - I have produced quite an apparatus of somewhat elaborate arguments, all of which need expansion and reinforcement. I expect that the logical ice is pretty thin under some of them. p.29
I do think he is fairly explicit that this problem is a problem of logic, not of causality. So Free Will is probably not at stake here. Here are two quotations:-
"A large part of the reason is that in thinking of a predecessor making its successor necessary we unwittingly assimilate the necessitation to causal necessitation. Gunfire makes windows rattle a few seconds later, but rattling windows do not make gunfire happen a few seconds earlier, even though
they may be perfect evidence that gunfire did happen a few seconds earlier. We slide, that is, into thinking of the anterior truths as causes of the happenings about which they were true, where the mere matter of their relative dates saves us from thinking of happenings as the effects of those truths about them which are posterior to them. Events cannot be the effects of their successors, any more than we can be the offspring of our posterity." p. 21
"It is quite true that a backer cannot guess correctly that Eclipse will win without Eclipse winning and still it is quite false that his guessing made or caused Eclipse to win." p.22
As to conclusions, some of us got quite excited about this generalization of some of his arguments: - "Roughly, statements in the future tense cannot convey singular, but only general propositions, where statements in the present and past tense can convey both." p.27 I'm not sure than anyone thinks it is right, but it is quite persuasive in its context. I do think there is something in it.
"Certain thinkers, properly impressed by the excellent logical discipline of the technical concepts of long-established and well consolidated sciences like pure mathematics and mechanics, have urged that intellectual progress is impeded by the survival of the unofficial concepts of unspecialized thought...... It is, of course, quite true that scientific, legal or financial thinking could not be conducted only in colloquial idioms. ....... the specialist when he comes to use the designed terms of his art (sc. does not) cease to depend upon the concepts which he began to master in the nursery, any more than the driver, whose skill and interests are concentrated on the mechanically complex and delicate works of his car, cease to avail himself of the mechanically crude properties of the public highway. He could not use his car without using the roads, though he could, as the pedestrian that he often is, use these same roads without using his car." p. 35
But you say that you are giving up on this lecture. I'm now a bit uncertain what to do for the best. Lecture IV on pleasure has not attracted any comment or debate. I was thinking of posting a summary of lecture V "The world of science and the everyday world" which might attract more interest. But if you would like me to wait for you, I doubt anybody will be inconvenienced. What do you think?
Oooh. Goodby, qualia.
I ran a thread once in which I argued that adding qualia to the discussion was detrimental; that we ought talk instead of colours and sounds, since they were sufficient. Ryle seems to agree.
Sadly, not good-bye. The argument still rages - in exactly the traditional format, which I thought had been banished. Which drives me back to Cavell's idea that philosophical ideas are not put away, because their roots are deeper even than philosophy.
On another site, I'm watching, appalled, as the debate around Dennett rages on.
The problem is, I think, that Ryle's argument doesn't address the need to locate the technical in relation to the untechnical. I think, nowadays, Newtonian mechanics has found a comfortable place, but other sciences have not - notably, as Ryle says, the sub-atomic world, but now the neuro-physiological world as well. Which I why I'm looking forward to VII.
Do you think I should post a summary of V, in case others might want to contribute?
Lecture V The world of science and the everyday world.
As usual, Ryle identifies his target at the beginning: -
We often worry ourselves about the relations between what we call the world of science' and the world of real life ' or the world of common sense'. Sometimes we are even encouraged to worry about the relations between 'the desk of physics and the desk on which we write. p.68
His answer is not difficult to predict: -
In the way in which a landscape-painter paints a good or bad picture of a range of hills, the geologist does not paint a rival picture, good or bad, of those hills, though what he tells us the geology of are the same hills that the painter depicts or misdepicts. p.80
He gets to his target in a somewhat roundabout way, by describing similar dilemmas. Im not sure how far these diversions contribute to resolving the main problem; their contribution seems to be more to loosen our familiar patterns of thinking and prepare us to look at things differently.
The first of these is the dilemma between Economic Man motivated primarily or exclusively by financial considerations and the market -and the Everyday Man for whom financial considerations are one amonst many preoccupations and far from his only concern. (p.69) Ryle maintains that the first of these is now a matter of history. It was very much alive in the 19th century. Certainly, it isnt a live issue for us now.
Theres a brief consideration of the question who Aesops story of the dog who dropped his bone in order to secure the tempting reflection of the bone in a pool is aimed at. (p.70)
Then he returns to the main business the feud between the world of physical science and the world of real life. p.71
He starts by deflating two over-inflated ideas science and world:-
(a) There is no such animal as 'Science'. There are scores of sciences. (p.71)
(b) The other idea which needs prefatory deflation is that of world. (p.73)
Then he presents us with another analogy: - An undergraduate member of a college is one day permitted to inspect the college accounts and to discuss them with the auditor. (p.75). His discussion of this is detailed and careful and ends with: - In fact, of course, physical theorists do not describe chairs and tables at all, any more than the accountant describes the books bought for the library. (p.79)
He is surprisingly cautious about his conclusion: -
I hope that this protracted analogy has satisfied you at least that there is a genuine logical door open for us; that at least there is no general logical objection to saying that physical theory, while it covers the things that the more special sciences explore and the ordinary observer describes, still does not put up a rival description of them . (p.80)
But he seems clear enough about the source of the trouble we should hesitate to characterize the physicist, the theologian, the historian, the poet, and the man in the street as all alike producing pictures', whether of the same object or of different objects. The highly concrete word picture' smothers the enormous differences between the businesses of the scientist, historian, poet and theologian even worse than the relatively abstract word description' smothers the big differences between the businesses of the accountant and the reviewer. p.81
And so he leads us on to the next lecture by characterizing what he has said so far as mere promise of a lifebelt. (p.81)
Quoting SEP Anscombe
H'mm. I'm afraid you'll have to tell me more before I can see your point. (I looked at the SEP article before saying that.)
I'm inclined to wonder whether she is using a different sense of "cause" from the one intended by Hume and others. More related to "causa" in Latin and "aitia" in Greek. I'm not saying that's wrong, exactly, just that it's different.
Come to think of it, there is a live issue where this might be relevant. At present, it tends to focus on Searle's Chinese room argument. It is the relationship between the description of physical states of a computer and the "interpretation" of them by people. (I'm not quite sure what the description of the software would apply, but I'm inclined to think that we have to think of that as a bridge between the two categories. It can't be a translation because the physical states of the computer are not a language.)
By extension, one might then see the relationship between brain and mental states as a similar problem, which, come to think of it is exactly the problem that Ryle puts at the summit of the mountain he is climbing in "Dilemmas". That's a hot topic (or is it the same topic?) as the computer issue.
By the way, I'm not intending to downplay the importance of levels of description in ethics.
Quoting SEP Anscombe
Cause in the way I was using it in my thread is agnostic to which approach you take in defining it. All that matters is a set of events that excludes other sets of events. A is not B, X is not Y. These set of gametes are not those set of gametes. Obviously, object in some level has to exist. So a red herring would be discussing what is X and what is Y.. Like everything is particles, so we cannot make such distinctions.
The title of lecture VI is "Technical and Untechnical Concepts"
Ryle gives a good summary of his own lecture towards the end of it:- Our alarming and initially paralysing question was this. 'How is the World of Physics related to the Everyday World?' I have tried to reduce its terrors and dispel its paralysing effect, by asking you to reconstrue the question thus, 'How are the concepts of physical theory logically related to the concepts of everyday discourse?' (p. 91/92)
He traces the problem back to the revolutions in science in the 17th century Galileo, Descartes and Newton and the doctrine that a scientific theory has no place in it for terms which cannot appear among the data or the results of calculations. (p. 82) The catch is where colours, tastes, smells, noises and felt warmth and cold belong. He cites Aristotle and Boyle and the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities as responsible for the banishing of colours and tastes from physics. (p. 84)
Well, they are not so much banished as marginalized. The chemist, the geneticist and the wielder of the Geiger counter, in apparent defiance of this ostracism of sensible qualities, may indeed base their special theories on the smells and tastes of chemical compounds, on the colours of sweet-peas and on the clicks heard from the Geiger counter. They are permitted as a reliable index of physical facts, but still, somehow, not themselves physical facts. (p.84)
He starts with a direct challenge to one view of all this (without actually accusing anyone of adopting it). It is not true that what is not and cannot be mentioned in a formula is denied by that formula. He points out that .. Again, it is not because algebraical equations will have nothing to do with numbers, that they mention none of them. Rather it is because they are impartially receptive of any numbers you please. (pp. 83/84)
Next, there is a diagnosis of one intellectual motive for construing a logically necessary impartiality as a logically necessary hostility. the tradition of Aristotelian logic. It seemed obvious that what was measured by thermometer or ruler and colour or taste were both qualities of an object. So the distinction was drawn (by Boyle, he thinks) between primary and secondary qualities. But it is a mistake to classify both in the same way. (p. 84/85)
This is a new idea (and a new one in these lectures). Expressions like Quality', Property', Predicate', Attribute', Characteristic', Description' and Picture' the latter is a survivor from the previous lecture push together concepts of very different kinds, and this is what constitutes the dilemmas that result. (p. 85) Ryle calls them "smother-words". The only perplexing thing in the situation is whether we ought to say that being a trump-card is a 'property' or 'attribute' of the Queen of Hearts. . This is not a Bridge-player's worry but a logician's worry. (p. 86)
We cannot answer the question what the Queen of Hearts can and cannot do unless we know the game thats being played. (p. 86) This leads him to the concept of theoretical luggage or theory-ladenness as the critical factor in creating the illusion of a puzzle.
He distinguishes the card-playing example which he pursues throughout the lecture from the scientific theories. But acknowledges that card games and physics (or economics) are activities of very different kinds. First, we can participate or not in card games but physics and economics are part of all our lives and second, the thinking involved in card games is about how to win, but in economics, for example is how to get the best bargains; thinking about physics is different again. (p. 88)
And so he moves on to the main issue perception.
Why do you think it the main issue?
That remark was a bit off the cuff and I'm prepared and happy to be wrong, if I am wrong. I found myself picking up breadcrumbs. Put it this way - I remember the book as a collection, not a path, and was interested by the discovery that it isn't. I is an introduction, II is clearly a throwaway and III almost entirely historical. The topics gradually gets more interesting - more "live". (Over this many years, that's quite remarkable, isn't it?)
In a way, calling VI the main issue is over-simplification. The main issue is methodological, but the explanation of it is demonstration rather than analysis, and VI brings the methodology to a live issue and demonstrates that it really can help with a real issue.
The beginning of IV:-
"THE two specimens of logical litigation that we have so far considered in detail, namely, the fatalist issue and Zeno's issue, have been in a certain way academic dilemmas. We almost deliberately let them worry us just because we found them intellectually interesting. They were, up to a point, like riddles to which we want to get the answers only because getting the answers is good exercise. From now on I want to discuss issues which are more than riddles, issues, namely, which interest us because they worry us; not mere intellectual exercises but live intellectual troubles." IV p.54
Which is reinforced at the start of V:-
"You will have felt, I expect and hope, that the fatalist dilemma, Zeno's dilemma, and my puzzles about pleasure are all, though in different ways, somewhat peripheral or marginal tangles - tangles whose unravelling does not promise by itself to lead to the unravelling of the tangles that really matter, save in so far as it may be instructive by example. Henceforward I shall be discussing a spider's-web of logical troubles which is not away in a corner of the room, but out in the middle of the room. This is the notorious trouble about the relations between the World of Science and the Everyday World." V p. 68
Actually, from memory, this was, let's say, not a dead issue back in the day. But it doesn't seem to bother anyone these days. "Science tells us what the world is really like." If only they would read Austin and Ryle.
The end of V is linked to VI:-
"But you will not and should not be satisfied with this mere promise of a lifebelt. Can it be actually produced and thrown to us in the precise stretch of surf where we are in difficulties? To one particular place where the surf is boiling round us I shall now turn." V, p.81
VI leads us to VII:-
"But now I must move on to a certain very special tangle or tangle of tangles, which is, I think, for many people somewhere near the centre of their trouble about the relations between the World of Physical Science and the Everyday World. We can call this 'the Problem of Perception'. I shall not unravel the whole tangle, for the simple reason that I do not know how to do it. There are patches in it, and important ones where I feel like a bluebottle in a spider's web. I buzz but I do not get clear." VI p.92
By the way, do you think there's a link between Ryle and Wittgenstein here, or just a good idea occurring independently? (I know it doesn't matter, but there is that issue about Ryle and Austin never mentioning Wittgenstein. Not that W had published much at the time, so perhaps it doesn't really need explanation.)
And in Vii, we find a link back to IV:-
"In this one negative respect seeing and hearing are like enjoying. It was partly for this reason that on a former occasion I discussed the notion of enjoyment at such length, namely to familiarize you with the idea that well understood autobiographical verbs can still be grossly misclassified. I argued that some theorists had tried to fit the notions of liking and disliking into the conceptual harness which suits such terms as 'pain' and 'tickle'. They had misclassified liking and disliking with sensations or feelings." VII p.102
VIII reads to me like a coda - picking up the methodological theme. It isn't woven in to the structure in the same way.