Functionalism has its early genealogical roots partially in behaviorism; according to the behaviorist, intelligence is the propensity to do or behave a certain way, given some set of appropriate circumstances. For soft-behaviorists like Gilbert Ryle, for instance, mental statements can be understood and made identical to a series of dispositional statements. Specifically, Ryle’s position can be termed analytical behaviorism, which often is considered equivalent to logical behaviorism (albeit Ryle would be more aptly considered as a predecessor to logical behaviorism, proper) according to which sentences concerning mentality can be translated, without any lossage, into sentences about observable behavior. According to Ryle, Hume put forward a fallacious causal theory that one could not have a particular “idea” without having previously having had a corresponding sensation; this is, for Ryle, evidenced by Hume’s so-called riddle of induction:
[Hume] put forward the causal theory that one could not have a particular ‘idea’ without having previously had a corresponding sensation, somewhat as having an angular bruise involves having been previously struck by an angular object. The colors that I see in my mind’s eye are, he seems to have thought, traces somehow left by the colors previously seen by me with my eyes open. The only thing that is true in this account is that what I see in my mind’s eye and what I hear ‘in my head’ is tied in certain ways to what I have previously seen and heard. But the nature of this tie is not at all what Hume supposed.[1].
Ultimately, for Ryle, causal theories prove inadequate, with the former identified by Hume and the problem of induction. For, following the problem of induction via Hume, we experience and identify physical objects, though we cannot know laws governing their behavior. Though distinct, the issues of whether or how we identify physical objects or events, and of whether or how we identify laws governing their behavior, are correlative problems requiring conjoint solution—we can only identify physical objects and, likewise, spatio-temporal events, as objective successions by discriminating regularities in their behavior; such regularities are discerned by way of their being at least partly manifest to us by way of how they appear to us—that is, by distinguishing their regularities from those regularities in their appearances which depend upon our own chosen courses of action.[2] Indeed, causal relations between our surroundings and our sensory ideas simply do not suffice for explaining how those ideas refer to and can represent objects in our surroundings.
Ryle underscores this in the aforementioned example; contra Hume, for Ryle “[t]he only thing that is true in this account is that what I see in my mind’s eye and what I hear ‘in my head’ is tied in certain ways to what I have previously seen and heard.”[3] For Ryle, mock-actions necessarily presuppose “ingenuous actions, in the sense that performing the former involves, in a special sense, the thought of the latter.”[4] In turn, a person who has never seen how blue things look could not see blue things in the mind’s eye (that is, they could not picture blue things in his mind’s eye or recognize blue things). Thus “we learn how things look and sound chiefly and originally by seeing and hearing them.”[5] Imaging, as a way of utilizing knowledge amongst many, requires the relevant knowledge has been acquired, in similar fashion. Knowledge-acquisition described as such, with it being tethered to knowledge-utilization—and thus the functional scheme writ large—demonstrates Ryle’s behaviorist predilection. In this example, Ryle states that we no longer need Hume’s “para-mechanical theory of traces” and all that is required for learning qua picture-thinking are those perceptual lessons which “entails some perceiving, that applying those lessons entails having learned them, and that imaging is one way of applying those lesson.”[6]
Given Ryle’s account, however, we have to contend with examples such as the following: the frame of mind of some person who is merely pretending to be upset, and how this is different from that of a person who genuinely is cross. For Ryle, the former’s simulation involves, in some way, the “thought” of crossness. More broadly, the business of trying or simulating to behave/behavior in ways in which a cross person would behave is itself, at least partially, making functional use of the thought of how the person would behave were they genuinely cross. That is, they are using “being cross” as a prop, comporting a more or less faithful muscular representation of the cross man or woman’s poutings and stampings, thus proffering the active utilization of the knowledge of how the cross man would, if genuinely cross, behave.[7]
Thus, for Ryle, there is not much between a child playing at being a pirate and one fancying that he is a pirate. Truly, the difference is merely linguistic, tethered to our using words. However, underlying this is perhaps a more radical difference which engages with picture-thinking, a difference that occurs when and by way of the fact that we apply the words “pretend,” “simulate” and “act the part,” where an overt and muscular representation is given of whatever deed or condition is being “put on” while we imagine/fancy for those behaviors of mental states that are “in their heads.”[8]. This brand of make-belief is what Ryle terms “imagining,” “visualizing,” “mind’s eyes,” and “going through in one’s head.” More important than getting rid of the superstition that picturing something is seeing a picture of it in one’s “mind’s eye” is the claim that epistemologists of Ryle day had, up to that point, long encouraged, asking us “us to suppose […] that a mental picture, or a visual image, stands to a visual sensation in something like the relation of an echo to a noise.”[9]
It was claimed by those espousing this stripe of epistemology that it is the case that what is occurring when I “hear,” “smell,” “see” corresponds something mental to that (bodily) element in perceiving. This was later embedded into Wilfrid Sellars’ Myth of the Jones. Consequently, Ryle considers that perceiving entails both having sensations and something else—i.e., thinking. Ryle details how imaging is not a function of pure sentence, or merely linguistic, and requires learning; what makes the imaginative operation of going through a song in one’s head similar to following a heard song/rehearsing the song is in exercising humming it or playing it:
Going through a tune in one’s head is like following a heard tune and is, indeed, a sort of rehearsal of it. But what makes the imaginative operation similar to the other is not, as is often supposed, that it incorporates the hearing of ghosts of notes similar in all but loudness to the heard notes of the real tune, but the fact that both are utilizations of knowledge of how the tune goes. This knowledge is exercised in recognizing and following the tune, when actually heard; it is exercised in humming or playing it; in noticing the errors in its misperformance; it is also exercised in fancying oneself humming or playing it and in fancying oneself merely listening to it. Knowing a tune just is being able to do some such things as recognise and follow it, produce it, detect errors in the playing of it and go through it in one’s head. We should not allow that a person had been unable to think how the tune went, who had whistled it correctly or gone through it in his head. Doing such things is thinking how the tune goes [….] We might say that imagining oneself talking or humming is a series of abstentions from producing the noises which would be the due words or notes to produce, if one were talking or humming aloud. That is why such operations are impenetrably secret; not that the words or notes are being produced in a hermetic cell, but that the operations consist of abstentions from producing them. That, too, is why learning to fancy one is talking or humming comes later than learning to talk or hum. Silent soliloquy is a flow of pregnant non-sayings. Refraining from saying things, of course, entails knowing both what one would have said and how one would have said it.[10]
For Ryle, to consider minds and bodies as distinct from one another—as he claimed dualists did—commits to a category mistake. Cartesianism, according to Ryle, implies there is some vague abyss-like and insurmountable epistemic gap between knowledge of one’s mind and the knowledge of other minds. However, despite the analytical behaviorist doctrine with which he is identified, Ryle is by no means agonistic about ontological behaviorism, as he considers behaviors, themselves, to be embedded, and thus intrinsic, with the mind/mentality. As Ryle notes, “[t]o talk of a person’s mind is not to talk of a repository which is permitted to house objects that something called ‘the physical world’ is forbidden to house; it is to talk of the person’s abilities, liabilities and inclinations to do and undergo certain sorts of things, and of the doing and undergoing of these things in the ordinary world.”[11] While Ryle articulates his theory on mentality in terms of “talk about minds,” it is clear that Ryle’s position is that a mind is nothing but dispositions and behaviors, and nothing more than this.
While Ryle is mostly silent about specific mental occurrences , we do have some indication to his position regarding them by way of his remarks on “heed concepts,” which apparently (and ambiguously) apply to mental occurrences where one may be in some apparently “heedful” state of mind with respect to behavior; to be in such a “heedful” state of mind seemingly means to be in said state without actually engaging in that behavior:
‘heed concepts’ […] refer to the concepts of noticing, taking care, attending, applying one’s mind, concentrating, putting one’s heart into something, thinking what one is doing, alertness, interest, intentness, studying and trying. ‘Absence of mind’ is a phrase sometimes used to signify a condition in which people act or react without heeding what they are doing, or without noticing what is going on.[12]
Thinking or heeding what one is doing does not entail constantly or recurrently making intelligent prose moves. On the contrary, making intelligent prose moves is just one example among others of thinking or heeding what one is doing, since it is saying things, thinking what one is saying. It is one species, not the causal condition of heedful performance. But certainly didactic telling, intelligently given and intelligently received, is often an indispensable guide to execution.[13]
Despite the ambiguities and lack of precision, “heeding” may perhaps be better understood as a dispositional state, using more contemporary parlance. It also seems to be of an episodic nature:
So while we are certainly saying something dispositional in applying such a heed concept to a person, we are certainly also saying something episodic. We are saying that he did what he did in a specific frame of mind, and while the specification of the frame of mind requires mention of ways in which he was able, ready or likely to act and react, his acting in that frame of mind was itself a clockable occurrence.[14]
In speaking of “frames of mind”, Ryles refers to those dispositional states that are “unlike motives, but like maladies and states of the weather, temporary conditions which in a certain way collect occurrences, but they are not themselves extra occurrences.”[15] Ryle does not grant these “frames of mind” much significance in terms of intentionality, as he deems them temporary conditions, something akin to a short-term mental disposition that does not overdetermine (physical) causation, functionally speaking—that is, speaking in terms of mereological relations, there is no macrophysical higher level that emerges from the microphysical lower level that results in novelty, the kind of qualitative change in behavior that occurs above some “critical value” of a parameter.[16] Indeed, as Laird Addis underscores, ontologically speaking, Ryle’s “frames of mind” can be but nothing but short-term dispositions, however much, as we have seen, Ryle attempts to at times avoid committing to this (or any) prescriptive theory of consciousness and the mental occurrences that make it up.[17]
Perhaps, had Ryle combined his conception of “headedness” with the aforementioned description of aping “crossness” he would have arrived at something akin to Kendall Walton’s notion of “quasi-emotions,” or emotions that elicit an isomorph to genuine emotions but do not stipulate the genuine belief-and-behavior pairing that genuine emotions do.[18] There is, however, a more significant problem with Ryle’s conception of behavior and, more importantly, behaviorism writ large. Behaviorism, in identifying mental events/experiences as nothing beyond behavior, requires universalizing “if-then” type statements. In the case of pain, for instance, behaviorism stipulates that: “if you are in pain, then you will report it.” Consider the possibility of a person who is in pain who cannot report it—they cannot wince, exclaim “ouch!” or lift their arm to relieve their pain. The behaviorist has no legitimate means of attributing such a person pain and would simply have to deny the possibility of experiencing pain for such a person. However, such people who cannot behaviorally report/communicate pain do exist, as in the example of selectively deafferented patients who are afflicted with pseudocoma-type “locked-in syndrome.” These people cannot move, and sometimes cannot speak, but are fully conscious. Perhaps the behaviorist would rejoinder with a revised conditional account of dispositions that attempts at alleviating this burden where “if one has the ability to report their pain, then they will do so.” Nonetheless, for the behaviorist, what grounds or supervenes realized behaviors/dispositions or reports is unaccounted for.
[1] Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 247.
[2] C.I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), 320.
[3] Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 247.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., 238-339.
[8] Ibid., 241.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., 244-245.
[11] Ibid., 199.
[12] Ibid., 118-9.
[13] Ibid., 126.
[14] Ibid., 140.
[15] Ibid., 83.
[16] “An emergent property, for Wimsatt, is a property of a system which is dependent on the mode of organization of the system’s parts, how they are aggregated into the whole. Properties which are invariant against (small) changes in the modes of aggregation are non-emergent. In order for a system property P to count as emergent, P has to violate some or all of the following conditions of aggregativity:
- P is invariant under rearrangements of parts of the system or replacements with ‘relevantly equivalent’ parts;
- (ii) P is “qualitatively similar” to the property exhibited by the system when parts are added or subtracted;
- (iii) P is invariant under decomposition and reaggregation of parts;
- (iv) there are no ‘cooperative or inhibitory interactions” involving P among the parts of the system.’”
Alexander Rueger, “Physical Emergence, Diachronic and Synchronic,” Synthese 125, no. 3 (2000): 304. William C. Wimsatt, “Reductionism, levels of organization, and the mind-body problem” in Consciousness and the Brain, ed. Gordon G. Globus (New York: Plenum Press, 1976), 205-67.
[17] Laird Addis, “Ryle and Intentionality,” Metaphysica 10, no. 1 (2009): 60.
[18] E.g., “quasi-fear” can be experienced when watching a horror film, where one does not believe they are truly in danger and thus does not run out of the movie theater to avoid being murdered by the Leatherface when watching Texan Chainsaw Massacre. Kendall Walton, “Fearing Fictions,” Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978): 5–27.