Int Ontology Metaphysics (2009) 10:4963 DOI 10.

1007/s12133-008-0039-6 O R I G I N A L PA P E R

Ryle and Intentionality

Laird Addis

Published online: 6 December 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract After some opening comments on how I think one should approach the philosophy of mind, I look at what relatively little Gilbert Ryle had to say explicitly about intentionality, that occurring almost exclusively in his several papers on phenomenology. Then, I discuss the notion of intentionality with respect to the doctrines of The Concept of Mind, although neither the word nor the idea, strictly speaking, appears anywhere in the book. Following more exposition of my own views, including an argument I have made for a certain specific theory of intentionality, I close with some reflections on Ryle as a modern-day Aristotelian. Keywords Ryle . Intentionality . Mind . Phenomenology

1 Introduction Gilbert Ryle was, if not one of the great, unquestionably one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. And if he is not discussed much these days, his most famous publication, The Concept of Mind, was reasonably selected earlier in this century by the editors of an anthology of essays (Gracia et al. 2003) about great philosophical works as among the 100 most important books of Western philosophy. In my contribution to that anthology, I characterized Ryles book as being after its ancient predecessor in both spirit and content, Aristotles De Anima, almost certainly the most famous essay on the nature of mind in Western philosophy (Addis 2003, 540) and insisted that it remains the locus classicus for
This paper, with slight differences, was presented in October 2007 at a conference on Gilbert Ryle and The Concept of Mind at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, and later also at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. I have chosen to retain the somewhat personal and sometimes casual style of a paper intended to be read aloud at a conference devoted to a philosopher with whom I have had some connection even though, to my regret, I never met him. L. Addis (*) The Department of Philosophy, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA e-mail: laird-addis@uiowa.edu

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an extended and detailed exposition and defense of a major philosophical theory of the mind (Addis 2003, 545). I offered that assessment despite my view that Ryles ontology of mind materialism of the behaviorist varietyis false and his arguments seriously defective. On this occasion, I will focus on Ryles views of mind in connection with the notion of intentionality while also stating and defending some of my own views about the matter. More specifically, I shall proceed as follows: first, I will speak of how I believe one should approach the philosophy of mind, with special attention to the phenomenon of intentionality. Second, I shall look at Ryles own discussion of intentionality, which occurred almost exclusively in the context of his several papers on phenomenology. Third, I will discuss the notion of intentionality with respect to the doctrines of The Concept of Mind, even though, if I am not mistaken, neither the word nor the idea appears anywhere in the book. Fourth, I will presume to discuss my own views in more detail, especially by way of rehearsing an argument I have made for a certain specific theory of intentionality. I will close with some final reflections on Ryle as a modern-day Aristotelian.

2 What is a Mind? I have long maintained that what we understand as the mind is best approached by the use of three or, possibly, four categories. There are, first, the various kinds of awarenesses such as perceivings, rememberings, imaginings, feelings, and so on those entities (or states or events, if you prefer) that make up what we sometimes call the stream of consciousness. These I call the primary mental entities for reasons that I will discuss momentarily. Then, there are those entities that do not seem to be themselves awarenesses but nevertheless depend on awarenesses for their existence such as bodily sensationspains, itches, tickles, nausea, and so onas well as moods and emotions and, if there really are any, perception-related entities such as images and sense data. All such entities I call the secondary mental entities, even though the empiricist tradition has, unfortunately, often treated them as if they were the essence of mind. Then, there are the tertiary mental entities such as believings and knowings, hopings, desirings (in one sense), and so on, entities that we are willing to ascribe to people when they are in dreamless sleep or even in coma, that is, when they are unconscious. These dispositional mental states are dispositions both to engage in certain kinds of behaviors as well as to have certain awarenesses; and it is indeed the latter that makes them dispositional mental states and not mere behavioral dispositions. Finally, if, as Ryle seems to maintain (I will give you a quote later), some behaviors themselves and not just the dispositions thereto are sometimes regarded as aspects of mind, then we can have a category of quaternary mental entities. But this is, I think, trivial in being more of an anthropological than a philosophical matter whether or not behaviors themselves are ever considered, in any reasonable sense, part of the mind. A mind, then, I say, whether human or any other we can imagine, is, in the primary sense, just the stream of consciousness, that flow of awarenesses that, in waking hours, consists at almost every moment of perceptions with most of the outer senses, the having of various bodily sensations such as pains or hunger or fatigue or

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sexual desire, thoughts of almost anything whatsoever such as the work one is doing as well as ones plans for the evening and so on, and often much more. The awarenesses that constitute the stream of consciousness are what I and others also call simply conscious states or states of consciousness or, somewhat more technically and perhaps better avoided, mental acts. There is, of course, an important tradition in Western philosophy going back at least to the medievals and of which I am a part that speaks easily and freely of acts of the mind, but some object to this way of speaking for what it may seem to implythat awarenesses are themselves things of a sort one chooses to undertake in much the same sense that one chooses ones behaviors. And that, of course, is absurd. I then shall speak generally, as I have been doing, of awarenesses or conscious states. A person in dreamless sleep or coma, even permanent total coma, can be said to have a mind. But this fact, surely, is derivative on the persons being a being, or at least the kind of being, that also has conscious states of the sort that comprise the stream of consciousness. A being, or kind of being, with only dispositional states, even if some of them were called dispositional mental states, is, in a reasonable if rather harsh way of speaking, a mindless being, even if the god of the monotheistic religions seems sometimes to be conceived as a being whose mind consists only of such states. (At least part of the reason for this is that awarenesses, it seems, can exist only in time; they require duration in order to be. But the god of the monotheists is conceived as being outside of space and timeindeed, as the very creator of them.) Even if we can suppose the existence of a being with only dispositional mental states and no conscious mental statesdispositional states such as knowing that 2 2 4 or desiring world peaceand who manages to exercise those dispositions somehow, not in the having of conscious states but only in behaviors or other external effects, we would surely be disinclined to say that it is a minded being. It is, instead, a wonderfully programmed robotprogrammed either by nature or by a genuinely minded being. Never mind for the moment if I am saying that Ryles view is that we are robots, programmed by evolution, instead of the conscious beings that we know we are. But it is clear what I mean by saying that conscious states are the primary mental entities, the essence of mind. Now, to make my way closer to our main theme, I want to insist that all conscious statesnot only perceivings and rememberings and imaginings but also the having of moods, emotions, and sensationsinvolve intentionality. All consciousness, as Husserl and later Sartre liked to say, is consciousness of something, whether that something is existent or not. There is no such thing as pure consciousness; to be conscious just is to be in some intentional state. So, in a more specific sense, we may say that intentionality, the aboutness of awareness, is the defining feature of the mind. But having taken that stephere very hastily, to be surethe next is to ask what the ontological analysis of intentionality is or, even more precisely, what the basic constituents of an intentional state are, be it a perceiving or a remembering or an imagining or any awareness whatsoever that might be a part of a stream of consciousness. To that matter, I shall attend later as well as to that of whether or not a philosophy of mind that takes intentionality and the inner life as fundamental in the ontology of mind is consistent with the scientific worldview. But let us now turn to Ryle and his encounter with intentionality through his study of the phenomenological movement.

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3 Ryle on Phenomenology and Intentionality Although Ryle eventually claimed that phenomenology is a bore (Ryle 1946, 223), he did in fact himself devote much time to reading, writing, and even speaking about it. And his discussions of intentionality, revealingly, occur almost exclusively in his seven publications whose primary theme is, with one exception, phenomenology. Those publications spread out over 40 years. They begin with his first two publications, both appearing in Mind, a short review in 1927 of Roman Ingardens Essentiale Fragen: Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Wesens and a longer review of Martin Heidegger s Sein und Zeit in 1929, proceed to an article with the title Phenomenology in 1932 in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society and a brief review in Oxford Magazine the next year of J. N. Findlays book Meinongs Theory of Objects, jump to a much longer review in 1946 in the journal Philosophy of Marvin Farber s The Foundations of Phenomenology, continue with an article published originally in 1962 in French in Cahiers de Royaumont Philosophie and translated into English as Phenomenology Versus The Concept of Mind for his collected works published in 1971, and conclude the next year with the published version of Intentionality-Theory and the Nature of Thinking, a short paper he had delivered at a colloquium on Meinong in Graz in 1970. The key figures in all of these papers are, of course, Franz Brentano and his students Alexius Meinong and Edmund Husserl and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Husserls students Heidegger and Ingarden. In very large measure, as I will try to show, Ryles conception of, and beliefs about, intentionality are confined to how it is treated in what came to be known as the phenomenological tradition. I would not want to suggest that this restriction is due to any particular lack of knowledge or imagination on Ryles part. But we know now that intentionality has, as it were, returned to or, perhaps one should say, found its place in the analytic tradition, especially in the three decades since Ryles death but beginning even earlier in the work of Gustav Bergmann who, after all, had been a member of the Vienna Circle and, later, of John Searle perhaps most prominently. And we know, too, as I shall later demonstrate in my own case with your indulgence, that, while retaining the basic idea of the notion of intentionality as the aboutness of awareness, there are other ways of treating it than those of the phenomenological tradition. Let us first take note of the fact that Ryle obviously could read German with complete ease. William Lyons reports that, under prodding by his mentor, H. J. Paton, Ryle taught himself German in order to gain some knowledge of what was going on in continental Europe (Lyons 1980, 3). The fact that he was asked to review Ingardens tome and especially that of Heidegger alone shows how adept Ryle must have become and been known to have become with the German language. In addition, many of these seven pieces show Ryles wide knowledge of Germanlanguage philosophy beginning with Immanuel Kant and Bernard Bolzano but continuing not with Hegel and those in that tradition but instead with Brentano and those following, as I have already indicated. And this knowledge could have come only from reading extensively in these philosophers in their native German, for translations into English of them were to come only much later. (In fact, Ryle several times bemoans the lack of English translations, not, presumably, for himself but for his colleagues and students.) What, however, specifically gave him what can fairly

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be called his love/hate relation to the phenomenological movement, I cannot say. But no English-writing philosopher knew or wrote more about it in the 1920s and 1930s than Gilbert Ryle. Perhaps it was only that, being able to read what the phenomenologists had written, he was in a position to see it as the foremost competitor to the kind of philosophy he was to do. But with these speculations, let me now turn to just what he did have to say about phenomenology and intentionality and to offer my understanding of what is to be learned from it. The two key features of phenomenology as Ryle saw it (and I have no dispute with this) are, first, its doctrines of Essences and Objects, that is, its extreme realism in the sense that anything, or almost anything, that can be thought or imagined has some kind of existence; and, second, its theories of intentionality, that is, that the essence (non-technical use) of mind is in the aboutness of consciousness. Ryle does not always put matters this way, but I think this is, nevertheless, a fair reading of the overall thrust of his understanding. But there is another key idea, which will be the basis of my fundamental criticism of Ryle on intentionality, and that is the belief that these two features are somehow mutually dependent, that the doctrines of Essences and Objects and the idea that everything thinkable has ontological status (to use an expression from my own heritage) somehow derives from and in turn lends support to the notion that intentionality is the key to understanding the nature of the mind. But let us spend some time taking a chronological glance at these seven papers with the occasional quote from each which, in many ways, present a side of Ryles scholarly life quite different from that you would know only by acquaintance with The Concept of Mind. As I have said, Ryles first publication, at the age of 27, was a review of a book of Ingarden, better known eventually for his work in aesthetics and a student of Husserls. Ryle identifies him as belonging to the phenomenological movement and remarks that The main common possession, in virtue of which they may be called a School, is their logical and ontological theory of objective Essences (Ryle 1927, 367). Indeed, the great virtue of phenomenology, as Ryle saw the matter, was in their affirmation of the mindindependence of the facts of logic and mathematics (even if, in his opinion, they themselves got it wrong in their extreme realism) and says, accordingly, of Ingardens book that its value lies in clearing the ground, clarifying and regularising the terminology, in meeting objections against the general theory of objective Essences and in refuting Psychologistic and Anthropologistic attempts to reduce them to something else (Ryle 1927, 369). Turning briefly at the end of his review to the question of how we know Essences, Ryle writes (speaking of our relation to Essences) that This relation is dubbed, after Husserl, the Intentional relation. It is the Essence of Consciousness to be of something beyond itself namely of an Object which is independent of the act in which my consciousness relates itself to it.... Thus the Phenomenological theory of Knowledge [by which Ryle means the theory of intentionality] ... is grounded in the theory of objective Essences (Ryle 1927, 370). Ryle spends the first seven pages of his much longer review of Heidegger s book on a general introduction to the phenomenological movement beginning with Brentano. Here, a little curiously but not inaccurately for Brentano, Ryle describes the intentional connection as getting one only to other features of ones own mind when he says Two important things must be noticed about intentionality (which is,

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of course, ultimate and indefinable): (1) It has nothing to do with intending in our sense of intending or purposing to do so... (2) The intentional object of an act of consciousness is not an extra-mental reality, but immanent in the consciousness of which it is the content (Ryle 1929, 199). But he hastens to add a few sentences later that, for Brentano, the further distinction has to be made, between the content or intentional object of a psychic act, and the real, extra-mental object, e.g., a thing in space and time (Ryle 1929, 199). And a few pages later, along the same lines, he points out that it is perhaps no coincidence that Brentano who claimed to be the pupil of Aristotle and the Schoolmen should be the teacher of pupils who re-affirmed the independent reality of entia rationis and found in our thinking elements that were not sensations or echoes of sensations (Ryle 1929, 201). That, too, is where one of those pupils, Husserl, stood at the time of his classic Logische Untersuchungen of 1900. But even there, Ryle says (and I fully agree) that Husserl, in calling the objects of awarenesses Meanings, was on the road to the idea that consciousness is constitutive of all objects that are (or pretend to be) transcendent (Ryle 1929, 204), that is, on the dismal road to idealism. What is striking about Ryles treatment of Heidegger is how seriously he takes him and how generous he is in his evaluation despite fundamental disagreements (and admitted incomprehensions). Indeed, what Heidegger in this book argues to be the fundamental task of philosophy, the disclosure of Being through a study of Dasein, Ryle more or less dismisses as either unintelligible or at least hopeless (again, I fully agree), and he comes close to simply making fun of Heidegger s idea that we need to return to a more primitive mode of psychological existence in order to grasp Being itself. And as for the essence of Dasein being Sorge (care or concern), while he pursues briefly some of Heidegger s claims for it, Ryle leaves it off with the admission that here, for the reviewer at any rate, the fog becomes too thick (Ryle 1929, 210). Among his general comments near the end of the review, Ryle, with respect to Heidegger s claim that phenomenology starts with no hypotheses or presuppositions, observes correctly that while there is no objection to the thesis that I can know my own experiences and the I who has them, the assertion that this is all I can know, or that if I can know anything else I can only know it if I first know my experiences and my I, is far from self-evident; indeed it seems to me to contradict itself. At any rate it presupposes a theory of knowledge and a metaphysic, and so a Phenomenology based on this theory is not presuppositionless (Ryle 1929, 211). Further, with respect to Husserls and Heidegger s treatment of intentionality and its objects, Ryle insists that while it is a dangerous metaphor to speak of acts having meanings or of things being the meanings of acts, it is a fatal error to speak of a thing known as the correlate of a knowing-act as if that implied that we could get to the heart of the thing by analysing our experience of it (Ryle 1929, 212). I will close the summary of this piece of Ryles with some of his final words: But though I deplore the damage wrought upon his Metaphysics by the presuppositions which Heidegger has unconsciously inherited, I have nothing but admiration for his special undertaking and for such of his achievements in it as I can follow, namely the phenomenological analysis of the root workings of

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the human soul. He shows himself to be a thinker of real importance by the immense subtlety and searchingness of his examination of consciousness, by the boldness and originality of his methods and conclusions, and by the unflagging energy with which he tries to think behind the stock categories of orthodox philosophy and psychology. And I must also say, in his behalf, that while it is my personal opinion that qua First Philosophy Phenomenology is at present heading for bankruptcy and disaster and will end either in self-ruinous Subjectivism or in a windy mysticism, I hazard this opinion with humility and reservations since I am well aware how far I have fallen short of understanding this difficult work (Ryle 1929, 213214). The publication of Ryles 1932 paper, Phenomenology, demonstrates his continuing interest in the subject and is devoted almost entirely to exposition and criticism of Husserls view but in which he, Ryle, fails to mention even a single work of Husserls, much less a specific reference. This practice, later adopted by some other well-known philosophers and most evident in Ryles case in The Concept of Mind, leaves us relying entirely on Ryles own understanding in this case of Husserl, especially with respect to his references to earlier and later stages of Husserls thought. But while I have strong objection to this practice, it need not bother us much here, for it is, after all, Ryles own understanding of phenomenology and intentionality and not necessarily its accuracy that we are primarily interested in. Ryle expresses his agreement with Husserl that the philosophical study of the mind is not empirical but a priori. But here, for the first time, Ryles extreme nominalism makes its appearance, when he criticizes Husserl for holding that the subjects of a priori propositions are universals or essences as well as propositions... objects of a higher order (Ryle 1932, 72). As for himself: I do not myself believe that phrases such as being a so and so, being such and such and that so and so is such and such do denote objects or subjects of attributes...... And I do not think that what Husserl calls essences are subjects of attributes at all (Ryle 1932, 73). Here, we find, then, completely without argument here or anywhere else in Ryles writings that I know of, his view that to exist is to be a subject of attributes and the further view that attributes themselves are never the subjects of attributes. So properties do not exist; only the subjects of properties exist. But I cannot here take the time to argue against what I believe to be this radically mistaken basic ontological claim of Ryles. Ryle continues by discussion of the phenomenological reduction and its termination in Husserl in the theory of a transcendental self, in the Kantian style. And in his emphatic rejection of this doctrine, I could not be in more agreement with Ryle. Turning then to intentionality, Ryle attacks Husserls view that every awareness has an intentional object in the sense of there being something that is the object. What Husserl should have held, according to Ryle, is that what we miscall the object or content of an act of consciousness is really the specific character or nature of that act, so that the intentionality of an act is not a relation between it and something else, but merely a property of it so specific as to be a differentia or in some cases an individualizing description of it (Ryle 1932, 79), a view that comes very close to the one I will defend later. But Ryle rejects the general theory anyway, on the ground that it originates from an erroneous assumption that

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consciousness of... is a true summum genus of which the several forms of mental functioning (including knowing) are true homogenous species (Ryle 1932, 79). Instead, Ryle says, invoking the authority of John Cook Wilson, the intentionality of mental acts must be defined in terms not of consciousness of... but of knowledge of... (Ryle 1932, 80). This seems to me to be a radically false view (Are the perceptions of insects, which are surely forms of awareness, to be defined in terms of knowledge?), but I cannot take the time to pursue that matter here. I do note, however, this crucial point for the understanding of The Concept of Mind: if indeed intentionality is to be understood in terms of knowledge and if, further, knowledge, either as knowledge-how or as knowledge-that, is, as one might reasonably assume, dispositional in nature, then one has, as it were, the reduction of awarenesses to dispositions, a view, as we shall see, that does indeed seem to be Ryles. Ryle closes this essay by insisting, against Husserl, that it is a mistake to suppose that we cannot make mistakes about our mental life and also wrong to believe that we cannot have knowledge of objects outside our minds. And, here again, I am in full agreement with Ryle. In his brief and generally favorable review the following year of Findlays book on Meinong, Ryle unsurprisingly sides with Russell against Meinong and invokes an idea that was becoming familiar and fundamental not only to Ryles thought but in analytic philosophy generally: that, to take Ryles example, a sentence may be grammatically about unicorns without being logically about themfor there are none to be described as having or lacking characteristics (Ryle 1933, 119). As for Meinong, with respect to the traditional doctrine of Termsthat every Term in language and thought denoteshe showed, though he did not see, that the whole structure was rotten (Ryle 1933, 120), again connecting the notion of intentionality with that of a theory of special objects that, while they do not exist in the ordinary sense, nevertheless have some kind of being. Ryles longer review of Farber s (1946) book in 1946 largely repeats material from the earlier papers and adds little for our grasp of Ryles understanding of phenomenology and intentionality. He again gives a brief history of the movement from Brentano through Meinong to Husserl, but he is more confident now in stating his positive views, especially about his developing method of linguistic analysis. Yet, and again without argument, he claims, falsely in my opinion, that property terms do not denote; in other words, that, ontologically speaking, properties do not exist for, he says, concept-words, formal or non-formal, are syncategorematic. It is, therefore, nonsense (as we felt in our bones) to speak of intuiting essences. The proprietary method claimed for Phenomenology is a sham (Ryle 1946, 221), again tying the theory of intentionality with what I see as a confusion on Ryles part between rejecting properties as such as existents with rejecting non-existent particulars as having properties. The 1962 paper, Phenomenology Versus The Concept of Mind, is a curious essay, obviously written to acquaint French readers with his own ideas. It begins with yet another summary of the history of the phenomenological movement, has a middle section entitled, in deference to Russell and Wittgenstein, The Cambridge Transformation of the Theory of Concepts on conceptual analysis in general, and concludes with a section in which, after summarizing the overall thesis and method of his book, he rehearses, elaborates, and occasionally modifies some of the analyses

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of certain particular mental concepts in The Concept of Mind. No direct confrontation is posed, and little direct argument is made for the presumed superiority of his method and of what I, though not he, would call his ontology of mind. The emphasis of the essay is, however, on the thesis that what he calls concepts are not denoting, as the phenomenologists (and many others) assumed, and so not to be understood through awareness of what they do denote but in another way, namely, by way of something called conceptual analysis, a method for which he credits Ludwig Wittgenstein as being the primary advocate and expositor: Some years after the Tractatus Wittgenstein was able, in practice if not in explicit doctrine, to disentangle the required notion of elucidation from the obsessive notion of objectdescription and so to rescue conceptual investigations from the menace of ineffability without re-assimilating them to inspections of entities (Ryle 1962, 188). Finally, for the sake of completeness and before turning explicitly to The Concept of Mind, I take note of the last of the seven pieces I mentioned, his Meinong lecture at Graz, published in 1972 (Ryle 1972). Again, it adds little to what he has already been said in earlier papers, but there is a useful passage in which he invokes Russells theory of descriptions as follows: The principle... was that wherever possibleand wherever anything was at stakethe contributions made to sentences by words and phrases must be shifted away from the Socrates-place [that is, the subject place] and into the predicate place. Instead of golden mountains do not exist; we should write there is not anything that 1) is mountainous and 2) is composed of gold (Ryle 1972, 12). But of course, for the extreme nominalist Ryle, putting something in the predicate place means that it too, like the golden mountain, denotes nothing at all. So not only is there no golden mountain, as we all agree, but there is no property of being mountainous or being gold either.

4 The Concept of Mind and Intentionality The Concept of Mind appears in 1949, a little more than 20 years after Ryle began publishing, and four of which articles had to do with phenomenology and intentionality. How, then, did he think of intentionality as a result of this encounter and why does it have no place, at least no explicit place, in the book? I think the answer to the latter question is contained in the answer to the former in that, in almost all contexts in which Ryle dealt with intentionality, it had, or appeared to have, features that were either implausible in themselves or that appeared that way to Ryle. To take the big three philosophers of that tradition and to put the point most succinctly but with little sacrifice of accuracy, if I am not mistaken: for Brentano, intentionality is conceived as relating mental acts only to immanent contents of the mind; for Meinong, intentionality is conceived as always having an existing object even if it sometimes is, in the ordinary sense, a non-existing object; and for Husserl intentionality is conceived as being constitutive of its objects. Representationalism, extreme realism, and idealism: none of these views is acceptable to Ryle; and I agree that he is right to reject them. But that is only a quick and facile answer to my question, and much more needs to be said. Let us proceed with a brief statement of Ryles ontology of mind (as I insist on calling it), this being the quote I earlier promised you in which behaviors themselves

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are considered as part of the mind: To talk of a persons 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 persons 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 (Ryle 1949, 199). Ryle, of course, in accord with his official methodology, puts the matter in terms of talk about minds, but it is perfectly clear that his view is that a mind is just dispositions and behaviors, nothing more. But what of the stream of consciousness that is now going on in each of us with its plentiful stock of awarenesses, at various levels, of our bodily states, our moods, our plans for the evening, and most of all (one hopes) the business at hand? Is that just either a behavior or a disposition to behavior? The plain absurdity of an affirmative answer is evident, is it not? Well, Ryle certainly did not think so, nor of course do various other kinds of materialists, although one could, in principle, be a materialist and give a negative answer. But I am going to assume, what I think is probably true, that a view that gives the stream of consciousness and the intentionality that constitutes it the place of privilege in the ontology of mind will treat it as something other than a mere disposition to behavior and indeed as something involving properties unknown to physics (even if it has a purely physical explanation). Thus, at one level, Ryles lack of attention to intentionality in the book is simply the result of his belief that, in the required sense, there is nothing going on behind the scenes as he would say, no ghost in the machine. For it is difficult to imagine what it would be for a disposition, in any literal sense, to be about something, even if what everyone would regard as dispositional mental states such as knowledge, belief, hope, and so on are often treated as intentional states. I say in any literal sense because, in my view, only conscious mental states, which make up the stream of consciousness, have intentionality in the basic ontological sense. The intentionality or aboutness of everything elselanguage, maps, artworks, and much more including dispositional mental statesis derivative and not there intrinsically in those things themselves but is instead ascribed, as we might say. Another way to say this is that without the intentionality of conscious mental states, there would be no aboutness of any kind in the world. Ryle, of course, does not deny that people imagine, perceive, feel, remember, and so on, that is, have those mental features (to speak neutrally) that, as I would say, make up the stream of consciousness. How, then, does he fit them into his barren ontology of mind where all that exists are dispositions and behavior? Ryles official discussion of consciousness comes on pp. 156163 in a section called Consciousness, the argument of which assumes, falsely but with some historical support, that the dualists notion of the inner life requires that a person be always and infallibly aware of everything that goes on there. But it is under the heading of mental occurrences that Ryle comes closest to accommodating the notion of intentionality or, at least, of conscious mental states; and a section with that title occurs on pages 135149 of the book. Reading those pages is almost painful, as Ryle struggles to explain how what he calls heed concepts most importantly are to be understood, at least officially, within his framework of disposition concepts and behavior concepts and nothing more. Understanding that what he says about heed concepts will apply to mental occurrences in general and that one may be in a heedful state

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of mind with respect to some behavior without actually engaging in that behavior, his own statement of his answer is this: 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 (Ryle 1949, 140). So, just what is a frame of mind? The official answer, however vague, is given earlier in the book as follows: ...frames of mind 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 (Ryle 1949, 83). So being in a frame of mind is, apparently, a temporary condition that is, in collecting occurrences, itself an occurrence, but not, as Ryle says, an extra occurrence. Is it then just a short-term disposition, short enough to be regarded as an episode? It is at this point that Ryle, in my opinion, throws up what we might call a postmodernist smokescreenpostmodernist in its rejection of dichotomies (you will see what I mean) and a smokescreen insofar as he relies on the linguistic mode of analysis in a way that obscures the ontology of the situation. (Of course, smokescreens are quite prominent in the postmodernist literature, too.) Let us hear from him at some length, before I explain. Referring again to similar behaviors done with and without heed, he says: Are these complex descriptions of outwardly similar occurrences to be construed as descriptions of conjunctions of similar overt with dissimilar covert occurrences, or are their differences to be construed in another way? Do they assert dual matters of fact, or singular matters of fact, with different inferencewarrants appended? Neither option seems acceptable, though the second provides an indispensable part of the answer. Like most dichotomies, the logicians dichotomy either categorical or hypothetical needs to be taken with a grain of salt. We have here to do with a class of statements the job of which is to straddle just this gulf. Save to those who are spellbound by dichotomies, there is nothing scandalous in the notion that a statement may be in some respects like statements of brute fact and in other respects like inference-licences... Correspondingly, to say that someone has done something, paying some heed to what he was doing, is not only to say that he was, e.g. ready for any of a variety of associated tasks and tests which might have cropped up but perhaps did not; it is also to say that he was ready for the task with which he actually coped.... The description of him as minding what he was doing is just as much an explanatory report of an actual occurrence as a conditional prediction of further occurrences (Ryle 1949, 140141). And although acts of remembering, imagining, perceiving, and so on are not ordinarily connected with actual behaviors, they too, I assume, are to be understood

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as frames of mind which are somehow both dispositions and not dispositions, to put it contentiously. Indeed, the real question is, although Ryle would not agree, not what are the complexities of the linguistic analysis of the descriptions in question but what are the details of the ontological analysis of the kinds of situations in question. Is it really, after all, just behavioral dispositions and behaviors? Or not? Ryle clearly does not want to give an unconditional answer either way, although his official view, as quoted earlier, commits him to the affirmative: the mind is nothing but certain dispositions and their behavioral realizations. Ontologically speaking, then, frames of mind can be nothing but short-term dispositions, however much, as we have seen, this makes Ryle squirm. But within the limits of his ontological commitments, even if not explicitly recognized, this is the best he can do, however inadequate the answer, in accommodating the fact of consciousness and the mental occurrences that make it up. The Concept of Mind contains dozens of analyses of mental concepts with most of which analyses no one would disagree or has disagreed. That many, maybe most, mentalistic notions are dispositional or partly dispositional may be taken as true, even obvious. The question has always been whether or not, even given his way of dealing with the matter, all mentalistic notions can plausibly be so treated. We have just seen, if I am not mistaken, that the answer is no. But what of Ryles arguments against any view that would recognize that the mind consists, at least in part and most importantly, of events that are not publicly observable and that have properties that are radically different from any known to physical science and can be known to us only by introspection, that is, the theory of dualism, at least a dualism of properties? There are two basic such arguments in his book: first, that no sense can be made of the presumed causal connection between the mind so conceived on the one hand and behavior on the other, the assumption of which connection Ryle (mistakenly, I believe) holds to have been the fundamental motive for dualism, that of explaining intelligent behavior; and, second, that no account can be given of how we know what other people are thinking, as we sometimes do. I cannot possibly fully reply to these complaints, before I return briefly to my own ontology of mind. But here in a nutshell is the answer. First, if one has, as I believe one should have, a Humean theory of causation according to which causal connection is but lawful connection (plus context, as I like to say, but context is nothing, ontologically speaking), then there is no problem in there being whatever lawful connections are necessary between mental states and bodily/behavioral states in order to secure the requisite causal connections. And if one also holds, as I do, that the basic lawful connections between the mental and the physical are all of the coexistence sort, that is, that parallelism is true, then there is also no problem in understanding how we are able to know what goes on in other persons minds, when we do. But these matters I cannot pursue.

5 Intentionality by Way of Natural Signs The idea of an absolutely presuppositionless, neutral starting place in philosophy is, I believe, a pipedream. My own starting place can be put like this: Take the world as it seems to us to be, unless there is good reason, in particular matters, to believe otherwise, as there sometimes is. The earth seems to be the biggest thing there is

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and motionless, but of course there is conclusive reason to believe that it has neither property. How do things seem with respect to the mind, before we start thinking about it philosophically? I think we all know the answer, at least in general terms, and I will put it in the first person, assuming its truth for other people as well: It very much seems to me that I have what is often called an inner life that consists of multiple and rapidly changing events that are describable to some considerable degree, that are not observable to anyone else, some or all of which are about other things, and which are as real and as fully there in the world as anything else; in other words, that I have that stream of consciousness with which we started. I have not said that we have infallible knowledge of this realm or anything about its role in our knowledge of the physical world, only that it seems to be there and to be something radically different from the physical world, even if, I again hasten to add, its existence and nature has a purely physical explanation. Why, then, would anyonephilosopher, scientist, or anyone elsewant to deny that there is this realm that, I claim, seems to each of us to exist? We took brief note of Ryles two major arguments, but surely the motive or reason that compels most philosophers and scientists who do deny it is the belief that to acknowledge the existence of such a realm is somehow contrary to the scientific worldview, possibly even having remnants of outworn religious notions of the soul. I have argued in detail elsewhere (Addis 1982, 1999, 123142) that a dualism of propertiesphysical properties that are given or otherwise known by the outer senses and mental properties that are known by introspectionis fully compatible with the scientific worldview, most importantly in allowing that everything that happens, including human behavior and mental occurrences themselves, has a purely physical explanation. The emergence of mind in general is, of course, to be understood through evolutionary biology, while the occurrence of any particular conscious state has its physical explanation in a state of the brain (or some other physical configuration). We have excellent reason to believe that consciousness can exist only in lawful conjunction with highly organized states of matter, but that does not compel us, nor should it, to hold that a conscious state just is a state of matter. Indeed, I submit, an uninhibited empiricism that includes introspection as a mode of awareness of certain of the worlds properties will take us to a dualism of properties; but we can be as mechanistic, deterministic, and atheistic as we like and still recognize the inner life in all its richness. And if someone wants to invoke Occams razor at this point, I reply only that we must never let ourselves be intimidated by this sometimes useful principle into denying the existence of something that is plainly there. William of Occam, in another context, wrote of intentional states as being or containing what he called natural signs; and I have adopted this language myself in characterizing what are more often called intentional properties. A natural sign, in contrast to a conventional one like a word, is one that in its intrinsic nature shows what it is a sign of. As we now all imagine that Mars has just exploded, we know, if not infallibly at least with indefeasibility-at-the-moment, both that we are imagining and not perceiving and that our imagining is of Mars having exploded and not of anything else. The best way to ground these facts ontologically, I maintain, is to analyze this, and any intentional state, as consisting of a particular (whether

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momentary or continuant, whether itself physical or not) exemplifying two monadic properties. One of them is the mode propertybeing an imagining, in our example and the other the intentional property or natural signbeing of Mars having exploded, also in our example. They must be monadic properties in order to be available to introspection with its resultant indefeasibility-at-the-moment that we all can experience. This, in brief, is what I have called the phenomenological argument for natural signs; but it has little to do with phenomenology, as we have earlier been discussing it. (In addition, there are a scientific argument, having to do with the lawful explanation of behavior, and a dialectical argument, having to do with the general explanation of any kind of aboutness in the world, for the existence of natural signs (Addis 1989, 4765, 1999, 5056).) Because, on this ontological analysis, to be aware of something is to exemplify and not to be aware of the property that is the natural sign (although, as in my Mars example, one can also be aware that one is exemplifying the natural sign), this theory is not a form of representationalism. Because the natural sign can be exemplified even though that of which it is (or would be, if you prefer) the natural sign does not exist, this theory is not a form of extreme realism by which the object of awareness always has some kind of existence. And because, of course, any object can exist without anyones having a natural sign of it, this theory is most emphatically not a form of idealism. This theory of intentionality, I submit, avoids not only all of the problems that Ryle had with intentionality but all of the problems with it. But I must leave this matter here and proceed to some final comments on Ryle.

6 Ryle the Aristotelian Near the beginning of this paper, I noted that I have described The Concept of Mind as being, except for De Anima, the most famous essay in philosophy of mind in Western philosophy. But it can almost be regarded as De Anima itself, in modern dress. For Ryle, I suggest, is profitably regarded as an Aristotelian in many important respects, mostly ontological, whether or not he would recognize himself as such. Although not in ontological contexts, Aristotle is invoked five times in Ryles book, always favorably and once as the only person before him to have recognized a certain distinction. But here are the ontological respects in which I see Ryle as an Aristotelian: First, like Aristotle, Ryle had a substance ontology and, more precisely in the case of humans, a one-substance ontology. A human being is fundamentally an organism consisting of a physical continuant and a mind. And of course his substance ontology is the ground, too, of his unargued-for anti-Humean theory of causation. Second, this mind is not another substance but, instead, what Aristotle called the form of the body, giving it a distinctly inferior ontological status to that of the body. And as the form of the body, it is ontologically, not merely causally, impossible for the mind to exist without the body. This, too, is obviously Ryles opinion. And, third, and playing a lesser but not insignificant role, is their mutual rejection of abstract entities. In this connection, we earlier noted Ryles radical nominalism, his claim that properties do not exist. (Aristotle, however, was not a radical nominalist; for him accidents exist but are not universals while genuine universalsthe forms of thingsexist only as informing matter.)

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But there is another feature, not directly ontological, that perhaps more than any other, ties Ryle to Aristotle, a respect in which, one might possibly say, Ryle never fully entered the world of modern science. (He was, we must always remember, at Oxford, not Cambridge.) Recognizing Sigmund Freud as psychologys one man of genius (Ryle 1949, 324), Ryle maintains that it is only in the realm of abnormal psychology that we need the resources of science in order to understand human behavior: Let the psychologist tell us why we are deceived; but we can tell ourselves and him why we are not deceived (Ryle 1949, 326). I want to suggest that this is a version of Aristotles distinction between natural and unnatural behavior with their concomitant different modes of explanation. In thinking that he is being modern in rejecting the ghost in the machine, Ryle is, in fact, relying on an ontology and a conception of explanation that science has long since rejected. Yet, despite what I regard as its fundamental inadequacies, The Concept of Mind will, as it should, secure recognition of Ryles permanent place in the philosophy of the twentieth century.

References
Addis, Laird. 1965. Ryles Ontology of Mind, Moore and Ryle: Two Ontologists (with Douglas Lewis), Martinus Nijhoff, 1101. Addis, Laird. 1982. Behaviorism and the Philosophy of the Act, Nos, 16, 3, 399420. Addis, Laird. 1989. Natural Signs: A Theory of Intentionality, Temple University Press. Addis, Laird. 1999. Of Mind and Music, Cornell University Press. Addis, Laird. 2003 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949): A Method and a Theory, in Gracia et al, 2003, 540545. Gracia, J. E., Reichberg, Gregory, and Schumacher, Bernard. 2003. eds. The Classics of Western Philosophy, Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. Lyons, William. 1980. Gilbert Ryle: An Introduction to his Philosophy, Humanities Press. Ryle, Gilbert. 1927. Review of Roman Ingardens Essentiale Fragen: Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Wesens, Mind, 36, 366370. Ryle, Gilbert. 1929. Review of Martin Heidegger s Sein und Zeit, Mind, 38, 355370. Ryle, Gilbert. 1932. Phenomenology, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. 11, 6883. Ryle, Gilbert. 1933. Review of J. N. Findlays Meinongs Theory of Objects, Oxford Magazine, 52, 118120. Ryle, Gilbert. 1946. Review of Marvin Farbers The Foundations of Phenomenology, Philosophy, 21, 263 269. Ryle, Gilbert. 1949. The Concept of Mind, Barnes and Noble. Ryle, Gilbert. 1962. Phenomenology Versus The Concept of Mind, Collected Papers, Vol. I, Hutchinson & Co., 179196. Ryle, Gilbert. 1972. Intentionality-Theory and the Nature of Thinking, Jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein: Beitrge zur Meinong-Forschung, edited by Rudolf Haller, Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 712.