Margaret Macdonald and Gilbert Ryle: a Philosophical Friendship

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

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Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle: a philosophical friendship

Michael Kremer

To cite this article: Michael Kremer (2021): Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle: a philosophical friendship, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2021.1932409 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2021.1932409

Published online: 15 Jun 2021.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rbjh20 BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2021.1932409

ARTICLE Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle: a philosophical friendship Michael Kremer Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

ABSTRACT This article considers the personal and philosophical relationship between two philosophers, Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle. I show that a letter from MacDonald to Ryle found at Linacre College, Oxford, was part of an extensive correspondence, and that the two were intimate friends and philosophical interlocutors, and I explore the relationship between their respective philosophies. MacDonald, who studied with Wittgenstein before coming to Oxford in 1937, deployed and developed Wittgensteinian themes in her own subsequent work. I show that this work was an important source of ideas in Ryle’s philosophy. I examine two episodes: (1) a 1937 symposium in which MacDonald gave the lead paper, and Ryle was a respondent – I argue that Ryle derived his famous distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that from her paper; and (2) Ryle’s rejection in Dilemmas (1953/4) of the central importance of the idea of a ‘category mistake’–I argue that this may have been in response to MacDonald’scriticalreviewof The Concept of Mind. Along the way I consider the development of MacDonald’s metaphilosophical views, and I shed new light on MacDonald’s remarkable biography.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 21 January 2021; Revised 20 April 2021; Accepted 17 May 2021

KEYWORDS Margaret MacDonald; Gilbert Ryle; knowledge-how; category mistake; analogy

Introduction “Dear Gilbert, Well, I am glad they have seen the light at last! Congratu- lations! I shall look forward to seeing the Trinity Shining with the eﬀects of Board of Trade Stockinette!” These cryptic words open a letter, dated 12 December 1942, from Margaret MacDonald, on leave for war service with the Board of Trade from her post as librarian of St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, to Gilbert Ryle, also on leave from his position at Christ Church, Oxford while serving in military intelligence. This letter, the only remaining piece of a long and personal correspondence, shows that the two philosophers were intimate friends. I present the evidence for this friendship, and explore the relationship between their

CONTACT Michael Kremer [email protected] © 2021 BSHP 2 M. KREMER philosophical works in the light of this discovery. MacDonald, who studied with Wittgenstein before coming to Oxford in 1937, deployed and developed Wittgensteinian themes in her own subsequent work. I show that this work was an important source of ideas in Ryle’s philosophy, inﬂuencing both his famous distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that, and the development of his philosophical methodology. I begin, however, with a sketch of MacDonald’slife– overcoming poverty, ill-health, and misogyny to achieve prominence in her ﬁeld, before her premature death at the age of 52.

1. MacDonald’s life and character In the next section, I present the evidence for MacDonald and Ryle’s friendship. Here, I establish the background of MacDonald’s biography – remarkable in itself, and for its contrast with Ryle’s. Ryle, as he himself said in 1972, lived a seemingly boring life: “Apart from four bloodless years in khaki during the Second World War, my career has been the uninterruptedly scholastic one of an Oxford undergraduate, an Oxford graduate, an Oxford tutor, an Oxford proctor, and an Oxford University Professor” (Chanan, Logic Lane, Episode 6). His progress through these ranks was apparently easy and inevitable, supported by a solidly upper-middle-class background. His grandfather was the ﬁrst Bishop of Liverpool, and his father was a physician, practising in Brighton, where Ryle and his twin sister Mary were born on 19 August 1900.1 After attending Brighton College as a day student, Ryle matriculated at Queen’s College, Oxford. Upon graduation in 1924, he was appointed lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, where he remained until the Second World War. In 1929, he met Ludwig Wittgenstein at the joint meeting of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society, and they “struck up a friendship” close enough that they “occasionally accompanied each other on walking holidays” in the 1930s (Monk, Wittgenstein, 275–6). When war broke out, Ryle volunteered for the Welsh Guards; in September 1941 he moved into the Radio Intelligence Service (RIS), as a member of “a team of brilli- ance unparalleled anywhere in the intelligence machine”, including Stuart Hampshire, and the historians Hugh Trevor-Roper and Charles Stuart (Har- rison, “British Radio Security”, 68). In 1945, he succeeded R. G. Collingwood as Waynﬂete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy; at the pinnacle of his career, he became editor of Mind, publishing his main work, The Concept of Mind in 1949, followed by Dilemmas in 1954. He retired in 1968, and died on 6 October 1976 while on a walking holiday.

1Information about Ryle’s life is from Strawson, “Ryle, Gilbert”, unless otherwise indicated. BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3

The contrast between Ryle’s relatively easy life and MacDonald’sisstriking. She was born on 9 April 1903, in Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, London.2 Her hospital birth was a marker of poverty – hospitals were charitable organizations for the care of the working class and indigent (Rivett, London Hospital System,23– 4). Her birth certificate lists only her mother’sname:“Christina MacDonald, dressmaker of Marylebone”. The space for her father’s name is blank. Diseases of poverty marked her childhood; she survived rheumatic fever (Bradbrook, “Margaret MacDonald”, 27), and on 15 November 1913, at the age of nine, she was admitted into a sanatorium run by the National Children’sHome and Orphanage (NCHO) as a tuberculous patient.3 Her admission records, and correspondence in the NCHO files, show that her mother had abandoned her and left for Australia; the family with whom she was living had an income of less than 15 shillings a week. She had attended a local school where, because of her history of tuberculosis, she had been isolated from the other children. In March 1914, when MacDonald was well enough to leave the sanatorium, the NCHO transferred her to their orphanage at Alverstoke, rather than returning her to her impoverished foster family.4 She was educated there until 1919, when she went to the NCHO Office in London for clerical training. On 1 June 1922, she was released from the NCHO’s care at the age of 19; her records contain the notation: “disposal: situation”. In fact, she may have continued to work for the NCHO; in November 1931, the Tuberculosis Medical Officer for the County of Middlesex wrote to them, proposing to admit her for observation and possible Sanatorium treatment. She had suffered a relapse of her tuberculosis; letters from MacDonald in the NCHO records show that she was sent to Barmouth for fresh air. By this time MacDonald was a student at the University of London, where she began her studies in 1929, at the age of 26 (Addis, “MacDonald, Margaret (1907–56)”, 1997). Her January 1934 fellowship application to Girton College, Cambridge, states that she passed the matriculation examination and the Intermediate Arts examination at Birkbeck College “while engaged during the day in a clerical occupation”, a remarkable achievement given her pre- vious education.5 The NCHO supported MacDonald’s studies, eventually providing 522 pounds – half in the form of a loan, which she struggled to pay back over the course of her career.6 Their archives show that in 1930 she

2Addis, “MacDonald, Margaret (1907–56)”, 1997, gives her birthdate as 9 April 1907. However, her birth certificate, and the records of both the National Children’s Home and Orphanage, and Girton College, confirm the date of 9 April 1903. 3NCHO records obtained through Action for Children (https://www.actionforchildren.org.uk/) on 9 Sep- tember 2020. 4MacDonald seems to have retained affection for her foster family. In correspondence with the NCHO in 1946 she explains that she cannot afford much towards repaying a loan due to “other responsibilities (partial support of elderly foster parents)”. 5Girton College archive, Margaret MacDonald file, archive reference: GCAR 2/5/6/1/4. 6The NCHO file for MacDonald contains considerable correspondence concerning this loan. 4 M. KREMER had moved from Birkbeck to University College, where she graduated with First Class Honours in Philosophy in June 1932.7 Later that year she began graduate studies, working with Susan Stebbing (Addis, “MacDonald, Margaret (1907–56)”, 1997). For her last year of studies, she won a John Stuart Mill Scholarship, which covered her fees.8 She joined the Aristotelian Society in 1932 (Aristotelian Society, “Officers and Members”, 350), and began to participate in their meetings, where she probably first met Ryle – both were discussants for a paper given by A. J. Ayer on 11 December 1933 (Aristotelian Society, “Abstract of the Minutes”, 295). Ayer recalls her as one of a number of mainly younger “like-minded” philosophers some of whom, at the joint meeting in July of 1933, founded the journal Analysis, which was edited by Austin Duncan-Jones with the assistance of Stebbing, Ryle, and C.A. Mace (Ayer, Part of My Life, 150–1). In June 1934, she received her PhD for a thesis on “The Logical Characteristics of Expression”,9 and was awarded a Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge, for 1934–7, which provided her with an income of 200 pounds per year. MacDonald’s Girton Fellowship application outlined a project on “The Concept of Matter: a study of the influence of certain language forms in philosophy and science”–a conception reminiscent of The Concept of Mind. She proposed “a philosophical analysis of the way in which certain language forms have been used in the formation of metaphysical and scientific theories about the world”, showing that:

difficulties in the development of physics have been due to the manner in which fundamental physical propositions have been expressed. These expressions by reason of the inappropriateness of their syntactical forms have led to misunderstanding with regard to the form of the facts to which the expressions refer.10 Stebbing, in her letter of support, praised MacDonald as her best student, and judged that her research programme was uniquely suited to being carried out at Cambridge. The presence there of G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgen- stein, whose lectures MacDonald attended in 1934–5 and 1934–6 respect- ively, was especially significant for MacDonald’s future work.11 While she became a devoted friend of Moore (Bradbrook, “Margaret Mac- Donald”, 27), Wittgenstein’sinfluence on her was profound. According to

7Butler, K.T., and McMorran, H.I., Girton College Register, 1869–1946 (Cambridge: Privately printed, 1948), entry for MacDonald. Shelfmark, Girton College Library: General Reference Collection X.529/19410. 8Fellowship application in the Girton College file. Mary Ellen Waithe claims that she received financial assistance from Stebbing. Waithe, “MacDonald”, 364. But her Fellowship application mentions only the Mill scholarship and the NCHO loan when explaining her financial resources. 9This thesis is in the University College London library; I have not been able to examine it. 10This methodology resembles ideas of both Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Ryle’s “Systematically Mislead- ing Expressions” (1932). 11MacDonald’s lecture notes from Wittgenstein’s and Moore’s lectures in 1934–5 have been printed in Wittgenstein, Lectures 1932–35, and Moore, Lectures on Metaphysics. BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 5

M. C. Bradbrook, Mistress of Girton, “When she came to Cambridge, Wittgen- stein was at the height of his influence, and she was among the little circle that studied ‘the blue book’ and ‘the brown book’…”(Bradbrook, “Margaret MacDonald”, 27).12 At the end of her fellowship term, MacDonald was hired as librarian at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she also taught for the College (Whitlock, “Margaret MacDonald”, 16). In 1938–9 she offered classes on “Philosophy and Ordinary Language” and “Matter and Materialism” mentioned in the lecture lists for the Honors Schools of Philosophy, Politics and Economics and Literae Humaniores (Oxford University Gazette, 24 June 1938, 9 December 1938). Bradbrook states that in Oxford “she met Professor Gilbert Ryle … whose work she very greatly admired” (Bradbrook, “Margaret MacDonald”, 27). Although they must have met earlier, perhaps at this time their friendship developed into something more than a mere acquaintance. During these years, MacDonald struggled financially. In an 11 July 1939 letter concerning repayment of her NCHO loan, she writes that she is able to supplement her meagre income of “75 pounds a year with board and resi- dence”“by coaching and examining”, and mentions a forthcoming “lump sum payment for London University examining in August”. She had not yet repaid her loan since “I have been hoping to get a permanent lectureship in philosophy … It is difficult in my subject, especially for a woman”. Brad- brook summarizes:

The strain of living through the dismal thirties on grants, part-time salaries, and crumbs of teaching was increased for her since she had no home or relations to provide a background. Philosophy is not a bread-and-butter subject; posts were few, and some quarters still harboured a prejudice against women. (Bradbrook, “Margaret MacDonald”, 27) Yet MacDonald was able to write while struggling to support herself, publishing eight articles in Philosophy, the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, and Analysis between 1934 and 1939. Of particular importance to us will be two Aristotelian Society papers: her contribution to a 1937 symposium on “Induc- tion and Hypothesis”, and her 1938 methodological paper, “The Philosopher’s Use of Analogy”. We will see how these papers bear on the philosophical relationship between Ryle’s and MacDonald’s work. In 1941, MacDonald entered war work as a Temporary Principal of the Board of Trade, “working mostly at Leicester on control of the hosiery and rayon industry …” (Bradbrook, “Margaret MacDonald”, 27) She had little time for philosophy, publishing only a few book reviews, but continued to mark examinations for money – her letter to Ryle ends “I have just been

12The Brown Book was dictated by Wittgenstein to Alice Ambrose and Francis Skinner in 1935–6. Mac- Donald possessed copies of both The Blue Book and The Brown Book, which likely stemmed from her days at Girton. 6 M. KREMER

finishing off a stack of examination papers and am not feeling too bright”.At war’s end, MacDonald finally achieved financial security with an appointment to Bedford College, University of London, first as Lecturer in 1946, then in 1954 as Reader.13 During these last years she also achieved professional success. She became editor of Analysis when the journal was revived after the war (Analysis, “Change of Editor”, 1). Her work moved into political philosophy and aesthetics, and she continued to develop her metaphilosophical views. Her papers were reprinted in several anthologies in the newly recognized field of analytic philosophy; one such volume, Logic and Language, edited by Antony Flew (1951), featured two of her essays. The Australian philosopher John Passmore recounts her hosting a weekly salon in 1948:

On Sundays there was often a meeting of a small discussion group hosted by Margaret McDonald [sic]. … It was, too, a wonderfully diversiﬁed group of per- sonalities. The quick-witted Margaret McDonald, living refutation of the view that close philosophical reasoning was not for women, the very Cambridge John Wisdom, conjoining psychoanalysis with Wittgenstein’s new-style philosophy, O. K. Bouwsma, the best type of mid-Westerner, totally devoid of preten- tiousness, steadily refusing East-Coast oﬀers, and then me, the wild colonial boy (Passmore, Memoirs, 238). In short, she had arrived, philosophically: Bradbrook writes that:

After the war, her work at Bedford brought her into contact not only with the British philosophers but with many from overseas. As editor of Analysis,asa member of the Aristotelian Society, and a faithful attender at its many confer- ences she was widely known. She received several invitations to visit America which her health unfortunately did not permit her to accept.14 (Bradbrook, “Margaret MacDonald”, 27) In fact, her poor health led to her premature death on 7 January 1956. Her childhood rheumatic fever left her with a mitrial stenosis which required sur- gical attention; but she did not survive the operation (Bradbrook, “Margaret MacDonald”, 27). MacDonald won the admiration of many for her perseverance, generosity of spirit, modesty, and courage. Ruth Saw, in her Analysis obituary, described her as “unfailingly generous of time and help”, “a delightful companion” whose “cheerful pessimism and kindly cynicism sometimes issued in sayings that took even her by surprise” (Saw, “MacDonald”, 74). Bedford College sociologist, Barbara Wooton, wrote to The Times of MacDonald’s

13Girton College Register entry for MacDonald. 14Addis claims that MacDonald “participated in an exchange programme with Smith College, Massachu- setts” where her friend Alice Ambrose taught. Addis, “MacDonald, Margaret (1907–56)”, 1997. This is contradicted by Bradbrook’s report, and I have not been able to ﬁnd independent evidence to decide the matter. BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 7

“Outspoken … socialism and … agnosticism” and “outstanding intellectual honesty and warm human sympathy”. Wooton added that:

Fate had deprived her of the close family circle by which most of us are sustained in adversity; but, though constantly ill, she made incredibly few demands on anybody. She was sometimes discouraged, but always good- humoured, friendly, and brave beyond belief … . (The Times, 13 January 1956) Bradbrook summarized her character:

Margaret MacDonald’s life, untimely cut short as it was, remains a triumph for disinterested intellect and for that rare kind of courage which inhabits the vul- nerable and naturally sensitive. … Her mind was so lively and alert, her personal modesty and real good temper so unfailing that her most inflammatory views could not antagonize. She was always ready to learn, and her capacity for enjoyment equalled her thirst for knowledge. (Bradbrook, “Margaret MacDonald”, 27) Bradbrook sadly concludes: “Miss MacDonald was only fifty-two at the time of her death; she had known security for a very short time, and ease hardly at all. Yet the memory of her which remains is of gaiety and courage” (Brad- brook, “Margaret MacDonald”, 27). Her philosophical career from undergraduate studies to her death spanned twenty-seven years, with an interruption of five years for the war, and only the last decade marked with real success and recognition. Her overcoming the obstacles of poverty, ill- health, and misogyny, is an inspiring story, and one which makes her friendship with Ryle all the more intriguing, given the differences not only of gender but also of class and upbringing that might have separated them.

2. Evidence of the friendship I now turn to the evidence for this intimate friendship. First, there is the letter mentioned at the opening of this paper. At the end of his life, Ryle tried to destroy his correspondence and unpublished writings, so that there would be no Ryle Nachlass (Palmer, “Introduction”, 4). However, he donated his books to the library at Linacre College, Oxford. These hid unintended clues to his life, including a few postcards and letters – for example, a postcard from Husserl inviting him to visit in 1928, and a letter from Ayer written shortly after his arrival in Vienna in 1933.15 Also found in these books was one letter from Margaret MacDonald, dated “12.12.42”. MacDonald was then at the Board of Trade, and Ryle was in the RIS. This is clearly the letter of one intimate friend to another. MacDonald opens by congratulating Ryle on his promotion to Captain – this is the

15For more on the collection, see Barber, “A Philosopher and his Books”. 8 M. KREMER meaning of the cryptic sentences quoted at the beginning of this essay – military uniforms were made of Stockinette, controlled by the Board of Trade, and the “Trinity” is three stars on his uniform, indicating his new rank.16 Ryle and MacDonald are acquainted with each other’s social circles: she casually mentions several of her friends, assuming that Ryle will know who they are, and speaks of his family members in familiar terms. She says that “your mother will be proud of the three stars” (his promotion), and that she is sending books for his “young” (his nephews and nieces). She invites Ryle to visit for the holidays at Bournemouth, suggesting that he stay with his relatives, “the Bernard Scott’s at Fairlea … who like to entertain the family”.17 She also invites him to speak to “the club” in Leicester, and worries that his promotion will send him to Scotland, or abroad, putting greater distance between them. All of this indicates a very close relationship. Moreover, the letter shows that their correspondence was regular and frequent. MacDonald, in response to some question or remark of Ryle’s, gives her opinion of C.S. Lewis, whom she accuses of “hearty simplicities”, and wonders what “your friend Trevor-Roper” thinks of Lewis. And at the end of the letter, she predicts that she will “write again before Christmas”–in less than two weeks’ time. MacDonald also tells Ryle that she is sending a copy of T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding as a Christmas gift. Among the books left by Ryle to Linacre College, there are six inscribed by MacDonald to Ryle, three for his birthday (1940, 1941, and 1950) and three at Christmas (1941, 1942, and 1947). The earliest, The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, given August 1940, is inscribed “To Gilbert/ Who despised the feminine epistolary style/ from Margaret”. This inscription in a volume of letters from a woman to a man who would become her husband suggests that MacDonald and Ryle were already regular correspondents in 1940, and on intimate terms of friendship. The last, Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, dated 19 August 1950 (Ryle’s ﬁftieth birthday), is an impressive gift – a 1714 edition in three volumes. These presents again suggest a more than ordinary professional relationship between the two philosophers.18 This is conﬁrmed further by MacDonald’s will, dated 21 August 1951,19 in which she left several things to Ryle, including her copies of The Blue Book and

16According to records I obtained from www.fold3.com, the promotion did not take official effect until 6 March, 1943. Presumably, Ryle was notified of it in late 1942 and conveyed the news to MacDonald. 17This was a medical family with close links to Ryle’s family. Ryle’s mother, Catherine (Scott) Ryle, was the sister of Bernard Bodley Scott, a Bournemouth physician who died in 1937. His son Maitland Scott took over the practice. He died on 2 January 1942; MacDonald was perhaps referring to his widow and children, or other members of the family. (Genealogical information from ancestry.com, and British Medical Journal obituaries of Ryle’s father R.J. Ryle, Bernard Scott, and Maitland Scott, as well as a history of the practice at http://www.westbournemedical.com/index.php/about-us/history (accessed 15 June 2018).) 18Barber, “A Philosopher and his Books”, 19, remarks on MacDonald’s gifts to Ryle, but does not connect them to the letter. 19Obtained from https://www.gov.uk/search-will-probate on 6 August 2015. BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 9

The Brown Book, most likely dating from her time at Girton,20 her notes on Wittgenstein’s lectures, and her unpublished writings. Ryle must have passed the lecture notes on to Wittgenstein’s literary executors; notes from 1934–5 were incorporated into Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932–35, edited by her friend Alice Ambrose, who reports that she received them from Rush Rhees (Wittgenstein, Lectures 1932–35, ix); and there is an unpublished, partially finished edition of the 1935–6 notes, edited by Cora Diamond. Unfortunately, I have been unable to trace MacDonald’s papers, which I fear Ryle destroyed when he tried to eliminate his own Nachlass. Most significantly for our purposes, MacDonald bequeathed to Ryle a set of letters in her possession, which she asked him to preserve for his biographer (while asking that any other letters be destroyed). These, I infer, were his letters to her; again, it seems that Ryle, who had no interest in having a biographer, destroyed them along with her letters to him, save for the one preserved at Linacre. Why MacDonald might have thought that these letters would be of interest to a Ryle biographer is therefore unclear – they might have included personal information about Ryle, or information about his work with military intelligence, or even important insights into his philosophical development. But that MacDonald could think these letters – unlike any others in her possession – of sufficient interest to be preserved, suggests again the special character of their relationship. I acquired further evidence of their friendship in an interview with Ryle’s niece, Janet (Ryle) Beckley, on 4 November 2015. Janet was adopted after the Second World War by Ryle’s twin sister Mary and lived with Mary and Gilbert (neither of whom were married) for much of her childhood. She referred to Ryle as “Uncle Gil”, who “always treated me almost like a daughter”. When I asked her about MacDonald, she replied, “Oh yes, I knew Mar- garet, yes”. She added that “they were quite close” and told me that MacDonald “used to come over some times to talk to him … and she would take us out in the car and we would walk around the place and we would just talk … Like friends, … like brother and sister, that sort of attitude”. From this memory, together with the testimony of the will from 1951, and the birthday gift from 1950, we can infer that MacDonald and Ryle’s friendship continued after the end of the war, and included not only the exchange of letters, but personal meetings as well.

20By the early 1950s, pirated versions of The Blue Book and The Brown Book were in circulation, thanks to an “exercise in underground publication” begun by Antony Flew and David Pears in 1948–9. Flew, “A Philosopher’s Apology”, 194. But if these were what MacDonald had in her possession, it would be unlikely that she would have left them to Ryle in her will. Wittgenstein made copies of The Blue Book, which was dictated the year before MacDonald arrived in Girton, available to selected students; and MacDonald’s friend Alice Ambrose, after returning to America from Cambridge in 1936, produced typed copies of The Brown Book and shared them with various people. de Pellegrin, “Brown Book”. MacDonald may have received one of these copies, which would then certainly have been worth bequeathing to Ryle. 10 M. KREMER

One ﬁnal piece of evidence concerns MacDonald’s funeral. A report in The Times lists signiﬁcant people in attendance, including members of the Bedford College faculty, representatives of Girton and St. Hilda’s Colleges, and such prominent philosophers as John Wisdom, J.N. Findlay, and Morris Lazerowitz. One Oxford philosopher is on the list – Gilbert Ryle, paying his last respects to his friend (The Times, 16 January 1956).

3. Philosophical interactions? At this point, the reader may interject: this is a fascinating story, but why is it of interest to the historian of philosophy? Unfortunately, with the loss of the MacDonald-Ryle correspondence, we lack one important way to answer this question. The surviving letter contains interesting reﬂections on C.S. Lewis’ interpretation of Milton, and insightful remarks about The Four Quartets; but there is no distinctively philosophical content. Consequently, we must turn to more circumstantial evidence in MacDonald’s and Ryle’s writings. MacDonald refers to Ryle’s work in several of her essays; her most sustained engagement with his thought is in a critical notice of The Concept of Mind, discussed below. She also twice acknowledges his assistance. Ryle, on the other hand, does not acknowledge help from or discussion with Mac- Donald, in accordance with his general policy to thank friends in private, not in public. Nonetheless, there are important traces of MacDonald’sinﬂuence in Ryle’s writings, to which I now turn.21

4. Knowledge-how One of Ryle’s most famous contributions to philosophy is his distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that, drawn in “Knowing How and Knowing That” (1945), and in the similarly titled second chapter of The Concept of Mind. It is less well-known that Ryle ﬁrst made this distinction in an earlier paper on conscience; and it has gone completely unremarked that he ﬁrst encountered it in an even earlier paper of MacDonald’s. I will trace the distinction backwards through Ryle’s works, to MacDonald’s use of it, and thence to her study with Wittgenstein. This example suggests a more general moral, that MacDonald’s development of Wittgensteinian ideas was an important source for Ryle’s work, which I will pursue in the following sections. In “Knowing How and Knowing That”, Ryle attacks ‘intellectualism’, the doctrine that for an action to be intelligent it must be guided by the intellectual apprehension of propositional truth (Ryle, Collected Essays, 222, 226). He

21I do not intend to suggest that MacDonald’s work is of value only for her inﬂuence on Ryle’s thought. I hope to pursue independent consideration of her writings in subsequent work. BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 11 traces “the intellectualist legend” to philosophers’ neglect of knowledge-how, the source of the intelligence exhibited in (some) human action (Ryle, Col- lected Essays, 225). However, this distinction already appears in his 1940 paper “Conscience and Moral Convictions”. Ryle’s topic there is a puzzle about conscience: why can my conscience pass judgement only on my actions, when my moral convictions apply to anyone’s actions, not only my own? (Ryle, Collected Essays, 195) Ryle’s answer involves an analogy between conscience and knowledge-how, and moral conviction and knowledge-that:

In a certain sense, I, having read the text-books and been a spectator, know how to swim; that is, I know what actions people must take to progress in a desired direction in the water, with the nostrils clear of the water. But no-one would say that I really know how to swim or that I have swimming-skill, unless when I do it myself I usually succeed. And it would be absurd to say that I have skill or expertness in the swimming of others, though in the academic sense of the word ‘know’ I may know just what mistakes they are making. The proper manifestations of my skill are my performances and not mere directions to others. And the proper manifestations of my conscience are in my good conduct, or reluctance to behave ill or remorse afterwards and resolutions to reform. (Ryle, Collected Essays, 198) But what ﬁrst led Ryle to this distinction between two forms of knowledge? An answer can be found three years earlier, at a symposium on “Induction and Hypothesis” at the Joint Meeting of the Mind Association and the Aristo- telian Society on 10 July 1937, immediately after the end of MacDonald’s Girton fellowship, and just as she took up her post at St. Hilda’s. MacDonald gave the lead paper, and the respondents were Ryle and Isaiah Berlin. This is the ﬁrst recorded philosophical interaction between MacDonald and Ryle. MacDonald’s paper opens with remarks, broadly Wittgensteinian in spirit, about the nature of philosophical problems: “the problem of induction … shows the usual marks of a philosophical puzzle” because “It seems to be concerned with a logical impossibility”–there seems to be “some kind of logical barrier between the present and the future”–yet “in ordinary life” we can easily tell what will happen if, for instance, someone ingests arsenic (MacDo- nald, “Induction and Hypothesis I”,20–1). She divides her discussion between ‘rationalist’ and ‘empiricist’ responses, arguing that both use words in ways that depart from their ordinary meaning, without giving them a clear alterna- tive sense – for the rationalist, ‘accident’ and ‘miracle’, and for the empiricist, ‘law’ and ‘hypothesis’. For our purposes, what matters is her treatment of the empiricist response. She associates this with Ramsey and Ayer, and accuses them of confusing two distinct forms of knowledge – knowledge of truths, and knowledge of rules (or knowledge how to apply rules). For Ramsey, “an empirical generalization or law” was not a proposition, but “a rule of conduct or guide for behaviour of the form 12 M. KREMER

‘If you meet an X treat it as having φ …’” Ayer generalized this, taking “all empirical propositions whatsoever as hypotheses or rules for the interpretation of future experience …”. Such hypotheses can be believed as highly probable, but not known to be true. Nonetheless they are our only source of “information about the world” (MacDonald, “Induction and Hypothesis I”,25). In response, MacDonald distinguishes rules from truths. Ramsey and Ayer accept that analytic propositions are “rules for the use of symbols to which ‘true’ and ‘false’ are inapplicable”. But empirical generalizations must be rules in another sense, “which is not concerned with symbols and is, presumably, concerned with true and false”, since they are supposed to “give us knowledge of matters of fact”. Against the idea that we can believe, but not know, such propositions, MacDonald argues that belief is a preparatory state to knowledge: “to believe and act on p is a way of discovering the truth or falsity of p and so coming to know either p or not-p”. Thus, belief and knowledge are opposed attitudes to a common propositional object, and believing that p is incompatible with knowing that p. “But”, she adds, “there is another sense of ‘know’, I think, which applies to rules but is not opposed to ‘believe’” (MacDonald, “Induction and Hypothesis I”, 26). This knowledge of rules is not opposed to belief because it operates in a diﬀerent domain – we cannot believe a rule. MacDonald elaborates this distinction in the following crucial passage:

I can ask ‘Do you know your instructions?’ or ‘Do you know the rules?’–‘Do you know what you have to do?’…And it would not be sensible to ask ‘Do you know the rules to be true?’ in this usage. ‘Knowing the rules’ here means understanding and being able to apply them. But it would be absurd to say ‘I believe the rule for treating men as mortal’ or ‘I believe what to do when I meet a gas’. So that if empirical propositions and laws are pragmatic rules I may know how to apply them but cannot be said to believe or disbelieve them. If I can be said to believe them to be true or false it must also make sense to say that I know them. (MacDonald, “Induction and Hypothesis I”,26–7, my emphasis) Here, the contrast is clear between knowledge of rules – knowledge-how – and knowledge of truths. MacDonald proceeds to develop her own view of induction by considering the use of ‘hypothesis’ and ‘law’ in science and ordinary life. What is of greater interest for our purposes, though, are Ryle’s and Berlin’s responses to her paper. Ryle briefly mentions MacDonald’s points about knowledge, signalling his agreement that “Scientists’ general propositions are neither commands nor signals, statements or recommendations of habits. They are truths and falsehoods” (Ryle, “Induction and Hypothesis II”, 36). Berlin’s response, however, clarifies the relationship between MacDonald’s distinction between two forms of knowledge, and Ryle’s later thought. According to Berlin, MacDonald actually “distinguishes three senses of the word ‘knowledge’”: knowledge of analytic propositions; knowledge of “rules, BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 13 instructions, etc., e.g. how to play a game, how to speak a language, how to drive a car, etc.”; and knowledge of facts. Berlin summarizes MacDonald’s argument in terms reminiscent of both Wittgenstein, and Ryle’s later doctrine of ‘category mistakes’: the three senses of “know”, while “radically distinct”, “in themselves … offer no problems”; but “when we confuse them”, asking of the object of one sense how it is related to the others, “or even fuse the senses into one”, we get into trouble. This is “ultimately a linguistic or gram- matical blunder, although it may disguise itself as a logical or epistemological crux”. We avoid the problems by keeping the senses distinct: “Alternatives to this position are eliminated not because they are false but because they are nonsensical” (Berlin, “Induction and Hypothesis III”,66–7). Berlin offers a complex critique of MacDonald’s argument, but again only one aspect matters to us: his claim that knowledge in the first sense, of analytic truths, “reduces to something very similar to, if not completely identical with” knowledge in the second sense, knowledge-how (Berlin, “Induction and Hypothesis III”, 68). He argues that analytic truths are true by definition, where adefinition is “a … rule for using symbols”. Hence, knowledge of analytic truths is just knowledge of rules, in

a perfectly normal sense of the word “rule”; we are said to “know” algebra or a system of shorthand or how to play chess in the same sense as that in which we know how to swim, or what to do in the case of a ﬁre. (Berlin, “Induction and Hypothesis III”, 73) This might seem parallel to Ryle’s later claim that “knowing a rule is knowing how” (Ryle, Collected Essays, 227), but Berlin’s explanation of knowledge of rules could also ﬁt Ryle’s intellectualist:

… what we mean when we say that we know, is either that we understand the sentences which state the rules (or could deduce or remember them if we tried), or that we believe that we could, if we chose, respond to the relevant situations by behaving in a certain fashion … . (Berlin, “Induction and Hypothesis III”,73–4) Here knowledge of rules – knowledge-how – is explained in terms of propositional understanding of sentences, or belief about our capacities for behav- ioural response. Here, then, MacDonald’s argument and Berlin’s response set the agenda for Ryle’s later work on knowledge-how. Although this did not fully ﬂower in Ryle’s writings for eight years, the seeds had been planted.

5. Wittgenstein, MacDonald, and Ryle Thus, this encounter with MacDonald’s work may have importantly inﬂuenced Ryle’s thought. In turn, MacDonald’s critique of Ayer and Ramsey represented her own thinking through of ideas she had ﬁrst 14 M. KREMER encountered in inchoate form in Wittgenstein’s lectures in 1934–6, when he was already working over the ideas of rule-following, learning and knowledge of rules, and “knowing how to go on”, which would become central to the Philosophical Investigations (Hintikka, “Rules, Games, and Experiences”). For example, in Michaelmas Term 1934 Wittgenstein says: “The expressions ‘being able to’, ‘understanding how to’, ‘knowing how to go on’, (for example, in a series) have practically the same grammars” (Wittgenstein, Lec- tures 1932–35, 92). This is echoed in Investigations, §§150–1:

The grammar of the word “know” is evidently closely related to the grammar of the words “can”, “is able to”. But also closely related to the word “understand”. But there is also this use of the word “know”: we say “Now I know!”–and similarly, “Now I can do it!” and “Now I understand!”. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 65e) This latter passage occurs during a discussion of the knowledge of how to apply a rule, in which Wittgenstein works to counter any identification of this knowledge with an occurrent state of mind of the knower. The lectures already suggest this train of thought. Wittgenstein considers “the mental states, images, etc” that occur “when a person knows how to go on”. While “going on does have something to do with mental occurrences” Wittgenstein claims that “more than these are required as criteria for … knowing how to go on”. Such occurrences could accompany a single case of conforming to a rule, whereas we would require “empirical evidence” that “he passes certain tests” in order to be “justified in saying he could go on” (Wittgenstein, Lectures 1932–35,92–3). In MacDonald’s response to Ramsey and Ayer, we see her developing these ideas and deploying them to powerful critical effect. The result is strongly suggestive of Ryle’s later arguments concerning the knowledge- how/knowledge-that distinction, and the dispositional character of knowledge-how. Ryle did not make much of MacDonald’s discussion of this topic in his 1937 symposium response, but it is entirely possible that, after hearing MacDonald’s paper and Berlin’s reply, he would have talked further with MacDonald about this once she had arrived in Oxford. This suggests a more general possibility. The influence of Wittgenstein on Ryle is widely acknowledged – as MacDonald herself notes in her review of The Concept of Mind, “Professor Ryle’s debt to Wittgenstein is very marked” (MacDonald, “Professor Ryle”, 80). But perhaps what looks like a debt to Witt- genstein was, at some points, as much a debt to MacDonald, and to the use she made of ideas inspired by Wittgenstein in her own work. Of course, Ryle learned from Wittgenstein at first hand, on their walking holidays and on occasions when he visited the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club. Yet on the one hand, MacDonald was a closer friend of Ryle’s than was Wittgenstein, and on the other hand, she had more contact with Wittgenstein at BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 15

Cambridge than Ryle is likely to have had in his entire life. Moreover, MacDo- nald brought to Oxford her copies of The Blue Book and The Brown Book, access to which was still very limited at the time. According to Isaiah Berlin, “…the ‘Blue Book’…had, I think, by 1937 or so, arrived in Oxford” (Berlin, “Austin”, 11). Perhaps it arrived with MacDonald. MacDonald’s own thought continued to be shaped by her experience with Wittgenstein in important ways, and in later papers she occasionally quotes from The Blue Book, and from Wittgenstein’s lectures. Therefore, her conversations and correspondence with Ryle could have contributed to seeming Wittgensteinian inﬂu- ences on his work.22 In the following sections, we will see another example of this, concerning the development of Ryle’s methodological views.

6. MacDonald and The Concept of Mind In January 1951, MacDonald published a critical notice of The Concept of Mind, which illuminates MacDonald and Ryle’s intellectual relationship in several ways. First, in certain respects MacDonald showed a finer understanding of Ryle’s book than the early reviews by Ryle’s own colleagues, J.L. Austin (anon- ymously) in the Times Literary Supplement, and Stuart Hampshire in Mind. Ryle set himself against “the Myth of the Ghost in the Machine”, his label for Car- tesian dualism, arguing that this position rested on a “family of radical category mistakes” (Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 8). Showing this meant dissipating “…the hallowed contrast between Mind and Matter” but “not by either of the equally hallowed absorptions of Mind by Matter or of Matter by Mind”, since “both Idealism and Materialism are answers to an improper question” (Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 12). Yet he recognized that he was liable to be misunderstood as embracing a behaviourist materialism: in the first chapter he admits that “In attempting to explode the myth I shall probably be taken to be denying well-known facts about the mental life of human beings”, and in the final chapter he confesses that “The general trend of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly be stigmatised as ‘behaviourist’” (Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 6, 300). Austin and Hampshire both ultimately understood Ryle in this way. According to Austin, Ryle exhibits “the fervour of a proselyte” in preaching “the doctrine of ‘one world’”,like“those who … revolt against a dichotomy to which they have once been addicted” and so “go over to maintain that only one of the alleged pair of opposites really exists at all”.While“Ryle does genuinely attack the myth as a whole” and is “convinced that the body is not a ‘machine’”,he“doesbelievethatitalone,andnotthe

22Of course, Wittgensteinian ideas were ‘in the air’, and being discussed by other philosophers whom Ryle would have known, such as Alice Ambrose and John Wisdom; most notably, Friedrich Waismann arrived in Oxford as a refugee scholar in 1940, with Ryle’s assistance, after two years at Cambridge. Baker, “Waismann, Friedrich”. 16 M. KREMER

‘ghost’,exists” (Austin, “Intelligent Behaviour”, 220). Similarly, Hampshire portrays Ryle’sconclusionas“Not Two-Worlds, but One World; not a Ghost, but a Body; (people are not) Occult but Obvious. Professor Ryle has been betrayed into using the weapons of his enemy …” (Hampshire, “Critical Notice”,238). MacDonald responds insightfully to these characterizations of Ryle. Refer- ring to the earlier reviews she writes that “It has been suggested that, despite his disavowals, Professor Ryle does not succeed in dispelling the myth but only substitutes a peculiar logical monism for Descartes’ dualism. Prop- ositions about minds must be translated into propositions about bodies” (MacDonald, “Professor Ryle”, 85). But, for Ryle, materialist or mentalist alternatives “are equally unacceptable”–they “only modify the myth” (Mac- Donald, “Professor Ryle”, 83). Ryle’s “solution is more radical” since “dualism is not a factual mistake” (MacDonald, “Professor Ryle”, 81). MacDonald brings out what Elmer Sprague has called Ryle’s “personism” (Sprague, Persons and their Minds, 10), according to which “mental qualities are ascribed not to minds but to human beings. In a sense, minds (and bodies) are part of the myth” (MacDonald, “Professor Ryle”, 85). Ryle’s “basic contention”, his “main thesis” is “that the only appropriate answer to who or what has a certain mental quality, e.g. intelligence, is a proposition containing a proper name or a personal pronoun” (MacDonald, “Professor Ryle”, 85). MacDonald’s reading of Ryle is borne out by such passages as “Assertions about a person’s mind are … assertions of special sorts about that person” (Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 8). But she does not try to paper over the more behaviouristic aspects of Ryle’s book:

A man is not just a body, nor is a picture just paints and canvas; but to talk about a man is to talk in a certain idiom about what a body does, as to talk about a work of art is to talk in another idiom about what has been done with the paints on the canvas. (MacDonald, “Professor Ryle”, 86) She does not hesitate to speak of Ryle’s “logical or analytical behaviourism”, but emphasizes that he does not “deny the difference between a man and a well-conditioned mechanism”, and that unlike psychological behaviourism “logical behaviourism … is a theory about what words mean, not about how dogs and infants learn” (MacDonald, “Professor Ryle”, 85). MacDonald’s essay contains further insights into Ryle’s thought, for example, her discussion of his views on the mental character of bodily action. Given her friendship with Ryle, she may well have discussed his book with him while writing her review. If so, her responses to Austin and Hampshire may reflect his own thinking. Nonetheless, her review is far from a merely positive account; it contains pointed criticisms, which may also have influenced Ryle’s philosophical development. BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 17

7. Categories and analogies: conﬂicting methodologies MacDonald’s critique of Ryle goes to the heart of the central methodological motif of The Concept of Mind, the idea of a category mistake. Ryle had developed this idea, derived from his reading of Husserl, Russell, and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, in two important methodological papers, “Categories” (1938) and “Philosophical Arguments” (1945). He later recalled that The Concept of Mind was written as “an example of the method really working”, and so “was a philosophical book written with a meta-philosophical purpose”:

I wanted to apply, and be seen to be applying to some large-scale philosophical crux the answer to the question that had preoccupied us in the 1920s, and especially in the 1930s, the question namely ‘What constitutes a philosophical problem; and what is the way to solve it?’…by the later 1940s it was time, I thought, to exhibit a sustained piece of analytical hatchet-work being directed upon some notorious and large-sized Gordian Knot. (Ryle, “Autobiographical”, 12) Ryle summarized the method in a slogan: “Philosophy is the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines” (Ryle, The Concept of Mind, lxi). Philosophical problems arise when philosophers make ‘category mistakes’, employing concepts as if they belonged to one logical category when they belong to another. Reductio ad absurdum arguments reveal such errors, showing that the views being criticized are not merely contradictory, but nonsensical. Such arguments also “indicate to what logical types the concepts under investigation ought to be allocated” (Ryle, The Concept of Mind, lx). MacDonald, beginning from ideas she had encountered in Wittgenstein’s lectures, developed a subtly diﬀerent metaphilosophy of her own. Her account focused on “The Philosopher’s Use of Analogy”–the title of a paper she gave to the Aristotelian Society in 1938, two weeks after Ryle pre- sented “Categories”. The idea that philosophical problems arise from mislead- ing analogies in our language was a central theme in Wittgenstein’s later thought.23 MacDonald’s approach diﬀered from Wittgenstein in that she focused on philosophers’ deliberate appeals to analogies, and argued that:

the informative air, the plausibility and the paradoxes of most philosophical theories are not due to any astonishing information acquired by the philosopher but to a curious practice of using words by analogy without giving the analogy any intelligible application. In agreement with Wittgenstein, she suggested that:

It is for this reason that such philosophical propositions have been called sense- less. They try to operate with ordinary words when they have deprived them of

23This theme is explored in several of Gordon Baker’s papers, collected in Baker, Wittgenstein’s Method. 18 M. KREMER

their ordinary functions. They recombine known words in an unfamiliar way while trading on their familiar meanings. Hence, “the only help we can get in tackling philosophical problems is from understanding the uses of words and their use and misuse by philosophers” (MacDonald, “The Philosopher’s Use of Analogy”, 293–4). In her 1938 paper, MacDonald illustrated these points primarily through a discussion of philosophical accounts of form and matter – the payoﬀ of the work she had proposed to carry out at Girton on The Concept of Matter. But she cautioned that “I do not wish to disparage the making of comparisons and analogies which are often very useful” (MacDonald, “The Philosopher’s Use of Analogy”, 312). Here too her approach is broadly in agreement with Wittgenstein. Gordon Baker has drawn attention to a passage in TS-220, the source for many key metaphilosophical passages of the Investigations, in which Wittgenstein wrote:

We then change the aspect by placing side-by-side with one system of expression other systems of expression. – The bondage in which one analogy holds us can be broken by placing another [analogy] alongside which we acknowledge to be equally well justified. (Translation from Baker, Wittgenstein’s Method, 30) This passage stems from an earlier manuscript, MS-142, written in 1936,24 while MacDonald was still at Girton. While not reproduced in the Investi- gations, in the manuscript and typescriptitoccursimmediatelybefore the crucial §122 of the finished work, in which Wittgenstein speaks of the need to achieve an “overview of the use of our words” through providing a “surveyable representation”25 (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investi- gations,54e). MacDonald offers a subtle development and application of such ideas after the war – well before the publication of the Investigations – especially in “Natural Rights” (1947) and “Ethics and the Ceremonial Use of Language” (1950). She argues that what we need to understand philosophically conten- tious ideas such as ethical obligation and natural rights is multiple analogies or models, each of which exhibits how problematic concepts and judgements “function in a manner logically similar to some other type of sentence”, showing both the strengths and limitations of each model. This moves beyond the negative task of demonstrating that “philosophical theories … are mere linguistic confusions” since “the comparison of different types of utterance is illuminating, not because it shows that one is exactly like another, but that it may be like a great many others in different respects” (MacDonald, “Ethics and the Ceremonial Use of Language”, 212–3).

24Hacker and Schulte in Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, xix. 25‘Perspicuous representation’ in Anscombe’s translation. BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 19

8. MacDonald’s critique of Ryle In her review of The Concept of Mind, MacDonald brings these ideas to bear on Ryle. She recognizes that “Ryle’s attack on the dualist ‘myth’ shows, again, that analogies are dangerous in philosophy”, but questions whether he has given a “complete account of our knowledge of minds”. She argues that he too has relied on analogies, as is “unavoidable” for a philosopher, but he has failed to realize that “a complete philosophical analysis would consist of many partial analogies, of illumination from many angles while leaving its subject ‘What it is and not another thing’” (MacDonald, “Professor Ryle”,86). In The Concept of Mind, Ryle explained the notion of a category mistake through a series of examples, beginning with the case of the visitor who is shown the colleges, libraries and so on at Oxford, but asks “But where is the University?” (Ryle, The Concept of Mind,6–8). MacDonald sees him here as providing analogies for the treatment he will give of the concept of mind: “Professor Ryle’s chief method is to compare the mind with those other ‘occult entities’, the state, the university, the average man, etc., and apply to it the treatment which has succeeded so well with them”. She admits that “Up to a point … the comparison is illuminating”, but suggests that “it breaks down”, because of one crucial “difference between men and the other terms of Professor Ryle’s comparison”–human beings, unlike Uni- versities, divisions, and team-spirit, are self-conscious. “Each of us is, at most times, aware of what he does and what happens to him” (MacDonald, “Pro- fessor Ryle”, 86). Here, Ryle’s behaviourist tendencies cause difficulty; some other analogy or model is needed, on her conception, to perfect Ryle’s account. She considers an aspect of his work which might be thought to address the problem – his hybrid category of “semi-hypothetical” or “mongrel categori- cal” statements, including “such qualities as being careful, taking heed, minding” (MacDonald, “Professor Ryle”,86–7). Ryle uses the example of a migrating bird to introduce this idea: to say that a bird is migrating is to say both that it is migratory – disposed to travel in certain directions at certain times – and that it is now so travelling (Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 124–5). He applies this model to “a battery of concepts all of which may be brought under the useful because vague heading of ‘minding’” (Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 118). For example, someone who is “now doing something with some degree of some sort of heed” is “actually meeting a concrete call” while “in a ‘ready’ frame of mind” (Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 129). MacDonald argues, however, that this conception puts pressure on Ryle’s insistence that our mental lives are “private” only in the unproblematic sense in which “‘private’ is ordinarily used not for what is necessarily confined to one but what is actually restricted to one (or a few) and could become public to all” (MacDonald, “ Professor Ryle”, 83). For, she adds: 20 M. KREMER

a “heeding” frame of mind does then seem to be a condition of being aware or conscious in a way unobservable by others. And if any part of an assertion states what cannot be publicly manifested in behaviour then something like a private, inner life seems to have been conceded. (MacDonald, “Professor Ryle”, 87) The same is true of Ryle’s discussion of “the convenient privacy which charac- terises the tunes that run in my head and the things that I see in my mind’s eye” (Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 23). According to Ryle, MacDonald writes, these are not private “in any metaphysically noxious sense” but are rather “of the same kind as our audible songs, conversations, and visible sums on paper or calculating machine and could be similarly imparted”. But, MacDo- nald insists, this should be resisted: “they are not and their unrevealed state is very queer”. They are at least at “the vanishing point of public behaviour where another analogy is required to complete the analysis” (MacDonald, “Professor Ryle”, 89). MacDonald ends in a Wittgensteinian mood: when we think of ourselves as “social beings, using a common language, understanding each other in a public world … the ‘myth’ seems incredible and is triumphantly dispelled”. But this Rylean triumph over the myth is unsatisfying because it “does not explain its fascination” (MacDonald, “Professor Ryle”, 89). Here she expresses another Wittgensteinian idea: that, as Cora Diamond has put it, “in philosophy you really have to undo the philosophical knot and not just snip it off”. We are “entangled in philosophical knots”, and “in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, the attention to our practices is part of the attempt at disentanglement” (Diamond, “Naturalism and Pragmatism”, 13). MacDonald sees Ryle as having attempted to snip off the knot rather than untangle it – as his later reference to a “Gordian knot”, to be cut through rather than untied, perhaps reveals. He has not sufficiently recognized that “myths are never gratuitiously introduced into philosophy. They are always very strongly suggested by certain facts and expressions” (MacDonald, “Professor Ryle”, 89). Ryle’s target, the myth of the ghost in the machine, responds to the truth that each of us claims “final authority for the truth of some statements about himself. … There is some evidence about the condition of another which I cannot have nor he about mine”. There remains “an acute philosophical problem”: “how to convey this situation without the pointless philosophical expedient of inventing mythical entities …”. She concludes that “perhaps the story can be told only by the poets and novelists” (MacDonald, “Professor Ryle”, 89).

9. The aftermath of MacDonald’s critique I conclude with two possible eﬀects of MacDonald’s critique on Ryle’s philosophical development. First, there is a notable methodological shift between The Concept of Mind and his 1953 Tarner Lectures, published in 1954 as BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 21

Dilemmas. There, Ryle argues that philosophical problems arise from “litiga- tions between lines of thought” taken from different fields of knowledge, which seem inexorably to lead to opposed conclusions (Ryle, Dilemmas, 4). To dissolve such dilemmas we must show that seemingly opposed thinkers are “talking at cross-purposes” (Ryle, Dilemmas, 10). Talk of “categories” here “can be helpful as a familiar mnemonic with some beneficial associ- ations”, but “It can also be an impediment, if credited with the virtues of a skeleton-key”, because there is no “exact, professional way of using it, in which, like a skeleton key, it will turn all our locks for us”. Rather,

there is an inexact, amateurish way of using it in which, like a coal-hammer, it will make a satisfactory knocking noise on doors which we want opened to us. It gives the answers to none of our questions but it can be made to arouse people to the questions in a properly brusque way. (Ryle, Dilemmas, 10) This is a striking demotion of the notion of category from the pre-eminent role it had in The Concept of Mind. Ryle returns to a point he had made in “Phi- losophical Arguments” (1945): “Philosophical problems cannot be posed or solved piecemeal”, because we have to “determine the cross-bearings of all of a galaxy of ideas belonging to the same or contiguous ﬁelds” (Ryle, Essays, 211). In Dilemmas he spells this out in terms of the metaphor of untan- gling knots:

The litigation between the two initial platitudes involves a whole web of conﬂ- icting interests. There is not just a single recalcitrant knot in the middle of one of the concepts involved. All the strings between all of them are implicated in the one tangle. (Ryle, Dilemmas,26–7) Could this methodological shift reﬂect in any way Ryle’s reaction to Mac- Donald’s essay? The review appeared in January 1951; a few weeks earlier, on 25 December 1950, Ryle had written to the Australian philosopher John Pass- more suggesting a new direction:26

Sometimes the plot of one story seems to conflict with that of another, or at least some of the developments of one seem to conflict with another – & yet, the tellers of both stories know quite well that they are right. Is not this the stan- dard perplexity-situation? Determinism, Sense-Datum-ism, Body-Mind, etc. Talking – as I’ve done in C of M – about categories etc., is only to give a name to the thing. The question is how to describe the differences between the stories. Does this sound to you a thing that wants doing – & if so, that can be done? While this was written before MacDonald’s essay appeared, if MacDonald and Ryle had discussed the essay before its publication, as might happen when a

26National Library of Australia, MS 7613. 22 M. KREMER philosopher reviews a book by a very close friend, it could still indicate that her review had had some eﬀect. Finally, the point on which MacDonald pushed Ryle most forcefully in her essay – those seemingly irreducibly ‘inner’, self-aware aspects of our mental lives, over which we each have ﬁnal authority – became something of an obsession for Ryle in the last two decades of his career. Ryle devoted about a dozen papers, beginning with “Thinking and Language” (1951), to the question of the nature of thinking – as he sometimes put it, “What is Le Penseur doing?” (the subtitle of his 1958 “The Thinking of Thoughts”).27 One can only speculate about conversations that MacDonald and Ryle might have had on these topics (and of course, MacDonald would not have been the only one to cause Ryle to rethink his views on this matter). Yet again, as among the closest of friends, might they not have talked this through?

Acknowledgements Fiona Richardson, librarian at Linacre College, Oxford; Oliver Mahony, archivist at St. Hilda’s College; Hannah Westall, archivist and curator at Girton College, Cambridge; and Michelle Campbell, Business Support Oﬃce for Access to Records at Action for Children, provided access to archival materials cited in this paper. John Passmore’s daughter Diana Millar allowed me access to Passmore’s correspondence with Gilbert Ryle. The Principal and Fellows of Hertford College, Oxford gave permission to quote from MacDonald’s letters and her Girton College fellowship application, as well as Ryle’s letter to Passmore. Sophia Connell provided helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, as did audiences at La Sapienza University, the University of Chicago, and the Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy.

Funding A grant from the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago supported work on this paper.

ORCID Michael Kremer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4382-817X

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27See Tanney, “A Peg for Some Thoughts”, for discussion of these essays. BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23

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