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Abstractions

Gilbert Ryle

Dialogue / Volume 1 / Issue 01 / June 1962, pp 5 - 16

DOI: 10.1017/S0012217300040579, Published online: 09 June 2010

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Gilbert Ryle (1962). Abstractions. Dialogue, 1, pp 5-16 doi:10.1017/
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 ABSTRACTIONS

S T. AUGUSTINE said "When you do not ask me what

Time is, I know perfectly well; but when you do ask me,
I cannot think what to say." What, then, was it that he knew
perfectly well, and what was it that he did not know ? Obviously
he knew perfectly well such things as these, that what happened
yesterday is more recent than what happened a month ago;
that a traveller who walks four miles in an hour, goes twice as
fast as a traveller who takes two hours over the same journey.
He knew how to say things and how to understand things said
to him which specified dates, durations and times of day; epochs,
seasons and moments. He knew when it was midday and he
could use the calendar. He could cope efficiently and easily
with concrete chronological and chronometrical tasks. He could
use and understand tensed verbs. What he could not do is to
give any reply at all to such abstract questions as these: what is
it that there is twice as much of in a fortnight as in a week ? Why
could Time, unlike a battle, never have started, and why can
Time, unlike a concert, never come to a stop? Does Time flow
on at an uniform or an irregular speed, and in either case, is its
speed measured in a second sort of Time ? In short, what is Time
— is it a Thing or a Process or a Relation ? Is it a sort of cosmic
river, only one without any tangible water between its non-
existing banks ? One which flows out of no spring and pours out
into no ocean?
We might say that Augustine, like anyone else, could answer
concrete factual questions about times; but that, like everyone
else, he could not answer abstract questions about the concept
of Time. But what is this difference between concrete or factual
questions and abstract or conceptual questions?
Take another example. Hume, like any other sensible person,
knew perfectly well how to distinguish between one occasion when
he met a friend by appointment and another occasion when he
met a friend by chance; or between one game of cards when the
dealer dealt himself all the aces by trickery, and another when
 GILBERT RYLE

the dealer dealt himself all the aces by sheer luck. None the less,
when Hume, as a philosopher, asks himself What is Chance?
he actually gives an answer which we can swiftly prove to be
wrong. He says that since whatever comes about is due to some
cause, and since chance is not a cause, therefore, to say that
something, like a meeting between friends, has come about by
chance can only mean that it has come about from some cause
of which we are ignorant. But this answer must be wrong, for
though we are ignorant of the cause of cancer, we should never
say that cancer comes about by chance. The phrase "by chance"
cannot therefore be equivalent to the phrase "from an unknown
cause". Hume tried but failed to answer his abstract question
about the concept of chance, though in everyday life he knew
perfectly well how to distinguish fortuitous coincidence from non-
fortuitous conjunctions of affairs. We are tempted to say that he
did not know the meaning of the abstract noun "Chance",
despite the fact that he knew perfectly well the meaning of the
adverbial phrase "by chance". Yet how could he possibly know
the one without knowing the other?
To change the example once more, you yourselves would find
it difficult to tell me what Knowledge is and how it differs from
True Belief, yet your difficulty, whatever it is, does not continue
to embarrass you when asked such concrete questions as these:—
Do you still know the date of the Battle of Waterloo ? At what
age did you learn or come to know Pythagoras' Theorem?
Why are memorised gibberish syllables easier to forget, i.e. cease
to know, than significant sentences, and sentences in prose easier
to forget than sentences in verse?
Notice that in this case, while my abstract epistemological
question employed the abstract noun "knowledge", in my
concrete questions this abstract noun did not occur, but only the
active verbs "know", "learn" and "forget". So we are tempted
to say that we do not know the meaning of the abstract noun,
though we are perfectly at home with the meanings of the active
verbs. Yet this cannot be right, for if a person understands per-
fectly well the active verbs "know", "learn" and "forget" he
knows all that he needs in order to understand the abstract noun
"knowledge". If a child has learned what it is for someone to
 ABSTRACTIONS

conquer or protect someone else, he needs no further lessons in

order to understand the abstract nouns "conquest" and "protec-
tion".
Similarly with adjectives. A person who is quite familiar with
the idea of things being probable or improbable is fully equipped
to understand the abstract noun "probability" — yet is not
thereby equipped to answer the abstract, conceptual question
"What is probability?" or "Is probability a property of happenings,
though only some future ones, or is it a property of some of our
thoughts about happenings?" Questions like those that perplexed
Augustine and defeated Hume, namely the abstract questions
about Time and Chance, can be classified as conceptual questions.
They are questions about Concepts. But a question such as "How
long did the battle last?" or "Did the friends meet by chance or
by design?" is a question about a battle or a meeting. Here the
ideas of temporal duration and of fortuitousness are being operated
with; but they are not here being operated upon. Somewhat
similarly, the sculptor operates with a chisel, but it is the stone
that he is operating upon. It would be the business of the mechanic,
not the sculptor, to operate upon the chisel itself.
With some exaggeration we might try saying that a conceptual
question or conceptual statement typically has for its grammatical
subject an abstract noun, like "Time" or "Chance" or "Probabili-
ty", where a factual question about a battle, or a meeting, or the
weather would incorporate the corresponding concrete ideas
only by means of its verbs or adjectives or adverbs. The weather-
forecast that tells us that in a certain region there will probably
be snowstorms tomorrow, has for its subject the weather in a
certain place, and not the concept of probability. This idea
comes in only adverbially, as a qualification of the expectations
about the weather. But to say this would be too violent. For the
weather-forecast might just as well be worded in this way:
"There is the probability" or "There is a high probability of
snowstorms in such and such a region". This forecast employs
the abstract noun "probability", though its author would cer-
tainly tell us, if asked, that he was not talking about the concept
of probability, but only talking about the weather. The presence
of the abstract noun "probability" or "time" does not prove
 GILBERT RYLE

that the sentence incorporating it expressed a proposition about

the concept of Probability or the concept of Time. It can do so,
but it need not. Correspondingly, a philosopher or logician might
be discussing the concept of Knowledge, Time, Chance or Pro-
bability, although he abstained from employing those abstract
nouns or any others.
How is an abstract assertion, however it is worded, about the
concept of Time, or Probability or Knowledge related to the
concrete assertions in which, perhaps, a battle is said to have
lasted for three days, snowstorms are asserted to be probable,
or the schoolboy is said no longer to know Pythagoras' theorem ?
(i) Clearly the abstract assertion about the concept is, in an
important way, more sophisticated than the concrete assertions.
A child who had not yet progressed far enough to understand
that snow would probably be falling tomorrow, would a fortiori
not yet be equipped to understand assertions about the concepts
of Probability and Time. (2) But more than this. Abstract asser-
tions about the concepts of Probability and Knowledge are
parasitic upon concrete assertions expressed, perhaps, with the
adverb "probably" and the verb "know", "learn" or "forget" —
parasitic in this way, that the maker of an assertion about Probabil-
ity or Time or Knowledge is saying in perfectly general terms
something about what is said when, for example, it is said that
snow will probably be falling tomorrow, or that the schoolboy
has forgotten what he had once learned, namely, Pythagoras'
Theorem. What functioned as predicate or a part of the predicate
of the concrete assertion is itself the subject matter that is being
talked about in the abstract assertion. Statements about Probabil-
ity are, in an important way, statements about what it is that is
stated when we state that something will probably happen or
what it is that is asked when someone asks whether it is more
likely to snow than to rain. To put it over-grammatically, the
abstract noun "probability" is parasitic upon, inter alia, the
adverb "probably", and the abstract noun "Time" is parasitic
upon, inter alia, the tenses of ordinary tensed verbs. The chisel
with which, this morning, the sculptor was carving the stone,
is, this afternoon, the object upon which the mechanic is working.
But he is always working upon the chisel as the tool with which
 ABSTRACTIONS

stone-carving has been done and is to be done again, though stone-

carving is not being done with it this afternoon.
Maybe we can now begin to see part of what it was that
perplexed Augustine. It puzzled him that, so to speak, in the
morning he could, without error or confusion, produce and follow
ordinary remarks containing tensed verbs and specifications of
dates, hours and epochs, and yet, so to speak, in the afternoon
he could not answer questions about the concept of Time. The
morning task and the afternoon task belong to different levels;
and the afternoon task requires re-considering, in a special way,
features of what had been done, perfectly efficiently perhaps,
but still naively, in the morning. In the morning he had talked
good sense about everyday topics in, inter alia, temporal dictions;
but in the afternoon he had to try to talk good sense about the good
sense that, in the morning, he had talked in those temporal dictions.
" But now for a further point. The persons responsible for publish-
ing weather-forecasts are constantly having to tell their hearers
that, for example, snowstorms are likely in certain regions, while
in other regions, though snowstorms are possible, rainy weather
is much more probable; and so on. From what intellectual motive
can they or anyone else raise what I am calling the "afternoon"-
conceptual questions, namely the questions about what had been
contributed to their morning forecasts by their expressions
"probably", "possible, but less likely" and so on? If, in the morn-
ing, they knew quite well what they were saying, why do they or
other people need, in the afternoon, to try to say things about the
well-understood things that they had said in the morning?
How are any conceptual problems left requiring a solution, if the
meteorologist had, in the morning, said with truth, consistency
and clarity all that he meant to say about tomorrow's weather?
What light is there for a conceptual discussion in the afternoon
to throw on themes in which the meteorologist had in the morning
been in no darkness at all ? He and his hearers knew what he meant,
so how can he need to be given an autopsy on what he meant?
What questions about Time are left to perplex Augustine, after
he has said and understood all the chronological and chrono-
metrical things about the everyday world that he had needed
to say and understand before lunch?
 GILBERT RTLE

Let us take a new example. We are all, in everyday life, con-

stantly having to consider concrete questions of existence and non-
existence. How long ago did mammoths exist and how long have
they been extinct or non-existent ? Does there exist a prime number
between 23 and 29? Is this island uninhabited or do there exist
some human beings on it ? Even when we speak of people con-
structing or demolishing bridges or houses we are speaking of
them as bringing bridges or houses into existence, and as rendering
them no longer existent. When theists and atheists dispute about
the existence of God, they may not come to an agreement on
their problem; but they do not differ in their employment of the
notions of existence or non-existence.
None the less, there do arise, so to speak, in the afternoon,
well-known problems about the concepts of existence and non-
existence. How can non-existence be ascribed to anything, say
a prime number between 23 and 29, or to a 20th century mam-
moth, if there is, i.e. if there exists nothing of which this or any
other predicate can be predicated ? Just how do 100 imaginary
dollars differ from 100 real or existent dollars, if I can imagine
my 100 imaginary dollars as having all the properties of the
real dollars, including that of being real ? Once again we have
to ask how it is that we are, in the morning, perfectly at home
with the idea of things existing or being extinct or non-existent,
and yet, in the afternoon, find ourselves challenged to describe
what it was that we had earlier been at home with. Yet we do,
somehow, need to be able to describe it. What sort of a need is
this? To ask this is to ask what sorts of problems are specifically
philosophical problems. Why do we need to philosophise?
Let us try out this suggested answer. A man at the dinner table
may know very well the difference between an onion and a beet-
root. He knows their names, he knows how they taste, he can tell
them apart from their looks and smells; maybe he even knows
how to cultivate and cook them. But he cannot classify them;
he cannot say to what different botanical sorts onions and beetroots
belong. So perhaps we are in a similar position. We can, in con-
crete cases, tell existence from non-existence, knowledge from
ignorance, a month from a minute; but we cannot say what sort
of a thing it is for something to exist, what sort of a thing knowing
 ABSTRACTIONS

is, or what sort of a thing a minute is a short stretch of. Perhaps

problems about concepts are classificatory problems. I daresay
that this is how Socrates thought of his philosophical problems,
namely as problems the solution to which, if he could ever find
them, would be of the pattern "Virtue is a species of Knowledge,
differing from other species of Knowledge in such and such res-
pects."
I do not think that this suggested answer is right, and for this
reason. The philosophically interesting and crucial problems
are problems about concepts which are, typically, too pervasive
or too catholic to be treated as mere species of higher genera.
The concepts of Time, Knowledge, Probability, Cause, Chance,
Existence, Negation, and so on, are not departmental notions,
and a fortiori not sub-departmental notions; they are inter-
departmental. They belong, to put it metaphorically, not to this
or that special vocabulary but to the topic-neutral syntax of our
thoughts about the world.
So now let us consider another suggestion. Instead of thinking
of a man who knows onions from beetroots but cannot tell us to what
botanical sorts they belong, let us now think instead of the in-
habitant of a village who knows well every house, field, stream,
road and pathway in the neighbourhood and is, for the first time,
asked to draw or consult a map of his village—a map which shall
join on properly to the maps of adjacent districts and in the end
to the map of his country and even of his continent. He is being
asked to think about his own familiar terrain in a way that is
at the start entirely strange, despite the fact that every item that
he is to inscribe or identify in his map is to be something that he
is entirely familiar with. In the morning he can walk from the
church to the railway station without ever losing his way. But
now, in the afternoon, he has to put down with compass bearings
and distances in kilometres and metres the church, the railway
station and the paths and roads between. In the morning he
can show us the route from anywhere to anywhere; but it still
puzzles him in the afternoon to describe those routes—describe
them not just in words but in such cartographical terms that his
local map will fit in with the maps of his entire region and country.
He has, so to speak, to translate and therefore to re-think his local
 GILBERT RYLE

topographical knowledge into universal cartographical terms.

Now he has to survey even his own dear home as if through the
transparent pages of an international atlas.
I think you will agree that Augustine's puzzlement about the
concept of Time has a good deal in common with the puzzlement
of our villager who is asked to think about his home-village in
cartographical terms.
We should notice that part of what perplexes the villager when
for the first time asked to draw or to read a map of a place in which
he is entirely at home is that he has to describe it in perfectly
general, cartographical terms—terms, that is, which are shared
by all other places. Where he normally thinks of his home, his
church and his railway station in personal terms, now he has to
think of them in impersonal, neutral terms. For him his village
is unlike every other village in being the centre of his own life;
but the map is neutral as between his village and any other.
It represents them all by different arrangements of the same
dots, lines and colours. All their distances, compass bearings and
heights above sea level are given in the same unemphatic, im-
partial, impersonal code. The map is not a local snapshot;
or an album of local snapshots; it is a slice out of an universal
diagram. When he is out of the country, a snapshot of his home
may make him feel homesick; but the map-reference of his home
will not do this.
None the less the map is a store of knowledge about his
district, for which his own personal familiarity with it can never
deputise. Besides being personally intimate with his neighbour-
hood, he does also need to know its geography. He has learned
something valuable when he has made the, at first, perplexing
transition from thinking of his neighbourhood in only personal
and practical terms, to thinking of it also in neutral, public,
cartographical terms. Unlike Augustine, he can now say "When,
in the morning, you do not ask me questions, I can guide you on
foot from anywhere in the district to anywhere else; but, when in
the afternoon, you do ask me questions, I can now also tell you
the distances in kilometres and the compass-bearings between
anywhere in the district and anywhere else in the district, or
anywhere else in the country or even anywhere else in the whole
 ABSTRACTIONS

wide world." Not only can he cope with the familiar morning
tasks, but he can now also cope with the sophisticated afternoon
tasks. Both are territorial tasks about one and the same region;
but they are tasks of different levels. The "afternoon" or carto-
graphical task is more sophisticated than the "morning" task
of merely guiding someone from the church to the station. But
this "afternoon" task is also in an important way parasitic upon
tasks of the "morning" type, since the "cash-value", so to speak,
of what the code-symbols in the map represent consists wholly
in such things as the fields, bridges, paths, rivers and railway-
stations with which the local inhabitants and visitors and even
the Ordnance Surveyors themselves became familiar, not by
studying maps but ambulando.
How should we apply this analogy of the two levels of topo-
graphical knowledge to the difference on which we have been
concentrating, namely the difference between concrete and
abstract, morning and afternoon, factual and conceptual con-
siderations ? In this way. In making my everyday unphilosophical
statements, in asking my ordinary factual questions or in giving
my concrete, practical advice, I say what I have to say with a
variety of familiar words and phrases. These may be quite un-
technical expressions or they may be technical or semi-technical
expressions. Some of them may be unfamiliar to some people,
but if I myself am not familiar with them, either I avoid trying
to use them, or I am in doubt whether I have said what I wished
to say.
Now every word or phrase that I so employ—with a few
exceptions, such as expletives—so contributes to my statement,
question or advice that it would have been a different statement,
etc., had I used a different non-synonymous word or phrase
instead. It would have been a different statement, different in
having different implications, in requiring different tests for truth
or falsehood, in being compatible and incompatible with different
affiliated statements, in being evidence for or against different
corollaries, and so on. Let us label these for brevity its "implica-
tion-threads". If I am familiar with a word or phrase, then I
know, ambulando, the particular differences, of these sorts, that it
contributes to the particular statements etc. in which I employ

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 GILBERT RTLE

it. Having said something sensible with it, I know how to go on

saying particular things that continue to make co-sense with what
I said. So far I am like the villager who, on leaving the church,
turns right in order to walk home and never has to nullify his
first steps by turning back in his tracks. He is continuously on the
correct route all the way—unless he is absent-minded or distract-
ed; and this reservation applies to my talking and thinking too.
But now we have to notice a new point. The things that we
say often, indeed usually, contain a mixture or plurality of words
or phrases. We have to marry the contribution made by one to
the contributions made by all the others; and sometimes the
implication-threads generated by one of them pull or seem to
pull across or away from the implication-threads generated by
another. For example, I might truly and intelligibly describe a
weary sailor in a storm as having toiled voluntarily, although
reluctantly; and then I find myself in a perplexity. For I seem
to be saying that he toiled not under compulsion but because he
volunteered to do it, despite the fact that he did not want to do it.
The natural implication-threads of "voluntarily" seem to pull
away from the natural implication-threads of "reluctantly".
So now it is not enough to be familiar with the separate contribu-
tions of the two adverbs. I need to be able to say how their ap-
parent conflict is an unreal one, as it must be if my original state-
ment was intelligible and true. I am now confronted by a con-
ceptual problem, though doubtless a fairly elementary and local
one. But still it is a problem the solution of which requires con-
sideration in perfectly general terms of the notions of action,
motive, preference, strength of desires, choice and so on, with no particular
reference to this sailor or this storm. I have, so to speak, now to
place on the same regional map the ideas of "voluntarily" and
"reluctantly" with each of which by itself I am quite at home.
I have to orientate them together with one another, and also
orientate them together with the other familiar ideas with which
they must or may come into conjunction. I have to fix what I
may call their "logical bearings" vis-a-vis one another and vis-
a-vis all their other normal or possible neighbours. Of course the
big philosophical issues are not those which, like my specimen
about the sailor, just happen more or less accidentally to crop

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 ABSTRACTIONS

up now and then, but those which inevitably present themselves

over and over again. When we speak, as we constantly have to
speak, in the very same breath, of a responsible human agent
acting in a world which is, as he himself also is, a field of chemical,
mechanical and biological causes and effects, we are not merely
liable, but bound, to find ourselves perplexed by the seeming
interferences between the implication-threads belonging to our
causal ideas and the implication-threads belonging to our moral
ideas. Men must, we feel, be free; yet they must, we also feel, be
amenable to prediction and explanation. Their actions cannot
be mechanical. Yet also they cannot be unmechanical.
But how ? And now we can see, I hope, that the answer to this
question "But how?" is not one the answer to which can be
provided either out of our morning familiarity with the ideas
of culpability and merit; or out of our morning familiarity with
the ideas of impact, attraction, pressure and tension, stimulus
and response. We have now, instead, suspiciously to trace and
test in their own right the implication-threads which ordinarily
we naively rely upon. We have now to operate upon what we
ordinarily operate readily and unquestioningly with. We now
need the theory of our daily practice, the geography of our daily
walks. When two or twenty familiar implication-threads seem to
pull across and against one another, it is no longer enough to be
able unperplexedly to follow along each one by itself. We need
to be able to state their directions, their limits and their inter-
lockings; to think systematically about what normally we merely
think competently and even dexterously with. Our familiarities
are now at seeming loggerheads with themselves; so an afternoon
discipline and method have to be superimposed upon our morning
habits. However forcibly a man may, in the morning, argue on
this or that concrete topic, he may still need to learn a quite new
kind of lesson, namely how, in the afternoon, to assess the forces
of those arguments and how to compare and correlate them with
the forces of seemingly interfering or cooperating arguments.
It follows first that the philosophical examination of a concept,
like that, say, of Time or Probability or Voluntariness, can never
be the examination of that concept by itself, but only the examina-
tion of it vis-&-vis its numerous neighbour-concepts, and then

15
 GILBERT RYLE

vis-d-vis their innumerable neighbours too. Even the cartographer

cannot produce a map that is the map just of one boulder by
itself, or one stretch of water by itself. It follows second that the
procedure of the philosophical examination of a concept is ne-
cessarily an argumentative or, if you prefer, a dialectical proce-
dure. The philosopher has done nothing at all until he has shown
the directions and the limits of the implication-threads that a
concept contributes to the statements in which it occurs; and to
show this he has, so to speak, to tug these threads through their
neighbouring threads, which, in their turn, he must simultaneous-
ly be tugging.
What cross-bearings are to the cartographer, crossing implica-
tion-threads are for the philosopher. Augustine's after-breakfast
ability to say things in temporal terms and to understand things
said in temporal terms was not enough by itself to enable him,
after lunch, to co-ordinate the contributions to statements of these
temporal terms with the contributions made to them by associated
terms of different sorts. He was like the sailor, who, though per-
fectly at home in his own ship, is asked about the disposition and
organisation of the fleet to which his ship belongs. This is not
just a new question of an old sort. It is a question of a new sort.

GILBERT RYLE
University of Oxford

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