Ryle on Mind and Language

D. Dolby

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780230360938
• eBook ISBN: 9781137476203
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Language in Philosophy

This collection is devoted to Gilbert Ryle's philosophy of mind and language. It features essays from prominent scholars on the topics of category mistakes, hypotheticals, dispositions, emotion, thinking, perception, and the task–achievement distinction.

1

Ryle and Strawson on Category Mistakes

Jonathan Dancy

In the volume of essays on Gilbert Ryle published in 1970 by George Pitcher and Oscar Wood, there is a paper by Peter Strawson on categories. In my contribution to this new volume on Ryle, I go through some now well-recognised difficulties with Ryle’s own treatment of categories, and in particular of category mistakes. I then consider some general problems that beset the efforts of others to do better, before turning to Strawson’s suggestions, which as far as I can discover have never been discussed in print. These suggestions have obvious merits, but I end by arguing that they are less than fully successful.

1 Ryle

Though he was influential in the revival of interest in categories because of his appeals to category mistakes, Ryle says little in his published work to give us a clear notion of how the term ‘category’ is to be used. Clearly some of his ideas came from Russell, about whom I will have something to say later. For instance, in his article ‘Categories’, Ryle writes that ‘There is not and cannot be any univocal title for all the significata of expressions, since if there was such a title all these significata would be of one and the same type’ (1966, p. 77). This is very close to Russell, even to the extent of having to admit the systematic ambiguity of the term ‘mean’, or in Ryle’s case of the term ‘significatum’, which he uses apparently unconsciously in just the role which he claims to be impossible. The same trait is to be seen in his graphic handling of category mistakes.

A man would be thought to be making a poor joke who said that three things are now rising, namely the tide, hopes and the average age of death. It would be just as good or bad a joke to say that there exist prime numbers and Wednesdays and public opinions and navies; or that there exist both minds and bodies. (Ryle 2000 [1949], p. 24)

This is supposed by Ryle to show that there are two different senses of ‘exist’ – an unproblematic conclusion in itself, until we know what is meant by it. And I think that the two passages quoted above show that, like Russell, Ryle thought that if one was careful enough one should be able to carve language up into distinct sectors, one for each category, and explain away all terms that tended to bridge the gaps as ‘systematically ambiguous’. No distinction is allowed between those terms that could meaningfully be applied to anything whatever, those that apply to things in more than one category, and those that are restricted to things in just one category. But these distinctions are, as we shall see, important.

Ryle offered two accounts of how to tell when two things (or ‘proposition-factors’, to use his technical term) are in different categories. The first is in ‘Categories’:

Two proposition-factors are of different categories or types, if there are sentence-frames such that when the expressions for those factors are imported as alternative complements to the same gap-signs, the resultant sentences are significant in the one case and absurd in the other. (pp. 77–8)

This passes the explanatory buck to the concept of absurdity. The obvious question is what sort of absurdity is at issue, and we are left looking for a non-circular definition of the sort of absurdity that is category-absurdity. It is, after all, not clear that all category mistakes do result in one and the same sort of absurdity. Of course, the appeal to absurdity is perhaps more promising than the attempt to understand category mistakes as contradictions, or as mistakes that generate contradictions a priori; for there are plenty of contradictions that are not category mistakes. But then there are plenty of absurdities that are not category mistakes. ‘Five is greater than six’ generates contradictions a priori all right, and is no doubt absurd; but though it is a mistake, it is not a category mistake.

Ryle did offer a second method of discerning category mistakes. In terms that were not his, we might say that to discover type differences or similarities between two terms is essentially to discover differences between the sentences implied by uses of those terms; if we find differences down there, we have established a category difference between the terms. But this is no sooner said than rejected. ‘Is red’ implies ‘is not green’, and ‘is green’ implies ‘is not red’ but ‘is green’ does not imply ‘is not green’. But this does nothing to establish that red and green (or ‘is red’ and ‘is green’) are in different categories.

What we all want to say, of course, is that category mistakes arise when a predication is false because the subject is the wrong sort of thing for the predicate properly to apply to it. Five is the right sort of thing to be greater than six, but a wrong one of that sort. So ‘five is greater than six’ is not a category mistake. These remarks make no appeal to any distinctive notion of absurdity. The difficulty is to provide an account of the sorts that we will be needing to appeal to in order to make the strategy work in general. After all, if my shirt is red it is the wrong sort of thing for the predicate ‘blue’ properly to apply to it, since red things are not properly called blue. So that is one sort of sort that is the wrong sort of sort.

How are we to focus on the right sort of sort? One simple answer is by giving a list. Ryle does indeed offer such a list, which includes ‘quality, state, substance, number, logical construction, category’. (He categorically does not suppose that there might be some discoverable number of such terms.) And with such a list in hand it is easy to identify the category mistakes; a category mistake is any sentence that implies that some item is in a category that it is not in. But this would do nothing to distinguish category mistakes (and their supposedly characteristic absurdity) from other sorts of mistakes. Better perhaps would be to say that a category mistake is a sentence that implies that an item is in more than one category at once. But this introduces an enormous assumption: that the categories are mutually exclusive. (Ryle’s second method did not need that assumption, nor did his first.) What is more, Ryle’s list does not match that assumption; it is not absurd to suppose that numbers are logical constructions. But if we do not make that assumption, but allow that an item can be in more than one category, we lose one potent weapon for diagnosing category mistakes. For instead of saying that a category mistake is any sentence that entails that some item is in more than one category, we have to say ‘... is in two incompatible categories’ – and now all the work goes into the distinction between compatible and incompatible categories.

Ryle’s practice, especially in The Concept of Mind, is to imply that if you examine a list of the sort mentioned above you will somehow get the hang of things and be able to add to the list of your own accord. But the question would still remain what use the list is once one has got it; are the items on the list bound to be mutually exclusive? Ryle claimed both that the notion of a category mistake is an important technical tool and ‘that there is only an inexact amateurish way of using it’ (1954, p. 9), and this is an unstable combination. Intuition here is not reliable, and we can see this from Ryle’s own examples. It is, I think, now generally agreed that the famous example of the foreigner who says that he has seen the colleges but has not seen the university, and asks where the university is, will not achieve what Ryle wanted it to achieve. (I cannot resist saying that this did in fact happen to me this very year, 2010, outside Balliol.) Ryle suggests that someone who says this has not understood how to wield the concept ‘university’; the foreigner ‘expected the University to be an extra edifice, rather like a college but also considerably different’ (Ryle 2000 [1949], p. 21). But it is clear that someone can view the college buildings as the place which houses an organisation, realise that the University is an organisation as well and suppose that it too must be housed somewhere. Even if that is not true in Oxford, a supposition to the contrary is a simple mistake of fact, not a sign of incompetence with a concept. In fact, rather than making a logical mistake, the foreigner drew what one can only call the logical conclusion. The University is the wrong sort of thing to be a building, but not the wrong sort of thing to have a building. Ryle’s intuitions led him astray here.

2 Russell

One lesson we learnt from the problems that Ryle gets into is that the notion of absurdity is probably not going to be the core of our account of a category mistake. Consider again the passage quoted above, which ends ‘the resultant sentences are significant in the one case and absurd in the other’. A simpler and more promising contrast than that between the significant and the absurd is that between the significant and the non-significant. And this decants us into the idea that category mistakes are meaningless in a distinctive way. (Of course they are not syntactically ill-formed, and there is a sense in which one understands what is being said in a category mistake perfectly well.)

Russell’s theory of types includes as one of its most important elements the stipulation that all false type-predications are meaningless; the only meaningful type-predications are the true ones. Of course he had his reasons, or at least his own motivations, for saying this, to do with paradoxes. But it leads to paradoxes of its own, which I will list fairly briefly.

First, what are we to say about the negations of type-predications, such as ‘Saturday is not a physical object’? Are they meaningful when false, that is when the type-predications which they negate are meaningful (that is, true), or are they meaningful when true, that is when the type-predications which they negate are meaningless (that is, false)? One is initially tempted to say that since negations of type-predications are presumably type-predications in their own right, they must be governed by Russell’s stipulation and so only be meaningful when true. But the idea that there is a sort of statement that is only meaningful when contradicting nonsense is hard to swallow, so long as we continue to think of these things as statements rather than as, say, articulations of rules. A more plausible account is that the negations of type-predications can only be meaningful when contradicting sense; which is to say that they can only be meaningful when false. But this seems even worse than the first alternative.

Second, how are we to decide whether a given type-predication is true when we don’t yet know whether it has a meaning? It seems clear that one needs to know the meaning of a sentence in order to decide whether it is true or not. But Russell’s stipulation reverses this order.

Third, what are we to say of the predicate ‘is of the same type as’? Russell insists that when two individuals are of different types, no predicate whatever is univocally true (or false) of both of them. This insistence suffers from making no exceptions to the predicates for which it was designed to hold. For apart from being highly counter-intuitive (since it rules out univocal applications of predicates such as ‘is interesting’, ‘is thought of’ and also ‘exists’), it is self-refuting in the case of ‘is of a different type from’. This predicate can only be meaningful when false, no matter what it is applied to. So there are no counter-instances to the truth of ‘is of the same type as’, and this obliterates all type-distinctions immediately.

3 Two sorts of negation

We are pursuing the suggestion that there is a sort of meaninglessness in a category mistake. But we want to allow that if Socrates is not a number, he must be in some other category. An apparently promising way to run this is to allow that all type-predications are meaningful, but that other predications are only meaningful if they are type-correct, that is if the type-predication that they entail is true. This of course allows that some meaningless sentences can entail false sentences, since the category mistake ‘Saturday is in bed’ entails the false ‘Saturday is a physical object’.

One way to make sense of this is to adopt Pap’s notion of a predicate family (1960), thus: a predicate family is a set of predicates such that one and only one member of the set must be true of anything of which some member of the set is true or false. Colour predicates make up such a family, perhaps. And the type-predicates do too, since everything (as Pap supposed) must be of one type and nothing is of two types, so the other type-predicates are false of it, just as ‘is blue’ is false of the red things.

There is an ambiguity in Pap’s account of a predicate family, which needs to be exposed. The cause is the phrase ‘one and only one member of the set must be true ... ’. There is a strong sense of this phrase, in which there must be one and only one member of the family that is true and all the others must be false. On this reading, predicate families are exclusive, and the paradigm case of a predicate family is the family of type-predicates. But the phrase might also mean that there is one (but only one, and always the same one) that is to be true whenever any other member of the family is true or false. Call this ‘the identity sense’. On this reading, predicate families are not exclusive, and the paradigm case for a predicate family is the family of colour predicates, for the predicate ‘is coloured’ must be true of any object of which any other member of the family is either true or false. The family of type-predicates is not, however, a family in this second sense. The third sense is what one might call the illegitimate numerical sense, that though one member of the family must be true (and not always the same one) others might be true as well, though they need not be. In this third sense, the family of type-predicates would again be a family, but no longer an exclusive one (if you see what I mean).

So the idea of a predicate family needs careful handling. But whichever way we take it, I think it cannot help us with our problems about category mistakes. If we take it in the strong sense, there will be very few predicate families, because there are very few exclusive families. For instance, something can be both red and coloured. Worse, if the class of type-predicates includes the negations of all type-predicates, we will find ourselves saying that all those negations are false, when the whole point was to say that all but one of them are true. This would resolve the strong sense into the illegitimate numerical sense. But the latter is no better, for it leads to the conclusion that all predicates whatever are of the, or a, same family, so that all predications are meaningful, none meaningless. For each family of predicates will include the relevant type-predicate, and each type-predicate is a member of the family of type-predicates, so that these families will amalgamate. The only way to stop this is to rule that one cannot lump together type-predicates and normal predicates; but this was just the sort of thing we were hoping to explain, and further, it prevents us from saying that all red things are coloured.

This leaves us with the identity sense. But this turns out to collapse into the strong sense. For whenever a type-predication is true, so will also be the negations of all other type-predications (always provided that the family of type-predicates is exclusive). So it is never the case that if something is, say, red, there is one and only one predicate (and always the same one) that must apply to it, for there will in fact be very many such predicates, except that most of them will be negative.

So again we need to look elsewhere, and what Pap suggests is that a suitable distinction between types of negative will enable us to say that all type-predications are meaningful (and either true or false) while other predications will be meaningless if they entail false type-predications. For whereas we should ordinarily agree to ‘Socrates is not a number’ on the ground that it is true – he isn’t a number, he’s a person – yet we would not ordinarily agree to ‘Socrates is not the square root of nine because this implies that though he happens not to be this number, he is some other number. The point can be made in terms of predicate families (despite the difficulties we have already uncovered with that notion). To deny that a predicate is true of some object is to imply that some other predicate in the same family is true of it. So we get a distinction between two sorts of negation. That which implies that some other member of the same family is true is to be called ‘limited negation’; that which contains no such implication is called ‘unlimited negation’. Let us signify unlimited negation as –Fa and limited negation as Fa′. To assert –Fa is to assert that both Fa and Fa′ are false, while to assert Fa′ is to imply, if not to assert, that some other member of the F-family is true of a. We can then use the notion of significance in a traditional way:

Fa is significant if and only if either Fa or Fa′ is true.

Fa is not significant if and only if both Fa and Fa′ are false.

This seems to explain very nicely our intuitions about what is meaningful and what is not. ‘Socrates is the square root of nine is meaningless, or non-significant, because it is false and its limited negation is false (implying as it does t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Ryle and Strawson on Category Mistakes
• 2  Nothing Categorical on Categories
• 3  Ryle on Hypotheticals
• 4  Ryle on Motives and Dispositions
• 5  Ryles Conceptions of Emotional Behaviour
• 6  What Is Le Penseur Really Doing?
• 7  A Peg for Some Thoughts
• 8  Ryle on Perception
• 9  Mental Occurrences and Terminus Verbs
• Index