Gilbert Ryle

Based on Wikipedia: Gilbert Ryle

The Ghost Hunter

In 1949, a philosopher at Oxford published a book that would change how we think about thinking itself. Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind attacked what he called "the ghost in the machine"—the idea, stretching back to René Descartes in the seventeenth century, that inside every human body lives a separate, invisible mind pulling the strings like a puppeteer.

Ryle thought this was nonsense. Not just wrong, but a fundamental confusion about what words like "mind" and "thinking" actually mean.

His argument wasn't that minds don't exist. It was stranger than that. He claimed that philosophers had been asking the wrong kind of question for three hundred years—like asking "where does the team spirit live?" after you've been shown the players, the coach, and the stadium. The team spirit isn't hiding somewhere you haven't looked. It's not that kind of thing at all.

A Family of Builders and Bishops

Gilbert Ryle was born in Brighton, England, on August 19, 1900, into what can only be described as an overachieving family. His grandfather was John Charles Ryle, the first Anglican Bishop of Liverpool—a man whose sermons were so popular they were translated into dozens of languages and are still read today. The Ryles were Cheshire landed gentry, the sort of family whose genealogies fill pages with knights and squires.

But the more interesting bloodline runs through his mother's side. Catherine Ryle was connected to a dynasty of architects who shaped the face of Victorian Britain. Her uncle was Sir George Gilbert Scott, who designed the Albert Memorial, St Pancras railway station hotel, and the Gothic Revival buildings that still define the skyline of many British cities. Her cousin George Frederick Bodley trained under Scott and became one of the most influential church architects of his generation.

And then there's Giles Gilbert Scott, another cousin, who designed something rather different: the iconic red telephone box that became a symbol of Britain worldwide, and Battersea Power Station, that magnificent cathedral to electricity that still dominates the south London skyline.

Gilbert grew up surrounded by books. His father Reginald was a Brighton doctor with eclectic interests—philosophy, astronomy, anything that might expand the mind. He passed his extensive library on to his children, and young Gilbert apparently read his way through much of it.

The Making of a Philosopher

Ryle went to Brighton College, then in 1919 to The Queen's College, Oxford, intending to study classics—the traditional path for bright young Englishmen of his class. Greek, Latin, ancient history, ancient philosophy. But philosophy grabbed him and wouldn't let go.

He graduated with what's called a "triple first"—first-class honors in three separate examinations. In 1921, classical moderations. In 1923, literae humaniores, which is Oxford's peculiar name for the combination of ancient philosophy and ancient history. And in 1924, philosophy, politics, and economics. This is roughly the academic equivalent of winning three gold medals at the Olympics in different events.

The university rewarded him immediately. In 1924, at just twenty-four, he became a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church, one of Oxford's grandest colleges. A year later, he was made a fellow and tutor there.

For the next fifteen years, Ryle taught and wrote and argued. He read the German philosophers—Franz Brentano, who had pioneered the study of intentionality; Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology; Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time was revolutionizing continental philosophy. Ryle was one of the few British philosophers of his generation who took German thought seriously, even as the political situation in Europe grew increasingly dark.

War and Intelligence

When the Second World War broke out, Ryle's linguistic abilities made him valuable to British intelligence. He was commissioned in the Welsh Guards—a regiment with a proud history dating back to 1915—but his real work was elsewhere. He was recruited into intelligence operations, though the details remain murky, as such things tend to.

By the war's end, he had risen to the rank of Major. What exactly he did remains largely classified or lost to history, but we know he was good at it. The war changed many philosophers of his generation—some never returned to academic work, finding it trivial after the life-and-death stakes of wartime. Ryle, however, came back to Oxford with renewed energy.

In 1945, he was elected to one of philosophy's most prestigious positions: Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, with a fellowship at Magdalen College. The chair had been held by some of the greatest philosophers in British history. Ryle would hold it until his retirement.

The Concept of Mind

Four years after the war ended, Ryle published the book that would make him famous. The Concept of Mind appeared in 1949, and it immediately caused a storm.

The target was Cartesian dualism—the view, attributed to René Descartes but with roots stretching back through Christian theology to Plato, that human beings consist of two fundamentally different substances. There's the body, which is physical, extended in space, subject to mechanical laws. And there's the mind or soul, which is non-physical, not located anywhere in particular, and operates according to its own mysterious principles.

Descartes had famously argued that you could doubt the existence of your body—perhaps you're dreaming, perhaps an evil demon is deceiving you—but you cannot doubt the existence of your own thinking. "I think, therefore I am." From this, he concluded that the thinking thing must be separate from any physical thing.

Ryle called this view "the ghost in the machine." The phrase was meant to be mocking. He thought the whole picture was based on a simple but devastating logical error: what he called a "category mistake."

Category Mistakes

What is a category mistake? Ryle gives a famous example. Imagine a visitor to Oxford or Cambridge being shown around the colleges, the libraries, the playing fields, the administrative offices. At the end of the tour, the visitor asks: "But where is the University? I've seen where the students live and where they dine and where they study, but I haven't yet seen the University."

The visitor has made a category mistake. The University isn't another institution alongside the colleges—it is the organization of those colleges. Asking to see the University after seeing the colleges is like asking to see the team spirit after meeting all the players.

Ryle argued that philosophers who talk about "the mind" as if it were some separate entity alongside the body are making exactly this kind of error. When we talk about someone's beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions, we're not talking about events in some ghostly realm inside their head. We're talking about patterns in their behavior, dispositions they have, things they're likely to do in various circumstances.

This sounds like behaviorism—the view, popular in psychology at the time, that mental terms just mean behavioral dispositions. Ryle anticipated the comparison and didn't entirely reject it. He wrote that the "general trend of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be stigmatized as 'behaviourist.'" But he suggested it might equally be called "a sustained essay in phenomenology"—a reference to the German philosophical tradition he had studied in his youth.

The difference between Ryle and crude behaviorism is subtle but important. Behaviorists wanted to reduce mental talk to talk about behavior. Ryle wasn't trying to reduce anything. He was trying to show that the questions philosophers were asking—"how does the mind cause the body to move?" or "where are beliefs located?"—were malformed from the start. They assume the mind is a thing of the same logical type as the body, just made of different stuff. Ryle thought that assumption was the source of centuries of confusion.

Knowing How and Knowing That

One of Ryle's most influential ideas is the distinction between "knowing how" and "knowing that." This distinction seems obvious once you hear it, which is often a sign of a genuinely important philosophical insight.

Knowing that is propositional knowledge—knowing that Paris is the capital of France, knowing that water is H₂O, knowing that Queen Victoria died in 1901. This is the kind of knowledge philosophers had traditionally focused on. It can be stated in sentences. It can be true or false. It can be written down in encyclopedias.

Knowing how is different. You can know how to ride a bicycle without being able to articulate the physics of balance. You can know how to tie a reef knot without being able to write out instructions. A skilled chef knows how to make a perfect omelette, but that knowledge isn't a list of facts stored in her head—it's embodied in her hands, her timing, her feel for the heat of the pan.

Ryle thought philosophers had made a mistake in trying to reduce all knowing-how to knowing-that. They assumed that whenever someone does something intelligently, they must first contemplate some proposition about how to do it, then apply that knowledge to their action. But this leads to an infinite regress. If every intelligent action requires first contemplating a rule, then contemplating the rule is itself an action—and does it require first contemplating a meta-rule about how to contemplate rules?

The distinction has been enormously influential far beyond philosophy. In cognitive psychology, it led to the recognition of different memory systems—procedural memory (knowing how) and declarative memory (knowing that)—which can be damaged independently by brain injury. A patient with amnesia might forget everything about their life but still know how to play piano.

The Philosopher as Cartographer

Ryle had a distinctive view of what philosophy is supposed to do. He compared it to mapmaking.

Ordinary speakers of a language, he said, are like villagers who know their way around their village perfectly well. They know where the church is, where the pub is, how to get from the baker to the blacksmith. Their knowledge is practical and personal. They navigate their village effortlessly.

But ask them to draw a map of the village, and they'll struggle. Translating their practical, first-person knowledge into the impersonal, bird's-eye-view format of cartography is a different kind of task.

Philosophy, for Ryle, is like making maps of our concepts. We all use words like "mind," "will," "belief," and "intention" perfectly competently in everyday life. But when philosophers try to give systematic accounts of what these words mean and how they relate to each other, they often get confused. They draw the conceptual map wrong, putting things in the wrong places, drawing roads that don't actually connect.

Ryle's job, as he saw it, was to correct these maps—to show where philosophers had gone wrong, to untangle the confusions that bad philosophy creates. He called this "rectifying the logical geography of the knowledge we already possess."

Thick and Thin Description

In 1968, near the end of his career, Ryle introduced another distinction that would have a surprising afterlife: the difference between "thin" and "thick" description.

A thin description records the surface appearance of an action. "His right hand rose to his forehead, palm outward." That's all you see from the outside.

A thick description adds the context that makes the action meaningful. "He saluted the General." Now you understand what was happening—it was a greeting, a sign of respect, embedded in military culture with its ranks and rituals and history.

But here's the thing: the same thin description could support multiple thick descriptions. Maybe he wasn't saluting at all—maybe he was shielding his eyes from the sun. Or mocking the General with a sarcastic fake salute. Or practicing saluting for a theatrical performance. The physical movement is the same. The meaning is entirely different.

This idea was picked up by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who made "thick description" the centerpiece of his influential approach to cultural interpretation. Geertz argued that understanding a culture isn't just recording what people do—it's understanding what their actions mean to them, which requires understanding the whole web of significance in which they live. The wink is not just a contraction of the eyelid; it's a conspiracy, a joke, a flirtation, depending on context that only thick description can capture.

The Cows and the Bunghole

Ryle was famous for his teaching style. He loved using vivid, slightly absurd examples to jolt students out of their philosophical complacency.

In his lectures at Oxford in 1967 and 1968, he would ask students: "What's wrong with saying there are three things in a field: two cows and a pair of cows?" The answer, of course, is that you're counting the same things twice. The pair of cows isn't a third item alongside the individual cows. This is a category mistake—treating a collective term as if it named an additional entity.

Or consider the bunghole of a beer barrel. Is it part of the barrel or not? The bunghole is the hole through which beer is poured in or drawn out. If you say it's part of the barrel, you're treating a hole—an absence of barrel—as part of the barrel. If you say it's not part of the barrel, you're ignoring that barrels are specifically designed to have bungholes. The puzzle reveals that our ordinary concept of "part" is more slippery than it seems.

These playful puzzles weren't just entertainment. They were Ryle's way of showing that philosophical problems arise from the hidden complexities in ordinary language. Solve the puzzles, and you dissolve the problems.

Portrait of the Philosopher

What was Gilbert Ryle like as a person? By all accounts, he was formidable. Peter Strawson, one of the leading philosophers of the next generation, credited Ryle with almost single-handedly reviving British philosophy after the war, saying that "by reason of his energy, his authority, and his vision—besides the brilliance and inventiveness displayed in his own philosophical writing—he contributed perhaps more than any other single person to the flowering of the subject in England in the years after the war."

Ryle was a lifelong bachelor. In retirement, he lived with his twin sister Mary. The artist Rex Whistler painted his portrait, and Ryle complained that it made him look like "a drowned German General." According to Michael Dummett, another distinguished philosopher, "that was exactly what he did look like."

He served as editor of the journal Mind—the most prestigious philosophy journal in Britain—for nearly twenty-five years, from 1947 to 1971. He was president of the Aristotelian Society, the venerable British philosophical organization, from 1945 to 1946. Through these positions, he shaped the direction of Anglophone philosophy for a generation.

His brothers were nearly as accomplished. John Alfred Ryle became Regius Professor of Physic at Cambridge—one of the oldest and most distinguished medical chairs in the world—and served as physician to King George V. George Bodley Ryle rose to become Deputy-Director of the Forestry Commission, managing the forests of England and Wales, and was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his service.

The Cognitivist Counter-Revolution

In the 1960s and 1970s, philosophy of mind took a dramatic turn away from Ryle. A new generation of philosophers—Jerry Fodor, Wilfrid Sellars, and others influenced by the linguist Noam Chomsky's work on generative grammar—argued that the mind really does contain internal representations, computational processes, symbolic structures. They were, in a sense, rehabilitating the ghost, though they insisted it was made of information rather than immaterial spirit.

Fodor's "language of thought" hypothesis proposed that thinking literally involves manipulating sentence-like structures in the brain. Sellars's functionalism defined mental states by their functional roles—their causes and effects—which seemed to require real internal states, not just behavioral dispositions.

For a while, Ryle's work seemed to belong to a superseded era. The cognitivists dismissed him as a behaviorist who had missed the point. The rise of artificial intelligence, with its talk of programs and data structures and algorithms, made the computational picture of mind seem not just plausible but inevitable.

The Return of the Body

But philosophy moves in spirals, not straight lines. In recent decades, there has been renewed interest in approaches that emphasize embodiment, situatedness, and the ways that intelligent behavior doesn't require inner representations.

Embodied cognition argues that thinking isn't just in the head—it's distributed across brain, body, and environment. Situated cognition emphasizes that intelligent action depends on context in ways that can't be captured by abstract rules. Discursive psychology focuses on how mental concepts function in social interaction rather than as descriptions of inner states.

These movements aren't exactly Rylean, but they share his suspicion of the ghost in the machine. Daniel Dennett, one of today's most influential philosophers of mind, was a student of Ryle's and has pointed to these developments as vindication of his teacher's approach. Dennett wrote a sympathetic foreword to the 2000 edition of The Concept of Mind, arguing that Ryle was ahead of his time.

What Remains

Gilbert Ryle died on October 6, 1976, in Whitby, a fishing town on the Yorkshire coast famous as the setting for part of Bram Stoker's Dracula. He was seventy-six years old.

His legacy is complicated. The specific arguments of The Concept of Mind have been challenged from many directions. His dismissal of inner mental states seems too quick to many contemporary philosophers, who note that neuroscience has revealed an extraordinary amount about the brain processes underlying thought and perception—processes that seem very much like the "inner" events Ryle wanted to dissolve.

But his broader contributions endure. The concept of category mistakes has become a standard tool in philosophical analysis. The distinction between knowing-how and knowing-that has shaped research in epistemology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. His emphasis on attending carefully to ordinary language—asking not "what is the mind?" but "what do we mean when we talk about minds?"—remains influential.

Most importantly, perhaps, he showed that philosophical progress often comes not from answering old questions but from showing that they were confused from the start. The question "where does the University live?" has no answer because it's the wrong kind of question. Maybe "where does consciousness happen?" or "how does the mind cause the body to move?" are similarly confused.

Ryle didn't prove that the ghost in the machine doesn't exist. What he did was make us question whether we knew what we were asking about in the first place. That's a different kind of contribution—not solving the mind-body problem but dissolving it. Whether he succeeded is still debated. But the attempt was brilliant, and the phrase he coined—the ghost in the machine—has become part of our language for talking about ourselves.