Royal Institute of Philosophy

Courses of Action or the Uncatchableness of Mental Acts

Author(s): Gilbert Ryle
Source: Philosophy, Vol. 75, No. 293 (Jul., 2000), pp. 331-344
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3751936 .
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Courses of Action or the
Uncatchableness of Mental Acts

GILBERT RYLE*

The Jellyfish Phenomenon

Sometimes, and not always for philosophical or psychological ends,
we try to give precise descriptions of the ways in which we had been
mentally occupied while we were trying to think out the answer to a
question or were trying to decide what to do or how to do it. What
exactly did this pondering consist of? Just what were these acts or
processes of thinking like?
You will agree with me that such attempts are always total fail-
ures. The task feels like that of trying to extract a jellyfish out of the
* Note: This was a paper originally read at the annual conference of the
Experimental Analysis of Behaviour Group at Bangor in April 1974, and
not, as far as we know, previously published. Professor T. R. Miles explains
the circumstances:
'It seems to me that I owe your readers some explanation as to how this
script came to be in my possession.
In the early 1970s I and my colleagues invited Gilbert Ryle to present
a paper to members of the Psychology Department at Bangor. At the last
moment he was prevented from coming on account of his sister's illness.
So as not to let us down, however, he sent me the script of the paper
which he had planned to read. I myself read it in his place, doing my
best-however ineffectively-to capture the delivery style of Gilbert
himself.
The script then remained on my bookshelf for around twenty years-
until it occurred to me in the early 1990s that there was no firm evidence
that it had ever appeared as a published paper. At this point I began to
wonder whether I was in possession of a lost masterpiece! When I made
enquiries amongst my philosophical colleagues the responses were all
negative: no one knew of the paper's existence. Yet it was clearly vintage
Ryle, and, if it had not been already published, it was surely a shame that
it should be lost to the world.
With some hesitation I wrote to the editor of Philosophy, explaining
the situation and asking if he would be interested in publication. On his
advice I carried out various further pieces of detective work so as to
enable all of us to be sure that the paper had, indeed, not previously
appeared in print. No positive evidence has emerged, with the result that
your editor and I are confident that the paper is now appearing for the
first time.'

Philosophy 75 2000 331

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

332
 Courses of Action or the Uncatchableness of Mental Acts

no details at all about the composition, the career or the lineaments

of this great enjoyment. Why not?
One over-familiar explanation for our jellyfish-phenomenon is
this: its vogue dates from relatively recent theories of the Subcons-
cious and the Unconscious Mind. Some 'mental' things, unlike
'external' or 'physical' things and happenings, systematically baffle
our powers of description because they are hidden deep down inside
the mind of their owner, their author or their victim. We already
possess (so it is supposed), or anyhow can construct, the requisite
descriptive-vocabulary and the requisite syntax in which to report
the qualities, careers etc., of these 'mental acts', etc., once they are
observed, but (the would-be Freudian story goes), they evade the
required observation by lurking inside a metaphorical grotto or
cellar. This answer is worthless, and not just for verification reasons.
It explains away a non-accidental indescribability by fetching in a
contingent inaccessibility, as if it just happens by bad luck that I-I,
of all people!-am so trap-doored off from all or some of my own
internal ruminatings, my own internal enjoyments of things, and my
own internal intentions to do things that I cannot discern what they
are like or, therefore, say what they are like. It is because many or
most of my introspections are blinkered that I have to stammer. Yet
novelists, who freely invent their characters' inner lives, seem to
catch nothing more than we catch. Notice, en passant, how this story
of our introspections being blinkered differs from the Descartes,
Locke, Brentano, Mill story of introspection being the peculiar
source of absolute indubitabilities.
So far from this catacomb myth giving the explanation of the
jellyfish-phenomenon, it is, rather, the jellyfish-phenomenon that
partly explains the myth. It is the fact that we falter and stammer
when trying to chronicle and describe our own mental acts, states
and processes that has driven theorists, including ourselves, to take
seriously the hypothesis of our mental acts and processes as lurking
even from ourselves deep down inside (metaphorical) grottos or
oubliettes. It is because the knitting-needle caught no fish that we
nominated a transparent and submerged jellyfish to be its evasive
quarry. But what if it was our idea of act-description or process-
chronicling that was the source of the trouble?
To illustrate this suggestion: (a) A camera-proud boy at the Zoo
snaps an eagle, a snake, and an octopus. He then follows a finger-
post marked 'Mammal'; but though he photographs successfully a
lion, a wolf and an otter, etc., he looks in vain for a mammal to
photograph. He asks: 'Are mammals microscopic or camera-shy
creatures? Or else, are they unphotographable in the ways in which
breezes, smells and ghosts are?' He has to learn that a snapshot of a

333
Gilbert Ryle

lion, a wolf or an otter is a snapshot of a mammal. Mammals are not

creatures of an extra species, with cages, keepers, looks and voices of
their own; they are the genus of which lions, otters, etc., belong to
the species. What cannot indeed be captured by the camera, or be
put in a cage of its own, because like Lockes' Abstract Triangle, it
cannot exist, is a mammal that is neither a lion, nor a wolf, nor an
otter, etc. It was the negatively disjunctive, or neither-nor creature
unsuspiciously required by the boy for his camera that had made the
trouble. (b) The boy now sees 'Danger' notices on the bars of the
lions' cage, above the snake-pit, at the foot of an electric pylon, in
front of a road excavation, outside a garage-exit, at the edge of a
reservoir. Again he finds no creature to give photographable sub-
stance to these signs. He wonders: 'Is my camera defective? Or are
dangers nocturnal creatures like bats, or burrowing creatures like
moles?' This time he has to learn a more complex lesson. Dangers
are not creatures or things or even happenings of any species or even
of any genus. There are no cages, keepers or feeding times for them.
They are situations-in-which-people-are-likely-to-undergo-harm-
of-one-sort-or-another, of being mangled, drowned, poisoned, elec-
trocuted, run over etc. The explicit statement of what the danger is
would have to incorporate such expressions as 'if', 'unless', 'either-
or', 'whenever', 'anyone', 'not', 'may', 'cannot', and of course,
'likely', 'death', and 'damage', none of which could occur in the
statement of what a particular animal looks and sounds like, or is
now doing, etc. There is no such thing as a description, or a photo-
graph advertising what a particular danger looks like or sounds like,
or is now doing, etc. The term 'danger' is semantically too sophisti-
cated or of too High an Order to permit it to occupy sentence-vacan-
cies that welcome specific terms like 'lion', or even generic terms like
'mammal' and 'damage'. A person who is in a risk-situation can of
course be tape-recorded or photographed either suffering or not
suffering the threatened harm. But the likelihood of this harm nei-
ther evades nor is captured by the camera; it is neither a visible nor
an occult thing; neither a ground level nor a subterranean thing; it is
neither a describable nor an indescribable thing, since it is not a
thing. Yet there is nothing mysterious or shrouded about, say, the
danger of one's being clawed by a lioness, if one gets close to the
bars of her cage, or about its differences from that of being electro-
cuted by the power-wires, if one climbs the pylon. The unpho-
tographability of a danger is not like that of a ghost, but more like
that of a climate, a regime, a difficulty, an academic qualification or
a rate of interest.
I am now going to show, in partial analogy, that our powers of
thought-description can be baffled by their would-be objects being,

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 Courses of Action or the Uncatchableness of Mental Acts

like dangers, semantically of too High an Order for witness-box

'What are they like?' questions to be asked about them, or for snap-
shots or dictaphone records of them to be taken. I aim thereby to
open one gap, wide enough for the notion of Thinking, between our
so-called 'outer' and our so-called 'inner' lives, between reduction-
ism and duplicationism about 'mental acts' and 'mental processes'.

Chain-undertakings or Courses of Action

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

335
Gilbert Ryle

puppy-training project. I can, for example, whistle to an already

trained dog, or (vainly) to a cat. The whistling that is subordinated
to a puppy-training programme need not differ audibly, but it does
differ tactically from that which is not so subordinated. These train-
ing-exercises, which go on for weeks, do not, of course, fill up the
entire days and nights of the trainers; they are sustained chains of
intermittent actions, not continuous actions. Training a child, a
beginner at golf, or a student is similar in the respects which matter
here. So is self-training, a cardinal thing to which I shall be return-
ing. (b) The exploration of a terrain is another obvious example of a
chain-undertaking. If all goes well, the exploration is the outcome of
countless particular subordinate acts on the part, maybe, of several
co-operating, competing or independent explorers-acts of trudg-
ing, scaling, scanning, photographing, compass-consulting, raft-
floating, rock-chipping, temperature-measuring, theodolite-reading
and note-taking. Not one of these variegated, here-and-now infra-
actions by doing which we explore is itself an exploration. The
native porter too may glance up at the sun and drop a twig into the
river, but not, like his employers, in order, by so doing to re-fix his
bearings or in order to determine the direction of the current.
Exploring is conducting ten thousand variegated infra-acts with one
governing and complex supra-policy or Higher Order purpose. A
snap-shot cannot, but a cinematograph-film might show an explorer
exploring. The request 'Show me a particular act of exploration'
would be absurd. So would 'He suddenly explored the valley'.
Other obvious chain-undertakings are conducted by the student
studying the German language; the invalid adhering to a diet; the
author writing a book or article; the two children playing a game of
spillikins against one another; the settler and his family building
their new home and making their new wheat-farm; the housewife
giving her house its annual spring-cleaning; all are engaged in long-
term or short-term chain-undertakings, which are prosecuted by
performing appropriate Lower-Order or infra-actions in tactical
subordination to some Higher-Order or supra-project, and there-
fore, quite often, with some controlling method, time-schedule, etc.
For each of the agents there is some action-programme, which may
or may not be an actually worded programme, by which he abides,
or else from which he backslides or deviates. The docile invalid
abides by his diet by, inter alia, refusing lobster each time it is
offered to him. Any of these infra-actions by itself, e.g., this spade-
thrust, that sentence-dictation, those swallowings of lightly boiled
eggs and those caviare-avoidings, could have been executed by a
person with a different, or with no Higher Order purpose. The
German radio-announcer, the language-student and his parrot may

336
 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;

337
Gilbert Ryle

(2) nor by executing any random procession of such infra-actions;

(3) nor, of course, by executing any supposed supra-action; but
(4) only by regularly or duly (etc.) conducting his appropriate infra-
actions in intentional subordination to the programme. It follows
that for our mystified Behaviourist there need be nothing here-and-
now visible, or audible to distinguish what our student practising a
bit of German pronunciation is doing from what his parrot and the
German announcer are also doing at the same moment in pronounc-
ing aloud the cacophonous dissyllable 'schrecklich'.
Our Behaviourist's mystification is gratuitous. After all, in
methodically studying a stretch of our student's phonetic behaviour,
he is himself engaged in a chain-undertaking of his own, namely, he
is conducting an organized stretch of infra-acts of watching, listen-
ing, tape-recording, card-punching, note-taking, etc. The student is
methodically rehearsing a bit of German pronunciation; he cannot
do this suddenly. Our Behaviourist is equally methodically observ-
ing this methodical rehearsal; and he cannot do this suddenly either.
A worded programme of his own research-project would in its turn
have to embody such negatives, conjunctions, quantifiers, etc., as
'not', 'when', 'unless', 'any', 'at the same time as', 'most', either ...
or', 'in order not to', etc. These subordinate-clause-introducers
would exhibit the tactical subordinations of his own infra-acts to his
own supra-undertaking. He may be a bit worried by the Cartesian
menaces of his own question to the student, 'How, if at all, do your
alleged 'purposive' practisings of the dissyllable 'schrecklich' differ,
since they do not audibly, from merely mechanical repetitions of it?'
He should be no less worried-or else no more-by the Cartesian
menaces of our question to him, 'How do your own allegedly 'scien-
tific' tapings of the student's phonemes differ, if they do differ, from
mere reflex tapings of them?' Like dieting, neither practising nor
rehearsing is an action; like dieting, practising and researching are
purposive Higher Order chain-undertakings under which various
actions proper are tactically conducted.
Our researcher might, at this point, argue from the tensing of,
e.g., 'He was dieting intermittently last month', or 'I am soon going
to stop dieting', i.e., from the grammatical fact that the verb to 'diet'
is an active verb, used in tense-specific ways, to the conclusion, that
dieting is not, (like knowing and possessing), a Hexis, but rather
something actual and 'on-going'. If so, he would be quite right. But
he might go on to argue that therefore dieting is an action or an
activity, and then he would be quite wrong. For, as we now know,
there is at least one other option; it might be a course of action-of
course, that is just what it is. This error in logical grammar might
now tempt him into philosophical trouble of a very familiar kind.

338
 Courses of Action or the Uncatchableness of Mental Acts

He sees at once that the invalid's imputed unique action of dieting

cannot be identified with his today's breakfast-consumption of a
lightly boiled egg, since yesterday, being on the same diet, he con-
sumed a poached egg. Moreover, his wife, who is not dieting, also ate
a lightly boiled egg today. But nor can his supposed unique action of
dieting be identified with this evening's fish-eating, for similar rea-
sons. Consequently, his supposed unique action of dieting-which,
qua a particular action, cannot be subject to tense-general, disjunc-
tive, negative, conditional, etc., qualifications-will have to be a par-
ticular something that the invalid does other than eating either eggs
or toast or fish, etc. His required separate and unique action of
dieting thus evaporates into an uncatchable, non-bodily intake of
immaterial fare-although the typed prescription up there on his
mantelpiece mentions no such 'private' feedings on 'mental' vict-
uals; and although his wife has no metaphysical difficulties in dis-
cerning whether or not the invalid is still adhering to his regimen.
Rather like the camera-proud boy who looked in vain for a mammal
to photograph, so our grammar-hobbled researcher looks in vain for
a particular gastronomic act of just dieting.
Similarly, since the student's supposedly unique action of study-
ing the German language cannot be equated with this particular
piece of syllable-pronunciation, with that momentary operation of
dictionary-consulting, or with any of those temporary bits of listen-
ing to German radio-talks, therefore it has to be identified instead
with some particular but jellyfishy, 'internal' act or process in which
there is no using of tongue, pen, eye or ear, and in which, therefore,
no German words are pronounced, read, written down or listened
to-which is absurd. Our imaginary researcher had been unmindful
of the (logico-grammatical) fact that the doctor's typed dietary-pre-
scription was, in fact or in effect, laced with such syntactical expres-
sions as 'whenever', 'never', 'sometimes', 'regularly', 'if', 'unless',
'only', 'not on the same occasion as ...', 'any', 'either ... or', etc.,
none of which could enter into the description of what the invalid
might be 'caught', whether by himself or by his wife, in the act of
doing either inwardly or outwardly, at a particular moment. The
category-difference of, say, the particular action of eating a piece of
toast from the Higher Order course of action of dieting was mis-
construed as the supposed merely 'sortal' difference of doing a par-
ticular overt or bodily thing from doing a particular crypto or
'mental' thing. But our imaginary researcher could be quickly
brought to his grammatical senses by himself receiving from his
own doctor the flat injunction 'Diet'. For he would have to ask 'By
eating and drinking which victuals and fluids, and by avoiding which
other ones, in what amounts, at what times of the day, how often in

339
Gilbert Ryle

the day, prepared in what manners, consumed in what combinations,

over how long a period, etc.?' Asking such questions is asking for the
controlling programme of a course of gastronomic actions and
abstentions; whereas the command 'Eat that piece of toast' is
obeyable or disobeyable as it stands, just by the eating or by the not
eating of that piece of toast. For this command carries no 'any',
'whenever', unless', 'not with ...', or 'frequently', etc. It has no sub-
ordinate clauses.
Of course, in real life no one would thus misconstrue the active
verb to 'diet' as signifying a jellyfish action, if only for the simple
but not basic, reason that dieting is notoriously too long-term an
affair to be counted as one action. To the question 'What was he
doing when you saw him over the garden-wall?' the answer 'He was
in the act of dieting' would be as obviously a jocosity as 'He was in
the act of wheat-growing, or in the act of mastering the pronuncia-
tion of German'. But it would not be so obvious a jocosity to give to
the question. 'What was he doing when you saw him in the railway-
station?' the reply 'He was waiting for the mid-day London train'.
Yet waiting, too, whether briefly or protractedly, is a chain-under-
taking, and it is one into the worded programme of which, among
other syntactical expressions, the word 'not' would occur in a spe-
cially dominant position. For to wait for a train is (nearly enough)
intentionally-not-to-move-far-from-where-the-wanted-train-is-
due-to-come-in-at-any-moment-before-it-comes-in. Why cannot
one suddenly wait for a train? If seven men are all on the platform
waiting for the train, the positive answer to the question 'What was
So and So in the act of doing when you saw him there?' would be
answered, not by '... not-moving-far-from-the-train's-arrival-
place', but by 'pacing to and fro', 'smoking his pipe', 'chatting to the
station-master', 'gazing up the railway track', or 'trying to do the
crossword puzzle without a pencil'. Between the seven or seventy
such infra-things that the seven train-awaiting travellers were wit-
nessed in the act of doing there need have been no visible, audible or
introspective similarities. The significant, though unphotograph-
able and unintrospectable similarity was their common Supra-
policy, namely, their all alike resolutely not doing any of the various
things that would remove them far from the train's arrival-platform.
Their purposely not going for a country walk, say, is not only not
itself a piece of country-walking or, of course, one of town-walking,
but it is not an action of any alternative sort either, e.g., of a jelly-
fishy sort. We have not been told what someone is doing, not even
what he is doing 'internally', when we have been told what he is
abstaining from doing. Waiting for a train, like keeping a secret or
postponing writing a letter, is not an action. It is not even a negative

340
 Courses of Action or the Uncatchableness of Mental Acts

action. (An action, cannot, any more than a collision or a comet, be

negative.) Rather it is a courseof action or a chain-undertakingwith a
negative supra-purpose tactically governing its infra-actions and
inactions.

Application

I want, in the end, to achieve an impartially anti-Dualist and anti-

Reductionist categorial re-settlement of at least some 'mental acts'
and 'mental processes', including, especially, the cogitations of Le
Penseur. I am hoping to have found, in this notion of courses of
action, a hitherto unsponsored categorial hostel in which the logical
grammarian may, at once unmysteriously and unreductively, at once
unprivately and unpublicly house the notion of pondering. In this
hostel it will be under the same roof as (though on a higher and
airier floor than) such notions as dieting, waiting, wheat-growing,
exploring, spring-cleaning,studying,puppy-training, etc.

Experiments and Practising

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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Experiments and rehearsals are educatively intended, i.e., under-

taken with the purpose of self-tuition. Now, neither experimenting
nor practising is an action. The commands 'experiment' and 'prac-
tise', like the commands 'begin', 'continue' and 'obey', 'repeat', can
be neither obeyed nor disobeyed unless explicitly or implicitly com-
pleted by, e.g., verbs specifying the concrete infra-actions by doing
which one would be making the experiment or giving oneself the
practice. Like puppy-training, practising, i.e., self-training, is not
one or several infra-actions but a tactical or Higher Order conduct of
them. Like exploring, experimenting is taking new infra-steps in
order to find out by taking them what happens when ..., or what
exists where ...; etc. It is not those steps; it is the exploratory con-
duct of them. If I experimentally turn a tap, I do not do two things.
I experiment by turning on the tap; yet my experiment may be a fail-
ure, though I succeed in turning the tap or vice versa. The suc-
cess/failure conditions of the experiments are different from those
of the tap turning. Similarly, making a practice golf-stroke is not
making two muscular movements. I practise the stroke by just e.g.
putting. But still the success/failure conditions of giving myself this
practice are different from those of making this putt. I may hole out
from a distance with this practice putt and yet not be improved in
my putting by this and the other practice-putts that I have taken
today. And vice versa.
We can now apply these truisms about experimentation and self-
drilling directly to the notion of thinking. Le Penseur, in trying to
solve a problem, is certainly to be described, with hardly a tinge of
metaphor, as exploring or researching. He is, therefore, engaged in a
Supra-undertaking, and one to which are tactically subordinated
various infra-actions, steps or moves to which his thinking does not
reduce. More specifically, his thinking will have at least our two fea-
tures (1) of tentativeness, having a shot of experimentation; and (2)
of practice or self-drill. He will be trying out new hypotheses, new
wordings, new arguments, new illustrations, etc. (and probably dis-
carding as useless or wrong most of these tentatively made moves).
He will also be repeatedly going over things which he has not yet
discarded, partly in order to prepare himself for the future exploita-
tion, re-examination, emendation or publication of them.
To compare a relatively great thing with a relatively small thing:
The guest of honour is today occupied off and on in composing his
after-dinner speech for tomorrow's banquet. His oration is, we may
suppose, not to be instructive, but amusing, sentimental, valedictory
and reminiscent. His thinking is not the thinking out of a theoretical
problem, but the thinking up of an audience-pleasing sequence of
phrases, sentence, anecdotes, sentiments, etc. As his speech is to be

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fresh, he has today to improvise or invent, i.e., to think up new

things to say, and new ways of saying them. He is having, in his head
or on paper, to try out candidate-phrases, candidate-sentences,
anecdotes, witticisms, etc.; and he is doing a good deal of tentative
cancelling, tentative expanding, tentative compressing, tentative
paraphrasing, tentative rearranging, and so on. Moreover, since he is
to deliver his speech viva voce, he must today try to make himself, if
not word-perfect, at least decently fluent; so he must do a good deal
of piecemeal path-rolling, i.e. rehearsing, in his head, on paper or
aloud. He has quite a lot of 'homework' to do, partly constructing,
cancelling and correcting, partly consolidating; or partly trying new
things out and partly practising some of these new things.
It now stands out that Le Penseur, (Newton, perhaps, or Pythago-
ras or Milton or you or Plato), must be partly occupied in his own
analogous tasks of essaying, cancelling, correcting and consolidat-
ing. An hypothesis, a proof, an epic, a table-turning rebuttal-these
are not, indeed, audience-pleasing orations; but no less than such
orations do they need to be thought up and then thought over. Here,
too, the thinking is a Higher Order undertaking, or, rather, a nexus
of such undertakings, that govern but do not reduce to their subor-
dinate, momentary steps and candidate-steps.

Conclusion

We now know one unmysterious reason why our attempts, whether

introspective or behavioural, to catch' oneself or another thinker
performing the mental acts of which, while still grammatically hob-
bled, we expected Thought to consist is the same as the reason why
we would equally vainly try to catch oneself or someone else in the
here-and-now act of puppy-training, house-building, exploring,
language-studying, train-awaiting, spring-cleaning, constituency-
nursing, oration-composing or wheat-growing. Indeed, it is pretty
obvious that our ponderings have something important in common
with each one of these (mundane) Higher Order undertakings. Our
mental work has a policy, however nebulous, behind it and a disci-
pline, however mild, in it-else it is not deliberating. One thing that
pondering could not be is a mere procession of separate moves or
acts.
I remember how when I was a young man I was troubled-as I
daresay you have been troubled-by the seemingly contemptible
intermittentness or fleetingness of my thinkings. I fancied that real
thinkers could go on wrestling with an issue continuously, perhaps
for hours on end, without pauses, or switches of attention. They, I

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Gilbert Ryle

supposed, stuck to their intellectual tasks like plough horses moving

unremittingly up and down their furrows. Yet there was I, meaning
well, but just drifting, flitting, alighting, flapping, sipping, resting
and taking wing again-a mere butterfly, instead of a plough horse.
Of course, I did not then realize that the task of excogitating some-
thing is, like angling, a chain-undertaking, in which a considerable
sporadicness or intermittency of the infra-acts or infra-moves is per-
fectly compatible with the prosecution of the total undertaking
being cumulative, progressive and even sometimes successful. The
housewife spring-cleaning her house works but with all manner of
pauses, interruptions, telephonings, re-reading letters before throw-
ing them away, watering the flowers, chatting to her neighbours,
looking out of the window, and so on. Yet by the end of the day her
house has been properly spring-cleaned. The wheat-farmer can take
his seaside holiday in February without postponing or diminishing
his September harvest.
Puppy training has to be sporadic, intermittent and repetitive
thing; yet it may result in a well-trained sheep-dog within a few
weeks or months. There is a lot of sheer waiting in angling, and in
ponderings; but the angler and thinker do not have to make excuses
for these spells of calculated un-business.*

* Published with the permission of the Ryle Collection, Linacre

College, Oxford.

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