Grice and Quinton on Ryle

--- Ryle did NOT belong to the Play Group! He couldn't even if he had liked it. The rule was that anyone belonging to Austin's play group HAD to be younger than Austin. Ryle had been born in 1900.

But Grice (born 1913, and thus member of the group) showed an interest in Ryle -- a philosophical interest, that is. He cites him in "Prolegomena to Logic and Conversation" vis a vis "The concept of mind" -- Ryle's opus magnum.

Now, Quinton dedicates a whole chapter to a lovely collection edited by Wood and Pitcher on Ryle. (Wood IS cited by Grice in WoW, and Pitcher was an American student with Austin). Quinton's piece is entitled "Ryle on perception".

On the whole Grice, who will quote Ryle again in "Method in philosophical psychology" and elsewhere as he would reminisce on what was distinctive of Austin and the Play Group, saw Ryle as too much tied with a 'behavouristic' picture of the 'mind' (which Ryle saw after all, his claim to infame goes, as the ghost in the machine!).

So, what could he have said about 'perception'?

For Grice, the problem of perception is pretty easy. It involves the 'that'-clause. We perceive propositions:

i. It seems to me as though the pillar box is red.
ii. I perceive that the pillar box is red.
iii. I see that the pillar box is red.

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Only ii and iii seem to be the target for Grice's analysis, because they feature what Grice would call 'subjective' perception. (Recall his distinction between objective certainty, "It is certain that the pillar box is red", and subjective certainty, "I am certain that the pillar box is red").

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Quinton was able to approach Ryle on perception after having examined the area in his interesting "The problem of perception". The analysis of Quinton's phrases is worth examining:

iv. It appears that they are away.
v. They appear to be away.
vi. It seems to me that they are away.
vii. They are away, I think.

--- In "The Problem of Perception", Quinton focuses on 'appear', rather than 'seem', and as he notes, 'appears' is hardly used to report a perception. Quinton focuses on 'objective' appearance. I.e. the object is the object perceived:

viii. The pillar box IS red.
ix. The pillar box seems/appears red.

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Grice and Warnock by this time were examining 'objectifications' of perception. Warnock famously came out with an essay on "What is seen".

Consider Macbeth's 'dagger'.

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x. A dagger appeared to Macbeth.

Quinton finds otiose. Quinton wants to say that Macbeth did not really see anything. Grice did have a problem with this and needed to recourse to the idea of disimplicature. Allowing for

xi. Macbeth saw a dagger.

even if the dagger wasn't there to be seen -- but utterered felicitously only in the context where the addressee is aware of the fact.

Warnock and Grice were perhaps more interested in the qualia and subjective nature of perception than Quinton was. They notably coined the visum. Macbeth, after all, saw the visum of a dagger (Warnock, "On what is seen") -- but admittedly Grice and Warnock later found the concept pretty otiose, even if pointing to some disanalogy of 'seeing' over the other 'four' senses.

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Now: to elucidate what a behaviourist like Ryle would say about this was a task! Congratulations to Baron Quinton!