ryle

gilbert ryle

context: Propositional knowledge - the idea that knowledge is internally represented through mental sentences (mentalese) or sentence like propositions. It seems plausible because many people report that they think by means of "inner speech". This view is supported by cognitivists and symbolic AI researchers. Various names for higher level structures needed to organise these propositions have been - schemata, frames (Minsky 1975) and scripts (Schank and Abelson 1977), MOPs (memory organisation packets and TOPS (thematic organisation points) [Schank 1982]

Bechtel et al discusses the challenge from connectionism and other ideas such as Ryles to the concept of internalised propositional knowledge - pp. 147-9, Bechtel et al, 1991

Knowing How and Knowing That eg. knowing that Melbourne is the capital of Victoria in Australia knowing how to ride a bike

The former requires propositional knowledge, the latter requires control of one's perceptual-motor system

knowing how is not limited to (physical activity) eg. knowing how to make or appreciate a joke, talk grammatically, play chess, argue knowing how may penetrate extensively into the cognitive domain

"...we are interested less in the stocks of truths that they acquire and retain than in their capacities to find out truths for themselves and their ability to organise and exploit them ... " p. 152, Bechtal et al quoting Ryle (1949)

Ryle says that "knowing that" rests on "knowing how"

Ryles approach was behavioristic so as to avoid the issue of "the ghost in the machine" (Ryle originated this term?)

Cognitivists explain knowing how in terms of procedures that are composed of proposition like rules - partly plausible because we often teach people how to do something new by step by step procedures, verbally or written down - but only partly plausible because we know that doing the activity is important for learning it

reference
William Bechtel and Adele Abrahamsen. Connectionism and the Mind: An Introduction to Parallel Processing in Networks. 1991


 * philosophical backdrop**: logical positivism of Russell, Wittenstein (later abandoned) - that sentences could be shown to be built up from atomic units of meaning which referred to or pictured basic real world entities

in this view language becomes a "conceptual boat" through which we view the world - if we cannot get out of this boat then we can't gain a clear view of the world as it really is

Ryle's declared aim was to destroy the Cartesian view, to remove "the ghost (from) the machine"

our behaviour is the working of our minds, the mental is in the behaviour

the mind is a concept, not an entity with its own causal powers mental activity is not an "internal shadow performance" private thinking is suppressed, "unpublished" utterances not importantly different from broadcast, public behaviour our ability to keep our thoughts to ourselves is a "sophisticated accomplishment" but does not indicate another layer of intelligence standing behind our intelligent behaviour intelligent behaviour is not the result of intelligent mental processes, rather the behaviour is the intelligence to pursue causal, reductive explanations of behaviour is to pursue a chimera - Miller, pp. 36-8

reference:
Kerry Miller. Literature review: Theory of Mind (1996). Unpublished