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Sensation and Synecdoche

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Gareth B. Matthews
Gareth B. Matthews*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts
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Extract

Sometimes in THE CONCEPT OF MIND Gilbert Ryle describes what he is up to in a way which is quite unhelpful. The following passage will serve as an example of what I mean:

To 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, (p. 199)

I call this passage unhelpful because it commits the fallacy of false alternatives. It would have us think that talk of a person's mind is either (1) talk of a special non-physical repository or else (2) talk of a person's abilities, liabilities, inclinations, etc.—but not both. Yet surely talk of the mind as a non-physical repository might be one way of talking about a person's abilities, liabilities, inclinations, etc.

Perhaps what Ryle should have said is that to speak of the mind as a non-physical repository that houses special, mental objects is a figurative way of putting what could be reported literally in talk of a person’s abilities, liabilities, inclinations, etc. Certainly that is a point Ryle tries to make in his book. Indeed it is a major burden of THE CONCEPT OF MIND to identify and analyze those figures of speech, or tropes, in which mental activities and capacities are commonly reported and described. The idea seems to be that we are misled philosophically by our failure to recognize the tropological character of what we commonly say about the mind and by our naivete as to how the tropes work.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , September 1972 , pp. 105 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1972

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References

1 London: Hutchinson, 1949.

2 For further discussion of this and related points, see my “Dualism and Solecism,” Philosophical Review. LXXX (1971), pp. 85-95.

The passage from Ryle at the beginning of this paper goes on, “Indeed, it makes no sense to speak as if there could be two or eleven worlds.” But of course it does make sense. Perhaps Ryle would have done better to argue that it is only in a figurative sense that one can speak of a “mental world.” Or, to bring the point even closer into line with Chapter 1 of The Concept of Mind, one could say that the ‘is’ of ‘There is a physical world and a mental world’ is syllepsistic.

3 Starting with Aristotle (cf. Rhetoric 1406b20f., 1410b17f.).

4 But Ryle ignores the possibility of iterated likeness operators. Unfortunately for his immediate point, ‘x does something like seeing the horseshoe’ entails ‘x does something like seeing something like the horseshoe’—or so I argue in “Mental Copies,” Philosophical Review, LXXVIII (1969), pp. 53-73. Thus (if I am right) the philosopher bent on insisting that imagination involves the perception of mental copies has another inning left.

5 There are shades of reconstructionism in Ryle’s earlier papers. To establish how much substance goes with the shades would be the project of another paper.

6 The remedy-to-malady transfer is a species of cause-to-effect transfer where the relevant effect is relief or cure. (Compare: “an Excedrin headache”—a headache that Excedrin, and perhaps only Excedrin, will cure.)

7 The examples I offer here are “dead” tropes, rather than live ones; that is, they are well enough established to merit an entry in a dictionary. This fact may make them belletristically objectionable, but it hardly lessens their interest for philosophical tropology. It is, for example, no part of Ryle’s claim that in speaking of having a sensation “in my chest” I am using a live figure of speech. Quite to the contrary, Ryle’s notion is that the established way of ascribing location to a bodily sensation is by the use of synecdoche.

8 Is one then saying only that it is as if the cause were there? But if that is right, then one could be said (without qualification) to have a pain in the amputated foot.

9 We are inclined to make too much of the disanalogy between ‘I have pain in my neck’ and ‘I have a pencil in my desk.’ Certainly ‘I have a pain in my desk’ makes no clear sense. But then neither does ‘I have an infection in my desk’ or ‘John’s toy has a defect in my desk.’ The ways in which one thing may be said to be in another are much more various than the mind-body problem would have us suppose.

10 On this and related points see Coburn, Robert C. “Pains and Space,” Journal of Philosophy, LXIII (1966), pp. 381-96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 One might suppose that the intransitive verb, ‘to shoot.’ meaning to move swiftly or dart, as in ‘Those little insects shoot about on the surface of the water.’ is already a synecdoche from the transitive verb to shoot.’ I am ignoring this possible complication.

12 Reprinted in Wood, Oscar P. and Pitcher, George Ryle: A Collection of Critical Essays. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970),p. 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.