Ryle and Sellars on Thoughts and Immediate Experiences

Abstract

This paper examines Sellars’ critique of Ryle in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind to draw a broader lesson about the nature of mindedness as such. I begin by showing that Sellars’ Ryle, unlike the author of The Concept of Mind (CM), is a philosophical behaviorist. I then argue that Sellars’ myth of Jones nevertheless offers an illuminating response to Ryle’s misgivings about his own account of sensation in CM and in the 1956 paper “Sensation,” thereby revealing a genuine blind spot in Ryle’s thought. In the final section of the paper, I suggest that Ryle’s work, in turn, provides conceptual resources for working through the dilemma that motivates the first episode of Sellars’ myth of Jones. The issue is that Sellars—along with the functionalist tradition that followed him—failed to fully appreciate the implications of Ryle’s critique of the Cartesian or “two-world” dogma for the notions of thinking and overt behavior. This critique can be properly understood only if one takes “intelligent capacities” as an indispensable category within Ryle’s concept of mind. Ryle uses it to make sense of overt and covert intelligent behavior without having to speak of unobservable inner episodes. The upshot of this exchange, I conclude, is a Sellars-enhanced Rylean conception of mindedness.