Ryle, Gilbert (1900-1976)

Thinking and Self-Teaching

1971, 1979

"Thinking is trying to better one's instructions; it is trying out promissory tracks which will exist, if they ever do exist, only after one has stumbled exploringly over ground where they are not."

Cartesians love to depict the activity of the thinker as consisting of supremely immaterial ingredients, such impalpable ingredients as ideas, intuitions, insights, etc. In fact, the crude stuff of thinking has to consist of the perfectly ordinary vehicles of everyday interpersonal lesson-communication, though here employed not in its normal didactic task, but in the parasitic of higher-order task of query-intuition. It does not matter whether Le Penseur actually draws his diagrams on paper, or visualizes them as so drawn; and it does not matter whether in his quasi-posing his on appro Socratic questions to himself he speaks these aloud, mutters them under his breath, or only As-If mutters them on his mind's tongue. What matters is what he is trying to do, and is sometimes succeeding in doing, by thus overtly or covertly plying himself with these candidate-lesson-vehicles, for example, that he is trying to find, and is sometimes finding, the proofs of theorems. As A's well-charted teaching can occasionally dispel B's ignorance, so my uncharted thinking can occasionally dispel my own ignorance. Thinking is trying to better one's instructions; it is trying out promissory tracks which will exist, if they ever do exist, only after one has stumbled exploringly over ground where they are not.
(121)

Motion::Stumbling Geography::Tracks

Reading

Text from "Thinking and Self-Teaching." 58:3 (1972): 111-122. <Link>

See also "Thinking and Self-Teaching," Journal of Philosophy of Education 5:2 (July, 1971): 216-228.

Collected in Ryle's On Thinking (Blackwell, 1979).

04/17/2014