50 Quotes by Gilbert Ryle

Roughly, execution and understanding are merely different exercises of knowledge of the tricks of the same trade.

The author is leading and the spectator is following, but their path is the same.

Minds are things, but different sorts of things from bodies;.

For making mistakes is not an exercise of competence, nor is the commission of slips an exercise of knowledge how; it is a failure to exercise knowledge how.

Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings.

When a boy begins to notice that he is fonder of arithmetic, or less homesick, than are most of his acquaintances he is beginning to be self-conscious, in this enlarged sense.

Knowing how to apply maxims cannot be reduced to, or derived from, the acceptance of those or any other maxims.

Certainly there are some things which I can find out about you only, or best, through being told of them by you. The oculist has to ask his client what letters he sees with his right and left eyes and how clearly he sees them; the doctor has to ask the sufferer where the pain is and what sort of a pain it is; and the psychoanalyst has to ask his patient about his dreams and daydreams.

Nor does this understanding require a prolonged grounding in the not yet established laws of psychology.