Quotes from Gilbert Ryle

Philosophy is the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines.

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.

A person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts.

The vain man does not think he is vain.

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.

The author is leading and the spectator is following, but their path is the same.

Knowing how to apply maxims cannot be reduced to, or derived from, the acceptance of those or any other maxims.

Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings.

But when a person has done the right thing, we cannot then say that he knew how to do the wrong thing, or that he was competent to make mistakes.

For making mistakes is not an exercise of competence, nor is the commission of slips an exercise of knowledge how; it is a failure to exercise knowledge how.

Roughly, execution and understanding are merely different exercises of knowledge of the tricks of the same trade.

I discover that there are other minds in understanding what other people say and do.

In making sense of what you say, in appreciating your jokes, in unmasking your chess-stratagems, in following your arguments and in hearing you pick holes in my arguments, I am not inferring to the workings of your mind, I am following them. Of course, I am not merely hearing the noises that you make, or merely seeing the movements that you perform. I am understanding what I hear and see. But this understanding is not inferring to occult causes.

Certainly there are some things which I can find out about you only, or best, through being told of them by you. The oculist has to ask his client what letters he sees with his right and left eyes and how clearly he sees them; the doctor has to ask the sufferer where the pain is and what sort of a pain it is; and the psychoanalyst has to ask his patient about his dreams and daydreams.

Nor does this understanding require a prolonged grounding in the not yet established laws of psychology.

Nor does this understanding require a prolonged grounding in the not yet established laws of psychology. Following the moves made by a chess-player is not doing anything remotely resembling problematic psychological diagnosis.

Of course, to execute an operation intelligently is not exactly the same thing as to follow its execution intelligently. The agent is originating, the spectator is only contemplating.

Intelligent' cannot be defined in terms of 'intellectual' or 'knowing how' in terms of 'knowing that'; 'thinking what I am doing' does not connote 'both thinking what to do and doing it'. When I do something intelligently, i.e. thinking what I am doing, I am doing one thing and not two. My performance has a special procedure or manner, not special antecedents.

A natural counterpart to the theory that minds constitute a world other than 'the physical world' is the theory that there exist ways of discovering the contents of this other world which are counterparts to our ways of discovering the contents of the physical world.

For this theory is just another unsuccessful attempt to wriggle out of a perfectly mythical dilemma.

For the reason, or maxim, is inevitably a proposition of some generality. It cannot embody specifications to fit every detail of the particular state of affairs.

The regress is infinite. and this reduces to absurdity the theory that for an operation to be intelligent it must be steered by a prior intellectual operation.

When I do something intelligently, i.e. thinking what I am doing, I am doing one thing and not two. My performance has a special procedure or manner, not special antecedents.

Drill dispenses with intelligence, training develops it.