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Courses of Action or the
Uncatchableness of Mental Acts
GILBERT RYLE*
sea from a fast moving boat and with only a knitting needle. Even a
Hume or a Virginia Woolf never gets the transparent, invertebrate
and slippery creature up to the surface of the water-if indeed the
creature had been there at all. What makes our thinkings such
description-bafflers? Why can our introspections do no better than
stammer?
Let me begin by hardening-up our puzzle in three or four ways.
1. In some of our thinkings, especially in our school-drilled addings,
subtractings, multiplyings and dividings, we know how to arrive at
perfectly definite results. I do not stammer in telling you the product
of 17 x 13, after I have finished working it out. But I do stammer badly
when you now ask me to describe that working itself. Why?
2. In this same sort of case, and a few others, I may be able to tell
you, without any stammering, via what interim steps I had got to my
result. Indeed, I might sometimes show you those steps as I had pen-
cilled them on the back of an envelope: '3 x 7 = 21; 3 x 9 = 27; 27 + 2
= 29; ...'. Yet if you now pester me with enquiries, not about these
interim steps, but about my movements or passages between one such
step and its successor, or between the last step and the final result,
again I stammer. Why?
3. Nor do I ordinarily have the slightest difficulty in informing
you precisely what was occupying my mind just now. Being myself
the ponderer, of course I know at first hand what I was mulling
over. Yet this Cartesian certainty about the topic of my recent mus-
ings seems to fade out the moment I attempt to be autobiographical
about the actual courses and impulses of these recent acts of rumi-
nating. Why?
4. Nor is it only our Penseur-like ruminatings and reckonings that
slither off our knitting-needles. All the multifarious things that are
sheltered under Descartes' 'cogito'-parasol baffle our descriptive
powers in the same way. (a) I can tell with perfect definiteness that
what I feel towards the trickster is indignation and not merely irri-
tation; and even on just what grounds I condemn him. Yet when you
now ask me what 'internally' marks off my indignation with the
trickster from my mere irritation with the garrulous barber, I have
nothing firm to say. (b) What are the introspected symptoms of my
meaning my sneer, as distinct from my sneering in fun or on the
stage? (c) How does my hoping that it will snow differ in 'feel' from
either my wanting it to snow or my expecting it to snow? (d) I had
made up my mind yesterday to travel tomorrow, and I have not since
changed my mind; but my state of mind today betrays no ripples,
currents, eddies or stagnant pools of this persistent resolve. Intro-
spection finds nothing to report. Yet tomorrow I duly do travel. (e)
I can tell you in full detail what I greatly enjoyed, yet I can tell you
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Gilbert Ryle
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Courses of Action or the Uncatchableness of Mental Acts
Let me first clear one thing out of our way. Aristotle, with no anti-
Cartesian end in view, rightly distinguished from our here-and-now
actions, activities, undergoings, etc., our Hexeis or Dispositions,
that is, our abilities, incapacities, frailties, propensities, tastes,
habits, etc. Some active and transitive verbs, such as the verbs 'to
know', 'to own', 'to aspire', and 'to belong to', signify not actions,
processes or episodes, etc., whether overt or 'inner', but tense-
general potentialities, skills, possessions, proneness, qualifications,
and the lack of them. I have discussed these before and I shall not
discuss them again.
Among the things that we do at specific times, on purpose and for
reasons, with or without skill, with or without success, of our own
free wills or under orders, there are some which are too complex, too
protracted and, sometimes, too syndicated to be classed with
actions. More importantly, they constitutionally incorporate subor-
dinate actions, without being reducible to these actions or to any sets
of them any more than syllables are reducible to the vowels and con-
sonants which they incorporate. (a) For example, training a puppy
demands manifold, systematic and often-repeated efforts from the
puppy's trainer or trainers. Asked what we did out on the common
ten minutes ago, we could not answer 'We trained the puppy,' but at
most 'We did another bit of puppy-training'.The command 'Train
your puppy now' would be ludicrous, as would 'Show me a snap shot
of what puppy-training looks like.' So would 'She suddenly trained
her puppy'. There is no particular thing done here-and-now by us
trainers to or with our puppy that might not be done to or with it by
someone who had no training-policy at all. We might all pat the
puppy, give it biscuits, take it out on the common and whistle to it.
There is no special class of Supra-Acts of Training; there are only
the every-day subordinate or infra-acts, by patiently doing and
repeating which we train it; but infra-acts so planned, concerted,
etc., as gradually to build up in the puppy the required obediences,
habits, reliances, fears and dexterities. I train the puppy by (inter
alia) whistling to it. But my whistlings need not be subordinate to a
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Gilbert Ryle
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Courses of Action or the Uncatchableness of Mental Acts
all come out with the same dissyllable 'schrecklich', when only one
of the three is trying to master by sedulous rehearsals the pronunci-
ation of this awkward German word.
This distinction between actions and courses or chains of action
is not yet a very clear one. Actions are done with intentions, while
courses of action have programmes; but this contrast is not a lumi-
nous one. We have no regulations to fix what shall and what shall not
count as a single action rather than as a combination or sequence of
numerically different actions; and we have no regulations to fix what
shall count as an action and not as a mere reaction, reflex, output of
energy, automatism, or spasm. But: (a) while we should not readily
swallow the story that someone was at one and the same moment
performing more than, at most, three non-automatic, non-rote
actions, we could readily allow that someone was, through the very
same months, engaged in sedulously studying the German language,
methodically training a puppy, industriously making a garden,
scrupulously adhering to a diet, carefully keeping a secret, and sys-
tematically exploring his new countryside. Synchronous intentions
are likely to be competitors; synchronous programmes need not
compete. (b) More important is this: while a person engaged in a
chain-undertaking, like making a cake, may never have heard or read
any worded instructions for making this sort of cake-she had often
watched her mother making cakes of this sort-still a worded recipe
could be given by a Mrs Beeton. Now such a worded programme
necessarily embodies or could embody such expressions as '... and
then ...', 'until', 'while', 'never', 'need not', 'either ... or', 'both ...
and', 'any', 'most', 'usually', 'unless', 'so as not to', etc., i.e. general-
izing, negativing, conditional, conjunctive, disjunctive and modal
expressions, etc., and these display in their subordinate clauses just
how the Lower Order actions are tactically subjected to their Higher
Order Undertaking. These conjunctions, quantifiers, etc., will not
enter into what the eye-witness reports having witnessed being
done, or into what the agent confesses to having done on a particu-
lar occasion. Subordinate clauses are not wanted for a pure factual
report. I diet by, inter alia, refusing lobster; there is ordinarily no
further 'by so-and-soing' to my refusing lobster.
Here is an introductory list of familiar kinds of things in our
adherence to which we are engaging in courses of action of chain-
undertakings: policies, adopted routines, office-practices, campaigns,
matches, traditions, curricula, conventions, customs, fashions, codes of
manners, ceremonials, drills, regimens, schedules, styles, rituals, com-
pacts, time-tables, recipes, techniques, procedures, gambling-systems,
agendas. ... A person follows a programme of any of these and other
kinds, (1) not by executing any single here-and-now infra-action;
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Courses of Action or the Uncatchableness of Mental Acts
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Courses of Action or the Uncatchableness of Mental Acts
Application
In nearly all fields of human activity there is scope for trying new
things out, originating, inventing, exploring, essaying, testing,
having a shot, in a word, for track-hunting; and there is scope for
habituation, practising, consolidating, mastering, rehearsing, get-
ting used to, going over, training, in a word, for path-rolling. An
experiment need not be a laboratoryexperiment; it can be a culinary,
a pedagogic, a house-decorating, a political, a metrical, a school-
teaching, or a rock-climbing experiment. Similarly, I may try to
master by practice as well a sonata as a piece of pronunciation, the
breast-stroke, a golf-swing, a proof, a surgical technique, a figure of
the syllogism, a verse-form or a ritual. The owner of a new car, golf-
club or camera tries to find out what he can do and cannot do with it
by a variety of continuously altering experiments; and later, or at the
same time, he may try to acquire control of it by repeatedly per-
forming the same operations with it. Only where there is explo-
ration, innovation, origination, enterprise or the essaying of some-
thing new, can there be experimenting; only where there is
intentional repetition, acclimatization, rehearsal, consolidation or
self-drilling can there be the intention to school oneself in some-
thing. Experimenting is essaying the un-habitual in order to acquire
the knowledge of something; practising is self-habituation or
rehearsing in order to fix the knowledge or possession of something.
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Courses of Action or the Uncatchableness of Mental Acts
Conclusion
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