Gilbert Ryle and the Map of the Mind

Ray Briggs
How much can we know about someone else’s mind?

Josh Landy
What’s the difference between knowing a fact and having a skill?

Ray Briggs
Can you know what you think before you see what you say?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy, we’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area,

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh teaches philosophy.

Josh Landy
And at the University of Chicago, where Ray teaches philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re thinking about the life and thought of Gilbert Ryle, a fascinating philosopher from the mid 20th century.

Josh Landy
Ryle had that great idea about category mistakes. He said, we’re constantly putting concepts in the wrong categories.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah, I love that. What’s your favorite example?

Josh Landy
well here’s one from Ryle. You know? He says, Look, imagine a tourist coming to campus. He said, Oxford, I’m going to say Stanford, right? Some tourist comes to Stanford and asks, where’s the university? I see the library, I see the philosophy department, I see a bunch of students and professors, but where’s the university? Ryle says, This tourist isn’t getting it, that tourist has put the concept University in the category of buildings, but a university isn’t a building, right?

Ray Briggs
And that’s what Ryle thought that people were doing when they were thinking about the mind. So suppose I say, Oh yeah, Josh. I see your love for Proust. I see your capacity to think deep thoughts and make great arguments. I see your tendency to get creeped out by horror movies. But where is your mind? That’s exactly the same kind of mistake.

Josh Landy
okay, but I don’t quite get that. I mean, why shouldn’t I think that there’s a mind just as there’s a body? I mean, I get it. There’s no such thing as Stanford above and beyond the people and the buildings. But isn’t there such a thing as a mind above and beyond you know your body?

Ray Briggs
Well not according to Ryle. He’d say you’re too influenced by Rene Descartes. Descartes thinks, oh, there’s a body which is an extended thing, and then there’s this other thing, a mind, which is a thinking thing. Ryle says, that’s all nonsense. It’s a category mistake. A mind is not a thing.

Josh Landy
But Ray, weren’t you telling me just the other day, a mind is a terrible thing to waste? Doesn’t that show you think the mind is a thing too.

Ray Briggs
Oh haha, very clever. That’s just an expression. In reality, your mind is nothing above and beyond your brain.

Josh Landy
Okay, so if my mind is nothing above and beyond my brain, that means my mind is my brain, but your brain is a thing. So my mind is a thing, after all.

Ray Briggs
Okay, let me rephrase: your mind is a thing a brain does.

Josh Landy
I don’t know. Ray, I just don’t get why you keep talking about the brain. Look, a lot of people think we live on after we die, right? I mean, I’m not going to have a brain after I die, but if the Christians are right, I’m going to have thoughts and feelings when I get to heaven. And if I’m reincarnated as other people think I’m going to have a different brain, but it’ll still be me. So isn’t it at least conceivable that the mind is a totally separate thing?

Ray Briggs
Well, yeah, it’s conceivable, but it’s not true. Why not?

Josh Landy
If you can imagine having your mind without your brain, it must be possible. And if it’s possible to have your mind without your brain, then they can’t be the same thing.

Ray Briggs
Look, you think it’s possible for your soul to go flying up into heaven, carrying all your thoughts and feelings and leaving your body behind. But that can’t really happen. In reality, thoughts and feelings are inseparable from your body. What do you mean? Well, I think Ryle believes that having thoughts and feelings just means your body is liable to act a certain way. So what it means to say that you like coffee is just that you grab your coffee cup when it’s in reach, and you drink the coffee and you smile.

Josh Landy
I don’t get that at all. Ray, I mean, let’s say I’m hanging out with my Italian friends, who are huge coffee fanatics, right? I mean, poor things like, I want to fit in with them. So, you know, maybe I drink a little sip of coffee. Maybe I even pretend to like it. I even say delicioso after some disgusting cup of espresso, right? So here I am. I’m grabbing a cup and I’m smiling, but I’m not enjoying it at all.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but you can’t fake it perfectly. The Body Keeps the Score.

Josh Landy
Does it, really, though? Ray, I mean, look, if that were true, no one would ever be able to fool anybody, but we see that happening all the time. Our world is full of liars and Bs, ers, and our poor brains just aren’t designed to see through them.

Ray Briggs
Our poor brains. Didn’t you mean to say, Ooh, our poor minds?

Josh Landy
You got me there. But still, I think there’s something going on behind my physical actions.

Ray Briggs
Well maybe our guest will convince you to agree with me. It’s Michael Kremer from the University of Chicago, who’s written a lot about Ryle.

Josh Landy
Meanwhile, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter to investigate a different side of Ryle’s philosophy. Ryle wanted to know which comes first, knowing how or knowing that Sheryl Kaskowitz files this report.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
In 1945 Gilbert Ryle gave the presidential address to the Aristotelian society at the University of London club. The title was “Knowing How and Knowing That.” Knowing-that refers to knowing the facts about something. Take driving, for example.

Borat
My name is Mike. I’m going to be your driving instructor. Welcome to our country. Okay. My name is Borat.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
You study the driving manual and learn the rules of the road, so you know things.

Borat
You do know how to drive a little bit? Yes.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Ryle says knowing-that is what’s usually recognized as intelligence. And once you have those facts, your knowing that translates into knowing-how to do a thing.

Borat
Have you driven a car before? Yes, many times. All right, let’s go this way.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
So you pass a written test about driving because of your knowing-that, and then you take all of that knowledge to inform your knowing-how to drive.

Borat
Now, time to make purchase of motorcars.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
But Ryle argues that this view has knowledge backwards. He sees knowing-how as a form of intelligence itself, and it doesn’t necessarily depend on knowing that he wrote.

Gilbert Ryle
A man’s intelligence or stupidity is as directly exhibited in some of his doing as it is in some of his thinking.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
And also…

Gilbert Ryle
Knowledge-how cannot be built up by accumulation of pieces of knowledge-that .

Sheryl Kaskowitz
And finally…

Gilbert Ryle
Rules, like birds, must live before they can be stuffed.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
It’s true that knowledge about the rules of the road doesn’t always translate to knowing how to drive. I failed my driver’s test after acing the written exam, and I know I’m not the only one.

Becca Burrington
Yeah, I definitely studied all the information and everything, and then it took me three times to pass the test.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
That’s Becca Burrington from Oakland, California.

Becca Burrington
And like the third time the driver was like, What is wrong with you? Why are you so nervous? He’s like, well, not make you nervous. Like, I guess if I sang while I did the driving test. So that’s what I did.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Becca is a professional musician, a trombonist and a singer, so in a way, the part about singing makes sense, and it actually relates to why I wanted to talk to Becca in the first place. I wanted to get her take as a musician and a music teacher on this question of knowing that, versus knowing how, because if you want to play classical music, there are some basic facts that you need to learn, like what all the symbols on the sheet music mean. This is Becca playing just the notes to this simple piece by Arcangelo Corelli, the way one of her students might start out, she says that understanding even more facts about music’s inner workings, like key signatures and scales and chords, definitely does feed into knowing how to play with intelligence. Becca plays it again.

Becca Burrington
At the end, like going back to the from the G going down the F sharp is kind of bringing out that tension right there.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Do this fits the knowing that argument that Ryle was fighting against, knowing that an F sharp is what’s called the Leading Tone in the key of G major, and that that’s going to create tension at that point in a piece, is part of what feeds into knowing how to play intelligently. But facts will only get you so far.

Kymry Esainko
I pulled up “Autumn Leaves” here.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
Becca’s husband, Kymry Esainko is a pianist, and has a different example.

Kymry Esainko
And you can just play the melody even as a beginner. Just poke out the notes right there, and there it is on the page, even though the chords that are listed here a minor seven, you can figure out what those are and play them just as as written, G, major C, major seven, but that’s not really playing jazz. You have to listen to other people play it and see how they approach it, and learn how to spell chords in different ways. So there’s all these more advanced kind of approaches that you learn mostly by doing, I would argue, than by studying. But it’s a combination.

Sheryl Kaskowitz
This seems more like knowing how you can know as many facts as there are about music, but it won’t help you become an expert knowing how is its own thing. And of course, people who learn music by ear seem like the clearest example of knowing how as its own kind of intelligence. I believe when I fall thoughts. Stevie Wonder doesn’t read musical notes, but he composes epic songs and often plays most of the instruments on the recordings. So he certainly knows how to make music for Phil. Philosophy Talk, I’m Sheryl Kaskowitz.

Josh Landy
Thanks so much, Sheryl. That’s such an interesting thing, and I have to confess, I didn’t pass my driving test the first time either, but don’t tell anybody I’m Josh Landy. With me is my fellow philosopher, Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about Gilbert Ryle and the map of the mind.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Michael Kremer. He’s professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Chicago, and author of many articles on Ryle. Michael, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Michael Kremer
Thanks. Thanks. Nice to meet you, Ray. Because, as you know, I’m no longer at Chicago. I’m retired, but and nice to meet you too. Josh.

Josh Landy
Very nice to meet you. Michael, we’re going to start from a question from a listener. Kent in Waco, Texas. Kent writes, I think the criticism of dualism based on the notion of category mistake is one of Ralph’s major contributions to the mind body discussion. Michael, can you say a couple of words about that?

Michael Kremer
Well, Josh, you already gave a brief statement about it in the intro. I will say my take on it is a little bit different from yours in this following sense. I think that if we take the example of the university, the problem is not simply that he thinks the university is another building, but he also says the university, and I think it actually helps that he’s talking about Oxford, that the university is not another thing like the colleges. It’s the way all these things are organized. So there’s here an idea of the difference between a collection of things and the structure, the organizational, functional, organized, you know, structure of them all, which is actually how he thinks about the mind. But the problem is to think of something in the wrong way where there’s a background a picture of us thinking in terms of fundamental categories of things.

Ray Briggs
So I want to hear more about the fundamental categories of things. It seems that quite often, when I’m making, say, an analogy or a metaphor, I imagine things as being in different categories than they really are. So I say, Oh, my love is a red red rose, and that’s kind of fruitful. Does Ryle think that I am not allowed to do that?

Michael Kremer
I think metaphor is fine with Ryle. There’s a different way he has of thinking about category mistakes, which is that words in our language have a kind of what he calls systematic ambiguity. And this leads us into category mistakes.

Ray Briggs
So yeah, give me an example of a systematic ambiguity.

Michael Kremer
So in the dialog between you and Josh, Josh was insisting that the mind is a thing, and what Ryle would say is where it’s a thing, but not in the same sense of the word as the body or the brain is a thing, the word thing doesn’t mean the same thing in those two different cases. And so you fall into the category mistake of assimilating minds and bodies as if they were the same sort of thing, because we have words like thing that bridge the boundaries in this what he thinks of it ambiguous way.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I remember another example that Ryle talks about is healthy, of a word that has these multiple meanings. So I can be healthy if I like, eat my fruits and veg and go to the doctor and exercise, and this meal can be healthy. But that doesn’t mean the meal eats its fruits and veg and goes to the doctor and exercises. Why is it so important to avoid category mistakes and spot this kind of ambiguity?

Michael Kremer
So I think for Ryle, when you are when you fall into a category mistake, you’re fundamentally confused about something, and it’s something philosophers do, I think, not ordinary people. So he says that we’re like people who know their way around their village or their town, but they can’t draw a map of it, and we know our way around with our concepts, which we think with, but when we try to think about the concepts, then we end up making an incorrect map, and that’s when we fall into the category mistake, and that leads philosophers in particular, down false paths. He thinks, for instance, thinking about the body and the mind as separate things, leads you into all kinds of puzzles about how they interact with your classic problems in philosophy. And if you avoid the category mistake, you don’t have to deal with that problem.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Gilbert Ryle with Michael Kremer from the University of Chicago.

Ray Briggs
How can you tell what your friends are thinking? How can you tell what you’re thinking? Should you look inside your soul or just observe your own actions?

Josh Landy
Mind, meaning and mystery—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Oasis
There are many things that I would like to say to you, but I don’t know.

Josh Landy
You know that there are many things you’d like to say, but you just don’t know how—what’s the difference? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about the 20th century British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, with Michael Kremer from the University of Chicago,

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
So Michael, you were telling us about how Ryle thought that philosophers were sort of making maps of concepts that we had. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that works?

Michael Kremer
Well, it’s a metaphor, obviously, but I think he wants to say that we can think of a concept as connected to all kinds of other concepts in all kinds of ways. One concept leads to another implies another or two concepts contradict each other, for example. And so knowing the place of a concept in the map in part consists of knowing how all of these things hang together in these logical ways, and the problem, go back to the problem of category mistakes, is that if you treat two concepts that don’t belong in the same space as if they were in the same space, he thinks you’ll run into absurdities.

Ray Briggs
One thing about sort of concepts, if I think about like them as like geographies that I live in, different people live in kind of different places. So my concept of a mind might be really tied to, I don’t know, feeling, my feelings and somebody else’s concept of a mind might be really tied to, I don’t know, intellectualizing about math. What happens when there are just multiple versions of a concept floating around and different people glom onto different ones.

Michael Kremer
This relates to an objection to Ryle, and not only Ryle, but the whole school of philosophy that he was commonly thought to be a part of, often called ordinary language philosophy that it privileges one perspective. Sometimes you could say the perspective of people who went to private English schools and then, you know, went to Oxford or Cambridge and then spent their time in the senior or junior Junior and then senior common rooms in those places. So how do we know Ryle relies on a sense of what, as it were, we would say, and how do we know that there is a we that encompasses that? But maybe one could say there might be something that kind of runs through all the things we say when we talk about the mind and we try to capture that.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s that’s a side of the metaphor I like a lot, which is, you know, if we think of philosophy as just drawing a map, then what’s implied by that is that, you know, the non philosophers are not ignorant, right? So if you think you know, think about the metaphor the map. Someone who’s lived in one place their whole life may not be able to draw a map for you, they may or may not, but they know their way around much better than you do. And so there’s something democratizing about that, right? And you know, in his book The concept of mind, Raoul says that the arguments in the book, he says, are intended not to increase what we know about minds, but to rectify the local geography of the knowledge we already possess. And I love that. I think there’s something very inspiring about that. The question I have is about the first part of that quote where he says, When I’m not, sort of trying to increase our knowledge, that’s a really interesting way of doing philosophy, right? All I’m doing, all I want to do is clarify. You know, I’m not, I don’t want to, I don’t want to discover or create new knowledge. Why not? Why shouldn’t Ryle hope to give us insights that we didn’t have before?

Michael Kremer
Well, I think when you say knowledge and then you say insights, I mean there are different things we could mean.

Josh Landy
Wait, am I in danger of confusing terms? Oh, I feel the spirit of Ryle looking over my shoulder.

Michael Kremer
I mean, I think he would, I would like to say that there is an outcome that he hopes to get from this, which is something like self understanding, if I can put it that way, we come to understand what we were already capable of doing. Yeah. But we come to have a clearer understanding of it. And at the end of the preface, from which you were kind of looking at the introduction to the book, he says that he’s primarily interested in curing diseases of which he himself is a victim. So there’s a sense in which it’s an exercise in trying to understand my own conceptual powers.

Ray Briggs
So I want to go to like, ryle’s therapy room to rectify my errors about the mind. And I know what I’m not supposed to do. I’m not supposed to think, Oh, there’s one thing that’s over here, that’s the body, and there’s another substance that’s over here that’s like the mind. What does he think I should think there?

Michael Kremer
I think Ryle has a very complicated he doesn’t ever tell you that, except in a few places. He gives very summary statements. But he says his view of the mind is, as I said before, something like when we talk about the mind, we’re talking about the patterns that organize human lives, thought of as something like in the terms of Aristotle, the lives of a rational animal. So he uses terminology like disposition to talk about this, but he also uses much more homegrown terminology, like we have what he calls tendencies and capacities. And these tendencies and capacities are exhibited in our lives.

Josh Landy
So we’ve got tendencies and capacities, right? So, for example, you put a cup of tea in front of me, I have a tendency to take a delicious sip. I have capacity, I guess, to use language and things like that, is there also a kind of organization component. You were saying earlier in regards to the university, that it’s not just students, professors, buildings and so on. It’s the organization of all of those things. Is there something analogous with the mind?

Michael Kremer
Good question. So I mean, he often tends to think of the mind simply as the sum of these tendencies and capacities. But there is something here which I think is maybe relevant. This is connected up with the question of knowing how and I tend to think that people, recently, some people have written about this in connection with Rael, besides me, but people often don’t fully get what he wants to say about that. But I think it’s broader that when we know how to do something, for Ryal, I know how to cook, for instance, then there is an element of what he calls self regulation involved. When I know how to cook, it’s not just that I follow a recipe, it’s that I can innovate, and as I innovate, I can notice what works and what doesn’t work, and I can correct or improve in the light of that.

Ray Briggs
So wait, what if I’m just a really, I don’t know, boring Cook, like I can make pasta. It’s the one thing I can do. Do I not count as knowing how to cook until I can innovate,

Michael Kremer
I think. And this is a place where I don’t think Ryal adheres strongly to the ordinary language use of the terms. I think really not very much. It’s not an interesting case, at the very least, when we say that your behavior doesn’t exhibit intelligence. And I think for Ryle, knowledge, how is a form of knowledge, and it will involve some kind of exhibition of intelligence.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Gilbert Ryle with Michael Kremer from the University of Chicago. So Michael, we were just talking about, know how, and I’d love us to dig more into this. Obviously, we’ve heard a little bit about it in the roving philosophical report. It’s my favorite part of Ryle. Why is this difference so important for Raoul? This difference between, for example, knowing that Paris is the capital of France, and, on the other hand, you know, knowing French, being able to speak French, or Ray’s example, being good at cooking. Why is that distinction such an important distinction for Ryle?

Michael Kremer
So there’s a number of different aspects to that, but let me focus on what I think is maybe a central one, which is that he thinks there is a fundamental difference between the two, and that in a really important sense, knowing truths, or knowing that depends on knowing how, and you can’t then try to replace knowing that knowing how with knowing truths. And even in the case of, he says, maybe the paradigmatic people who know that experts in, let’s say, mathematics or history or science, what they depend upon is a knowing how, which is not a matter of just more, knowing that they have to know how to prove things in mathematics. They know I have to know how to conduct an inquiry. They not need to know how to collect historical data and construct a historical narrative out of it.

Ray Briggs
So wait, but so. Suppose somebody just tells me, you know, Main Street is over there, and they point, I think I know that Main Street is over there. I don’t think I need any significant know how to understand what they said, Do I or do I?

Michael Kremer
I mean, I think Ryle would agree with that. Actually, I think he thinks that’s one of the fundamental differences between knowing that and knowing how, because you can’t know how to cook, he thinks by just being told do this, you need to practice. And so that’s the fundamental thing that’s involved in know how you need to practice. And that’s where the self regulation comes in.

Josh Landy
I mean, look, I mean, in your example, Ray, you ask someone, where is Main Street, they give you an answer. Well, you had to have the the ability to speak and listen right, to produce and understand language. So there is a form of know how that sort of sits underneath this capacity of yours to learn new information. So I think Ryles kind of on to something there, and in terms of the importance think about what it means, for example, for teaching, right? Because you might think, and some people talk this way, that education is just a matter of delivery of content this, you know, this kind of gets my hackles up when people talk about it that way. And so all that’s happening in a successful educative context is that someone with information is is putting it into the brain of someone without information. But I take it that Raoul did not see it that way, right? And he thought that teaching was much more about training. Is, do you see it that way too, Michael?

Michael Kremer
Yes, yes, if I may just go back to the previous point briefly. Also, besides the knowledge, how that you were pointing to, Josh, I was going to suggest, even though I may not have the knowledge how to discover the fact it goes back to somebody who does through a transmission somewhere, somehow, there’s someone who’s got a mental map of the city anyway, to go back to the other Question, teaching. Now this is very important in Ryle, and so he even has a paper later on in his career called teaching and training, which is precisely on this point of the difference between, you know, teaching someone and what he the idea of what he calls drilling in facts or in action. That’s not teaching. Teaching is fundamentally a matter of imparting not just facts but skills, and those skills have to do not with not only with acquiring facts, but also with knowing what to do with them, how to put them together, how to use them to learn new things and so on.

Ray Briggs
I love this idea that to really learn and understand facts, you need some baseline of skill and knowing how to do things. It seems like Ryle also kind of wants to push like in some sense, in the other direction. So there are a lot of like things that I might know how to do that turn out to require a lot more, like, I don’t know thought and maybe knowledge about my environment that we often think so. I think that, like athletic skill is like this, where in order to have athletic skill, you need a lot of fine grained knowledge of stuff, like how your body works. And that seems like knowledge that so is there, are there also requirements in the other direction?

Michael Kremer
So that my own reading of Ryle is that these two things interact and are interdependent in the way you suggest. He doesn’t deny that people often do think like a chess player. May think out what they’re going to do before they do it. He doesn’t deny that. But that can’t be the whole story. And what he wants to push back against is people who want to say, well, knowledge how just is knowledge of truth?

Josh Landy
And he has that lovely line,” You cannot affirm or deny Mrs. Beaton’s recipes.” I think that’s such a it’s such a lovely line to as a way of pushing back against those folks, right? You think, you think it’s just everything that’s sort of an intellectual accomplishment is just a matter of knowing facts. Good luck. Read those recipes. You can’t say they’re true or false. They you know either you’re you’re doing them right, you’re doing them wrong.

Ray Briggs
So there’s a contingent of contemporary philosophers who disagree with this claim about knowledge, how being irreducible to knowledge that and often they point to linguistic evidence, which I think Ryle would like. So if I know who was at the party, I know a particular kind of fact. It’s the fact that answers, Oh, Josh was at the party. If I know where to get a good hot dog in Chicago, I won’t single out any establishments. But like that, establishment is where you get a good hot dog in Chicago, there’s, there’s a knowledge that that I can have. Why isn’t knowing how, just knowing the answer to the question, how do you do this?

Michael Kremer
Right?. Let me just say a little bit about the linguistic argument. Because what it turns on is the idea that, how. Who, what, and so on. Are question words, and then we have the use of them with the word knowledge. And the idea is knowing what, as they say, Who, what, whether, why, how, which has got an H, A, W and H and A two knowing one of those things is knowing the answer to the question. And it is important that there’s a difference between knowing who was at the party and knowing who to ask for something where the word, little word to in there gets inserted and but linguistic evidence is very complicated. It’s very interesting because it turns out not every language works like English. And this point’s been made not by other philosophers, but French, for example, you don’t use the word how. When you want to talk about knowing how to do something, you just say knowing to do it right, or savoir faire.

Josh Landy
These are sensible languages. What is this English nonsense? I totally agree with you. And you know, I think Raoul is really onto something. And we talked a moment ago about the example of teaching. Another really important example he gives is virtue ethics being good, right? He has that essay can virtue be taught, where he says essentially that virtue requires, know how, requires a certain kind of skill, and then there’s even perception. That’s something I wanted to ask you, if I understand Ryle correctly, he’s suggesting that even smelling or tasting or hearing can be a form of know how I can get better at it. Is that right?

Michael Kremer
So I’m actually not sure about what to say about Ryle on perception, but let me go back to virtue for just showing Absolutely because I think, I think virtue and skill are similar, for Ryle in an important sense, because they’re acquired by doing the thing. This is an Aristotelian idea. You become virtuous by being made to do the right thing, perhaps by your parents or by others, and you become skilled by doing the thing, but I don’t think they’re exactly the same. And this goes to this thing I was talking about, about tendency and capacity, because he would say virtue, to be virtuous is just to tend to act in a certain way, whereas capacity is a piece of knowledge. And in that essay, can virtue be taught? He actually makes a point that virtue is not exactly the same as knowledge, even knowledge how, because knowledge how can be misused, but virtue cannot be misused. So if you know how to be honest, you can use that knowledge to scam somebody.

Josh Landy
So your motivation required, right? It’s know how knowledge is not enough. Know how is not enough. You also need the right kind of orientation.

Michael Kremer
Because virtue, and virtue is, according to him, a matter of what kind of person you are, and that’s going to involve what you care about.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about 20th century British philosopher Gilbert Ryle with Michael Kremer from the University of Chicago.

Ray Briggs
Should neuroscience change the way we understand the mind? Can you get better at hearing, smelling and tasting? Could being moral be a skill?

Josh Landy
Changing our minds about our minds—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

2st Century Monads
Don’t want your body too, ’cause your body is you.

Josh Landy
Is your body really you, or are you something else besides? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Michael Kremer, and we’re thinking about Gilbert Ryle and the map of the mind.

Josh Landy
So Michael, we’ve got an email from Leo. Leo writes AI, investors seem to believe that as a system grows more complex, it will inevitably wake up into consciousness. They have invested hundreds of billions of dollars into and staked a significant portion of the American economy on a proposition that I believe to be false. So Michael, what do you think Rao would say about that is. The idea of machine consciousness a category error.

Michael Kremer
It depends, perhaps, on what you mean by consciousness. There are a couple of different things we could mean. One is qualitative experience, feeling things to be a certain way. Another is, for example, self awareness, being able to say what it is that you’re thinking, for example. And those are quite different, and at least the first one Ryle doesn’t actually care about very much. Surprisingly enough, I mean animals, even perhaps insects, have that, and that’s not what he thinks of as the mind. But would it be a category mistake to say that a machine could wake up? I don’t have a view about that, but I do know there’s a certain number of philosophers who think that consciousness may be tied to our biology in a way that would simply not in that sense, qualitative experience, feeling things, seeing colors and so on, might be tied to our biology in a way that would never be available to an artificial intelligence. On the other hand, if I can say just a little more Ryle, his ways of thinking about learning and so on are, I think, quite compatible with ideas of artificial systems coming to learn, becoming intelligent and becoming self aware. That’s conceivable.

Ray Briggs
So I have a question actually about self awareness, which is, how did Ryle think that it works for us? So I know that Josh is hungry. If Josh, like, complains about it, or I see Josh getting a meal, I know that I’m hungry by a completely different method. Ryle. Have stuff to say about, like, what’s, what is the method? Like? I kind of think it is. I’m introspective, like looking inside of me and I’m seeing my my thoughts.

Michael Kremer
He didn’t think introspection was a form of self knowledge. He famously seemed to want to say that we know about ourselves in the same ways we know about other people, although he admitted that in a certain way, we have more evidence about ourselves.

Ray Briggs
Like, I can’t feel Josh’s pain the way I feel my pain.

Michael Kremer
No, you can’t feel Josh’s pain the way you feel your pain. It’s true. I don’t know whether that’s a point about your Josh’s pain being inaccessible to you and that you can’t know that Josh is in pain. You know Josh is in pain by observing his what he does, and you learn, I mean, this is not just ryle’s point, but you learn how to talk about pain in your own case, in part, by learning about the ways that people behave when they’re in pain, including yourself. I mean, you feel something, but how do you learn that it’s to be called pain as opposed to something else?

Josh Landy
That’s fair enough about how we use our words, but the point that Ray was making in terms of Ralph’s thought on this, it’s very interesting, isn’t it? Ray, so a couple of quotes. Ralph says John Doe’s ways of finding out about John Doe are the same as John Doe’s ways of finding out about Richard doe. So that seems to be the very squarely on this topic, right? That that Ray’s ways of finding about Ray’s pain are the same as Ray’s ways of finding out about Josh’s pain. And that that seems quite strange. Here’s another quote. In certain quite important respects, it’s easier for me to find out what I want to know about you than it is for me to find out the same sorts of things about myself. Wow. I mean, that’s really interesting. So I’m going to know better about Ray than Ray knows about Ray. So what’s going on with that?

Michael Kremer
So I think when we focus on pain, we’re focusing on the wrong thing. Ryles point of view, take the second quote in certain respects. What respects? Well, for example, I mean, Freud was around. It might be easier for me to find out about you that you dislike your father than it is for you to find it out about yourself. Now I’m not here talking about something like a momentary experience of feeling pain. I’m talking about something more like the kinds of things royal was mostly thinking about what he called dispositions, tendencies, patterns of behavior. So one of the things he wanted to say was, well, there’s no problem about solipsism. We know that other people have minds by understanding them. It turns out, on that account, that it’s no harder to know about other people than it is to know about ourselves, but it also means we have ways to know about ourselves.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I totally get your point about, you know, my love for my mother, right? I get the Freudian point and but I mean, aren’t there other things that fall into this category of dispositions that nonetheless, I know better about me? So for example, the way cilantro tastes to me. I’m in the 10% of cilantro phobes, and it’s a genetic thing. What can I do? And people often ask me, What does it taste like? I can’t really explain it. Yeah, so that’s a thing that’s not just a momentary matter, like a headache. It something like a disposition or so, I don’t know what, right it’s a, it’s just a, but it’s a, it’s a standing feature of my psychology that cilantro tastes, I can’t say better than and, and I feel like I have better access to that. I’d rather not, but it turns out that I have better access to that than Ray would, or you would. Why isn’t that the case? Why would Raoul deny that?

Michael Kremer
In this case, maybe partly a matter of his rhetoric, getting ahead of him. I don’t I think he what he really wants to say is the important thing that he wants to say, from his point of view, that’s important is it’s not that you don’t have better access. It’s that you don’t have what he calls privileged access. You don’t have unique access so that nobody else can know the thing about you. One way I can know it about you is because you tell me so. And that’s, according to Ryle, perfectly adequate knowledge. About you. We’ve

Ray Briggs
been talking about ryle’s theories on mind and knowledge. I think philosophers and neuroscientists are sort of have moved on partly to other concerns. What do you think we can learn from Ryle, either about this or about other topics that’s particularly relevant today.

Michael Kremer
Well, first of all, I think that whatever philosophers and neuroscientists have done, ordinary people do have a strong tendency to think in dualist terms. And I think that Ryan’s rejection of dualism is salutary in certain ways and but I do want to say it’s not because he thinks that we’re just bodies, we’re brains. He thinks we’re animals of a certain kind, human beings. And he thinks that that is not just I mean, he famously criticized partitionism as a ghost in the machine. But then he said, Well, man, to use the language of the 1940s does not need to be conceived of as a ghost in the machine. But that doesn’t mean that man needs to be reduced to a machine either. It could be hazard. Hazardous. Guess could be taken that man is an animal, a higher sort of mammal, or maybe even that man is a man, or we, shall we say, a human being. And so he there thought of the idea of a person, if you like, as something that’s not just a machine. But that doesn’t mean that the person consists of two interacting elements, body and mind.

Ray Briggs
Does this have implications for how we should treat each other, do you think?

Michael Kremer
Yes, I mean, I think it does. It means there’s a question of how it what we should say about not just each other, but other animals. For instance, burial himself did, in fact, tend to draw a very sharp line between human beings and other animals, except in one place where he admits the boundary is not so sharp. So the question is, if you’d like, maybe we could think of us as what you might call minded animals. Well, are other animals also minded in ways that might have implications for how we should think of them and treat them. And there are other rylian type philosophers who are somewhat friendly to Ryle, who’ve written about this and argued that, yes, indeed, Ryle himself should not have made this sharp distinction that he did, and should recognize the mindedness of other animals.

Josh Landy
So that’s pretty good, right? So we’ve got a kind of full throated rejection of Cartesian Dualism. We’ve got at least the inkling of another reason to treat non human animals differently. Anything else you think is particularly relevant today from Tyle’s overall philosophy.

Michael Kremer
Well, I think that some of his thought about virtue, which you’ve already brought up, is valuable. It’s not that he developed a systematic virtue ethics. He did not, but he wrote quite a few papers about this, one of which is a very interesting little paper about Jane Austen, whom he loved, but in also another paper had this curious title on forgetting the difference between right and wrong, in which he argued that you can forget things that you know, but it would be odd to say you’d forgotten the difference between right and wrong, where he kind of brings out the idea that virtue has to do with who you are and not just what you know. And I think this idea of cultivating virtue is a valuable thing to develop.

Josh Landy
Well, Michael, that is a wonderful place to end our conversation. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Michael Kremer
You’re welcome. I enjoyed it. Thank you.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Michael Kremer, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Chicago, and author of many wonderful articles on Ryle. So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I think I’m going to try to cook mindfully, so that I am exercising my skill in cooking this week. And I think I’m going to going to try to be a virtuous person so that I’m both exercising my know how and living by the know how that I should be.

Josh Landy
And I’m going to try not to forget what I know about virtue. That’s such an interesting thought and a slightly scary one, we’re going to put links to everything we mentioned today on our completely revamped website philosophy talk.org and while you’re there, you can subscribe to our feed for free.

Ray Briggs
Or you can support us with a premium subscription and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Josh Landy
Now, I know that this guy talks fast, but I don’t know how—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second philosopher.

Ian Shaoles
Ian Shoales… In 1949 philosopher Gilbert rail released his opus, the concept of mind, and thus became the nemesis of what we call dualism, while many still find dualism useful in thinking about the mind body problem, but Ryal thought dualism suffered from a misapprehension of its ingredients. He called it a category mistake. There’s assuming that mind and body are early apart, when, in fact, they feed on each other as one thing, vampire and victim may be giving us both sense and rot in the same timeline, which I guess is kind of a Manichaean view of things, fire and ice, as Robert Frost put it, how the world will end, choice wise. Well, also said sarcastically that the mind body problem required the dogma of the ghost in the machine. But the thing is, by the time I first heard the term ghost in the machine, it becomes shorthand for certain techno or sci fi thrillers, also Pinocchio or Frankenstein or the matrix in which the inanimate has given a human spirit, which always leads to trouble. There was also ghost and machine, an actual movie about a serial killer who kills two computer and there was Ghost in the Shell, an epic Japanese cartoon about a future world which explores what happens when humans are replaced piece by piece, body by mind, by computer, robots, not the sort of thing. Professor wild dwelled upon because he knew he was a philosophy professor who are beings without doubt, while they have doubts, but have no doubts, if you know what I mean, plus, he was also robot free many day now, I’ll bet AI will take over the mind body problem, leaving us without troublesome minds or bodies to worry about just pre digested movies entirely created by artificial intelligence. That’s the dream. Now, back when Professor Weil unleashed his book, it doesn’t seem like the thinking world is losing a lot of sleep around dualism, being more concerned with psychology, communism and nuclear weapons, people followed dualism, but not down the garden path. Part of that reluctance came from Descartes himself. If mind and body are separate, what brings them together? Well, he said it was animal spirits housed in the pineal gland. What was this? What Ryle called the dogma of the ghost of the machine. There’s no ghost in there. Kids, not even ectoplasm, get out of there with that. Descartes every time Ryle talked about the mind, part of mind body, he ignored the unseeable, the ghost. It’s the physical that reflects individual dispositions. If we love something, we kiss it, we can tell we love eating by what’s in our mouth, which all seems like begging the question. But then again, Ryle, being a philosopher, a non essentialist or athlete, I guess, didn’t put a whole lot of eggs into the basket of volition. If you know what I mean, he didn’t talk about desire or lust or rage. What about physical gestures that reflect areas of compliance? We are inclined to enjoy certain things. We are disposed that way, not cold, not hot, just right. Are you warm enough? You aren’t excited? Are you? It’s all very British, very Anglican. No enthusiasm, but it feels good. Well, then, by all means, consider it. Why don’t you? Feeling might not be the problem anyway. Maybe it’s thinking, you know, when we can say, I just had a thought, even if it’s not true, you’re bound to say something that will seem like a thought. They’ll either seal the deal on our project or cause your co workers, lovers, family members, to flee from you because your very thoughts are toxic. Maybe philosophy should devote itself to that modern conundrum thinking thoughts that shouldn’t be considered thoughts at all. Whose job is that? Who decides that job is left to America’s leaders right now, but I have no doubt that thoughts, as I once knew them, like, should I say that movie by Paul Anderson will ever come to love bagpipes will all return, along with lust, rage, disappointment and a big X name for all things AI. I mean, it hasn’t even happened yet, and we’re all sick of it. Is AI part of the mind body problem. I don’t know much about philosophy. If this much is true, you don’t look for pine trees in a Furniture Showroom. You don’t find sofa beds in a forest. And there ain’t no such thing as ghosts. And yet I remain afraid I gotta go.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of Leland, Stanford Junior University, copyright 2025.

Josh Landy
Our Executive Producer is James Kass. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is the Director of Research and advancement.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler, Angela Johnston, Karen Adjluni, Steve Choy, and Linda Fagan.

Josh Landy
Special thanks to Emma Lozman Plum, Michael Aparicio, Tom Lockhart, Matt Porta, and John Lehman.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Josh Landy
The views expressed (or misexpressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Ray Briggs
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. Thank you for listening.

Ray Briggs
And thank you for thinking

Like Mike 2: Streetball
Draw Squad has the lead and it looks like Ghost in the Machine may have to change his name to Toast in the Machine.