Talk:Ryle's regress

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The parenthetical "(1949)" after Ryle's name presumably does not mean his date of birth or death; rather, something written by Ryle is being cited. But I see no list of references. Moreover, if only one of his publications is cited, the year of publication is not needed to distinguish it from others. So specifically what did he write that is being referred to? Inquiring minds want to know. Michael Hardy 03:16, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Solution to the problem

Surely a computational/representational theory of mind is a perfectly good solution to the regress? According to such a theory. at the most primitive level thoughts have causal powers in virtue of their syntactic structure. Say that I kick John because I have the thought "I want to kick John". The process mediating thought and action is (by hypothesis) a blind, unintelligent computational process which is sensitive to the syntactic structure of the thought "I want to kick John". Thus, there is no regress, because ultimately it is blind computational processes which underly intelligent action.

I say all this because I think there ought to be a response to Ryle's argument in the article, but I'd like to find a cite first. Can anyone help? Cadr 12:23, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

I'd suggest looking at Dennett's answer, since he's a student of Ryles who claims to have solved this problem, among others. The solution he offers in Consciousness Explained, is pretty much what you describe. In his Multiple Drafts model, consciousness comes from the actions of simple, non-conscious components acting together, thus breaking the regress. Intentionality itself, rather than being an all-or-nothing attribute that only consciousness conveys, exists as an abstraction over behavior, viewable through the intentional stance. Alienus 18:17, 28 March 2006 (UTC)


Is this not Obvious ?? Why is it not in the article already? why is a cite needed? this is not original research, it's trivial...--Procrastinating@talk2me 18:36, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Indeed, Ryle speaks of category-mistakes when he is responding to the intellectualist "myth." Is it not a category-mistake for him to set mental "actions" in the same category as physical actions? Chieftain 17:19, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm not an expert, but as far as I understand the article, it says "If every intelligent action was caused by an intelligent action(including mental actions like thinking or considering), there would be no way to start the proces and hence, no way for anyone/anything to ever act intelligently". From that follows that either there are no intelligent agents around or that there is some other way to cause intelligent actions. For example, an intelligent action of considering something could be a reaction to hearing about said thing. - not an expert.

[edit] Citations

An interesting take on the regress. Some citations are needed, as marked. Banno 22:09, 19 July 2006 (UTC)