Quotes from Gilbert Ryle

I must however make it clear from the start that this refutation will not invalidate the distinctions which we all quite properly draw between voluntary and involuntary actions and between strong-willed and weak-willed persons. It will, on the contrary, make clearer what is meant by 'voluntary' and 'involuntary', by 'strong-willed' and 'weak-willed', by emancipating these ideas from bondage to an absurd hypothesis.

When a boy begins to notice that he is fonder of arithmetic, or less homesick, than are most of his acquaintances he is beginning to be self-conscious, in this enlarged sense.

If ordinary men never report the occurrence of these acts, for all that, according to the theory, they should be encountered vastly more frequently than headaches, or feelings of boredom; if ordinary vocabulary has no non-academic names for them; if we do not know how to settle simple questions about their frequency, duration or strength, then it is fair to conclude that their existence is not asserted on empirical grounds.

The fact that Plato and Aristotle never mentioned them in their frequent and elaborate discussions of the nature of the soul and the springs of conduct is due not to any perverse neglect by them of notorious ingredients of daily life but to the historical circumstance that they were not acquainted with a special hypothesis the acceptance of which rests not on the discovery, but on the postulation, of these ghostly thrusts.

To do something thinking what one is doing is, according to this legend, always to do two things; namely, to consider certain appropriate propositions, or prescriptions, and to put into practice what these propositions or prescriptions enjoin.

if he had examined only one signal-box and knew nothing about the standardisation-methods of large corporations, his inference would be pitiably weak, for it would be a wide generalisation based on a single instance.

The first question which we had to decide had nothing to do with the occurrence or non-occurrence of any occult episode in the boy's stream of consciousness; it was the question whether or not he had the required higher-level competence, that of knowing how to tie reef-knots.

But the rules which the agent observes and the criteria which he applies are one with those which govern the spectator's applause and jeers.

Moreover both this constant awareness (generally called 'consciousness'), and this non-sensuous inner perception (generally called 'introspection') have been supposed to be exempt from error.

The traditional theory of the mind has misconstrued the type-distinction between disposition and exercise into its mythical bifurcation of unwitnessable mental causes and their witnessable physical effects.

This point, that the capacity to appreciate a performance is one in type with the capacity to execute it, illustrates a contention previously argued, namely that intelligent capacities are not single-track dispositions, but are dispositions admitting of a wide variety of more or less dissimilar exercises.

champions of the dogma of the ghost in the machine tend to argue that the imputed objects of consciousness and introspection cannot be myths, since we are conscious of them and can introspectively observe them.

A boy can be said to have partial knowledge of the counties of England, if he knows some of them and does not know others. But he could not be said to have incomplete knowledge of Sussex being an English county.

The spectators applaud his skill at seeming clumsy, but what they applaud is not some extra hidden performance executed 'in his head'.

It is a subsidiary question how you conduct your imaginings, including your imagined monologues.

The concept of volition is in a different case. We do not know in daily life how to use it, for we do not use it in daily life and do not, consequently, learn by practice how to apply it, and how not to misapply it. It is an artificial concept. We have to study certain specialist theories in order to find out how it is to be manipulated.

It has for a long time been taken for an indisputable axiom that the Mind is in some important sense tripartite, that is, that there are just three ultimate classes of mental processes. The Mind or Soul, we are often told, has three parts, namely, Thought, Feeling and Will;

The main object of this chapter is not, however, to discuss the whole trinitarian theory of mind but to discuss, and discuss destructively, one of its ingredients. I hope to refute the doctrine that there exists a Faculty, immaterial Organ, or Ministry, corresponding to the theory's description of the 'Will' and, accordingly, that there occur processes, or operations, corresponding to what it describes as 'volitions'.

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

If I think, hope, remember, will, regret, hear a noise, or feel a pain, I must, ipso facto, know that I do so.

It is naturally difficult, if one denies the existence of the second theatre, to elucidate what is meant by describing the episodes which are supposed to take place in it as self-intimating. But some points are clear enough. It is not supposed that when I am wondering, say, what is the answer to a puzzle and am ipso facto consciously doing so, that I am synchronously performing two acts of attention, one to the puzzle and the other to my wondering about it.

An accused person may admit or deny that he did something, or that he did it on purpose, but he never admits or denies having willed.

Nor could it be maintained that the agent himself can know that any overt action of his own is the effect of a given volition.

The connection between volitions and movements is allowed to be mysterious, so, for all he knows, his volition may have had some other movement as its effect and the pulling of the trigger may have had some other event for its cause.