Abstracts Accepted

The Concept of Thinking: A Reappraisal of Ryle’s Work

In The Concept of Mind, Ryle’s official position seems to be that mental acts cannot be intrinsically private. However, some portions of The Concept of Mind as well as Ryle’s later work on thinking present a different picture. In a paper entitled ‘Thinking’, Ryle points out that most acts of thinking are goal-directed. An act of thinking ideally terminates in a thought, which (as Ryle suggests in the chapter ‘The Intellect’ of The Concept of Mind) is a state of being prepared for a verbal or non-verbal performance. Thinking is characterized by what Ryle calls intention-parasitism; for it is, insofar as the underlying motive is concerned, parasitic on the final performance which shall take place later. In a symposium on ‘Thinking and Language’, Ryle shows that every act of thinking, owing to its intention-parasitism, , has to be described in a tactical idiom, with reference to the final performance for which it was intended. However, in the same paper, Ryle considers a case where a person fails to narrate what he is thinking. Presumably, in that instance, the act of thinking does not culminate in a thought which could be translated into verbal or any other kind of performance. Such an act of thinking would turn out to be tactically insignificant, and hence non-narratable: an inevitable privacy is thrust upon it. Can such privacy be accommodated into the theoretical framework of The Concept of Mind?
In this paper, I seek to reevaluate Ryle’s work in the light of this question.
 
Key words: Thinking; Thought; Intention-parasitism; Narrative; Privacy
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*Department of Philosophy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.
Email: nilanj.das@gmail.com

Final Accepted MBC 14-15 Jan 2010