Courses of Action or the Uncatchableness of Mental ActsGilbert Ryle* *Note: This was a paper originally read at the annual conference of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour Group at Bangor in April 1974, and not, as far as we know, previously published. Professor T. R. Miles explains the circumstances: "It seems to me that I owe your readers some explanation as to how this script came to be in my possession. In the early 1970s I and my colleagues invited Gilbert Ryle to present a paper to members of the Psychology Department at Bangor. At the last moment he was prevented from coming on account of his sister's illness. So as not to let us down, however, he sent me the script of the paper which he had planned to read. I myself read it in his place, doing my best - however ineffectively - to capture the delivery style of Gilbert himself. The script then remained on my bookshelf for around twenty years - until it occurred to me in the early 1990s that there was no firm evidence that it had every appeared as a published paper. At this point I began to wonder whether I was in possession of a lost masterpiece! When I made enquiries amongst my philosophical colleagues the responses were all negative: no one knew of the paper's existence. Yet it was clearly vintage Ryle, and, if it had not been already published, it was surely a shame that it should be lost to the world. With some hesitation I wrote to the editor of Philosophy, explaining the situation and asking if he would be interested in publication. On his advice I carried out various further pieces of detective work so as to enable all of us to be sure that the paper had, indeed, not previously appeared in print. No positive evidence has emerged with the result that your editor and I are confident that the paper is now appearing for the first time." The Jellyfish Phenomenon Sometimes, and not always for philosophical or psychological ends, we try to give precise descriptions of the ways in which we had been mentally occupied while we were trying to think out the answer to a question or were trying to decide what to do or how to do it. What exactly did this pondering consist of? Just what were those acts or processes of thinking like? You will agree with me that such attempts are always total failure. The task feels like that of trying to extract a jelly fish out of the sea from a fast moving boat and with only a knitting needle. Even a Hume or a Virginia Woolf never gets the transparent, invertebrate and slippery creature up to the surface of the water – if indeed the creature had been there at all. What makes our thinkings such description-bafflers? Why can our introspections do no better than stammer? Let me being by hardening-up our puzzle in three or four ways. 1. In some of our thinkings, especially in our school-drilled addings, subtractions, multiplyings and dividings, we know how to arrive at perfectly definite results. I do not stammer in telling you the product of 17 x 13, after I have finished working it out. But I do stammer badly when you now ask me to describe that working itself. Why? 2. In this same sort of case, and a few others, I may be able to tell you, without any stammering, via what interim steps I had got to my result. Indeed, I might sometimes show you those steps as I had pencilled them on the back of an envelope: ‘3 x 7 = 21; 3 x 9 = 27; 27 +2 = 29; …’ Yet if you now pester me with enquires, not about these interim steps, but about my movements or passages between one such step and its successor, or between the last step and the final result, again I stammer. Why? 3. Nor do I ordinarily have the slightest difficult in informing you precisely what was occupying my mind just now. Being myself the ponderer, of course I know at first hand what I was mulling over. Yet this Cartesian certainty about the topic of my recent musings seems to fade out the moment I attempt to be autobiographical about the actual courses and impulses of these recent acts of ruminating. Why? 4. Nor is it only our Penseur-like ruminatings and reckonings that slither off our knitting-needles. All the multifarious things that are sheltered under Descartes’ ‘cogito’–parasol baffle our descriptive powers in the same way. (a) I can tell with perfect definiteness that what I feel towards the trickster is indignation and not merely irritation; and even on just what grounds I condemn him. Yet when you now ask me what ‘internally’ marks off my indignation with the trickster from my mere irritation with the garrulous barber, I have nothing firm to say. (b) What are the introspected symptoms of my meaning my sneer, as distinct from my sneering in fun or on the stage? (c) How does my hoping that it will snow differ in ‘feel’ from either my wanting it to snow or my expecting it to snow? (d) I had made up my mind yesterday to travel tomorrow, and I have not since changed my mind; but my state of mind today betrays no ripples, currents, eddies or stagnant pools of this persistent resolve. Introspection finds nothing to report. Yet tomorrow I duly do travel. (e) I can tell you in full detail what I greatly enjoyed, yet I can tell you no details at all about the composition, the career or the lineaments of this great enjoyment. Why not? One over-familiar explanation for our jellyfish-phenomenon is this: its vogue dates from relatively recent theories of the Subconscious and the Unconscious Mind. Some ‘mental’ things, unlike ‘external’ or ‘physical’ things and happenings, systematically baffle our powers of description because they are hidden deep down inside the mind of their owner, their author or their victim. We already possess (so it is supposed), or anyhow can construct, the requisite descriptive-vocabulary and the requisite syntax in which to report the qualities, careers etc., of these ‘mental acts’, etc., once they are observed, but (the would-be Freudian story goes), they evade the required observation by lurking inside a metaphorical grotto or cellar. This answer is worthless, and not just for verification reasons. It explains away a non-accidental indescribability by fetching in a contingent inaccessibility, as if it just happens by bad luck that I – I, of all people! – am so trap-doored off from all or some of my own internal ruminatings, my own internal enjoyments of things, and my own internal intentions to do things that I cannot discern what they are like, or , therefore, say what they are like. It is because many or most of my introspections are blinkered that I have to stammer. Yet novelists, who freely invent their characters’ inner lives, seem to catch nothing more than we catch. Notice, en passant, how this story of our introspections being blinkered differs from the Descartes, Locke, Brentano, Mill story of introspection being the peculiar source of absolute indubitabilities. So far from this catacomb myth giving the explanation of the jellyfish-phenomenon, it is, rather, the jellyfish-phenomenon that partly explains the myth. It is the fact that we falter and stammer when trying to chronicle and describe our own mental acts, states and processes that has driven theorists, including ourselves, to take seriously the hypothesis of our mental acts and processes as lurking even from ourselves deep down inside (metaphorical) grottos or oubliettes. It is because the knitting-needle caught no fish that we nominated a transparent and submerged jellyfish to be its evasive quarry. But what if it was our ideas of act-description or process-chronicling that was the source of the trouble? To illustrate this suggestion: (a) A camera-proud boy at the Zoo snaps an eagle, a snake, and an octopus. He then follows a finger-post marked ‘Mammals’; but though he photographs successfully a lion, a wolf and an otter, etc., he looks in vain for a mammal to photograph. He asks: ‘Are mammals microscopic or camera-shy creatures? Or else, are they unphotographable in the ways in which breezes, smells and ghosts are?’ He has to learn that a snapshot of a lion, a wolf or an otter is a snapshot of a mammal. Mammals are not creatures of an extra species, with cages, keepers, looks and voices of their own; they are the genus of which lions, otters, etc., belong to the species. What cannot indeed be captured by the camera, or be put in a cage of its own, because like Locke’s Abstract Triangle, it cannot exist, is a mammal that is neither a lion, nor, a wolf, nor an otter, etc. It was the negatively disjunctive, or neither-nor creature unsuspiciously required by the boy for his camera that had made the trouble. (b) The boy now sees ‘Danger’ notices on the bars of the lions’ cage, above the snake-pit, at the foot of an electric pylon, in front of a road excavation, outside a garage-exit, at the edge of a reservoir. Again he finds no creature to give photographic substance to these signs. He wonders: ‘Is my camera defective? Or are dangers nocturnal creatures like bats, or burrowing creatures like moles?’ This time he has to learn a more complex lesson. Dangers are not creatures or things or even happenings of any species or even of any genus. There are no cages, keepers or feeding times for them. They are situations-in-which-people-are-likely-to-undergo-harm-of-one-sort-or-another, of being mangled, drowned, poisoned, electrocuted, run over, etc. The explicit statement of what the danger is would have to incorporate such expressions as ‘if’, ‘unless’, ‘either-or’, ‘whenever’, ‘anyone’, ‘not’, ‘may’, ‘cannot’, and, of course, ‘likely’, ‘death’, and ‘damage’, none of which could occur in the statement of what a particular animal looks and sounds like, or is now doing, etc. There is no such thing as a description, or a photograph advertising what a particular danger looks like or sounds like, or is now doing, etc. The term ‘danger’ is semantically too sophisticated or of too High an Order to permit it to occupy sentence-vacancies that welcome specific terms like ‘lion’, or even generic terms like ‘mammal’ and ‘damage’. A person who is in a risk-situation can of course be tape-recorded or photographed either suffering or not suffering the threatened harm. But the likelihood of this harm neither evades nor is captured by the camera; it is neither a visible nor an occult thing; neither a ground level nor a subterranean thing; it is neither a describable nor an indescribable thing, since it is not a thing. Yet there is nothing mysterious or shrouded about, say, the danger of one’s being clawed by a lioness, if one gets close to the bars of her cage, or about its differences from that of being electrocuted by the power-wires, if one climbs the pylon. The unphotographability of a danger is not like that of a ghost, but more like that of a climate, a regime, a difficulty, an academic qualification or a rate of interest. I am now going to show, in partial analogy, that our powers of thought-description can be baffled by their would-be objects being, like dangers, semantically of too High and Order for witness-box ‘What are they like?’ questions to be asked about them, or for snapshots or dictaphone records of them to be taken. I aim thereby to open one cap, wide enough for the notion of Thinking, between our so-called ‘outer’ and our so-called ‘inner’ lives, between reductionism and duplicationism about ‘mental acts’ and ’mental processes’.
Chain-undertakings or Courses of Action Let me first clear one thing out of the way. Aristotle, with non anti-Cartesian end in view, rightly distinguished from our here-and-now actions, activities, undergoings, etc., our Hexeis or Dispositions, that is, our abilities, incapacities, frailties, propensities, tastes, habits, etc. Some active and transitive verbs, such as the verbs ‘to know’, ‘to own’, ‘to aspire’, and ‘to belong to’, signify not actions, processes or episodes, etc., whether overt or ‘inner’, but tense-general potentialities, skills, possessions, proneness, qualifications, and the lack of them. I have discussed these before and I shall not discuss them again. Among the things that we do at specific times, on purpose and for reasons, with or without skill, with or without success, of our own free wills or under orders, there are some which are too complex, too protracted and, sometimes, too syndicated to be classed with actions. More importantly, they constitutionally incorporate subordinate actions, without being reducible to these actions or to any sets of them any more than syllables are reducible to the vowels or consonants which they incorporate. (a) For example, training a puppy demands manifold, systematic and often repeated efforts from the puppy’s trainer or trainers. Asked what we did out on the common ten minutes ago, we could not answer ‘We trained the puppy,’ but at most ‘We did another bit of puppy-training’. The command ‘Train your puppy now’ would be ludicrous, as would ‘’Show me a snap shot of what puppy-training looks like.’ So would ‘She suddenly trained her puppy’. There is no particular thing done here-and-now by us trainers to or with our puppy that might not be done to or with by someone how had no training-policy at all. We might all pat the puppy, give it biscuits, take it out on the common and whistle to it. There is no special class of Supra-Acts of Training; there are only the every-day subordinate or infra-acts, by patiently doing and repeating which we train it; but infra-acts so planned, concerted, etc., as gradually to build up in the puppy the required obediences, habits, reliances, fears and dexterities. I train the puppy by (inter alia) whistling to it. But my whistlings need not be subordinate to a puppy-training project. I can, for example, whistle to an already trained dog, or (vainly) to a cat. The whistling that is subordinated to a puppy-training programme need not differ audibly, but it does differ tactically from that which is not so subordinated. These training-exercises, which go on for weeks, do not, of course, fill up the entire days and nights of the trainers; they are sustained chains of intermittent actions, not continuous actions. Training a child, a beginner at golf, or a student is similar in the respects which matter here. So is self-training, a cardinal thing to which I shall be returning – (b) The exploration of a terrain is another obvious example of a chain-undertaking. If all goes well, the exploration is the outcome of countless particular subordinate acts on the part, maybe, or several co-operating, competing or independent explorers – acts of trudging, scaling, scanning, photographing, compass-consulting, raft-floating, rock-chipping, temperature-measuring, theodolite-reading and note-taking. Not one of these variegated, here-and-now infra-actions by doing which we explore is itself an exploration. The native porter too may glance up at the sun and drop a twig into the river, but not, like his employers, in order, by so doing to re-fix his bearings or in order to determine the direction of the current. Exploring is conducting ten thousand variegated infra-acts with one governing and complex supra-policy or Higher Order purpose. A snapshot cannot, but a cinematograph-film might show an explorer exploring. The request ‘Show me a particular act of exploration’ would be absurd. So would ‘He suddenly explored the valley’. Other obvious chain-undertakings are conducted by the student studying the German language; the invalid adhering to a diet; the author writing a book or article; the two children playing a game of spillikins against one another; the settler and his family building their new home and making their new wheat-farm; the housewife giving her house its annual spring-cleaning; all are engaged in long-term or short-term chain-undertakings, which are prosecuted by performing appropriate Lower-Order or infra-actions in tactical subordination to some Higher-Order or supra-project, and therefore, quite often, with some controlling method, time-schedule, etc. For each of the agents there is some action-programme, which may or may not be an actually worded programme, by which he abides, or else from which he backslides or deviates. The docile invalid abides by his diet by, inter alia, refusing lobster each time it is offered to him. Any of these infra-actions by itself, e.g., this spade-thrust, that sentence-dictation, those swallowings of lightly boiled eggs and those caviare-avoidings, could have been executed by a person with a different, or with no Higher Order purpose. The German radio-announcer, the language-student and his parrot may all come out with the same dissyllable ‘schrecklich’, when only one of the three is trying to master by sedulous rehearsals the pronunciation of this awkward German word. This distinction between actions and courses or chains of action is not yet a very clear one. Actions are done with intentions, while courses of action have programmes; but this contrast is not a luminous one. We have no regulations to fix what shall and what shall not count as a single action rather than as a combination or sequence of numerically different actions; and we have no regulations to fix what shall count as an action and not as a mere reaction, reflex, output of energy, automatism, or spasm. But: (a) while we should not readily swallow the story that someone was at one and the same moment performing more than, at most, three non-automatic, non-rote actions, we could readily allow that someone was, through the very same months, engaged in sedulously studying the German language, methodically training a puppy, industriously making a garden, scrupulously adhering to a diet, carefully keeping a secret, and systematically exploring his new countryside. Synchronous intentions are likely to be competitors; synchronous programmes need not to compete. (b) More important is this: while a person engaged in a chain-undertaking, like making a cake, may never have heard or read any worded instructions for making this sort of cake – she had often watched her mother making cakes of this sort – still a worded recipe could be given by a Mrs Beeton. Now such a worded programme necessarily embodies or could embody such expressions as ‘…and then…’, ‘until’, ‘while’, ‘never’, ‘need not’, ‘either… or’, ‘both… and’, ‘any’, ‘most’, ‘usually’, ‘unless’, ‘so as not to’, etc., i.e. generalising, negativing, conditional, conjunctive, disjunctive and modal expressions, etc., and these display in their subordinate clauses just how the Lower Order actions are tactically subjected to their Higher Order undertaking. These conjunctions, quantifiers, etc., will not enter into what the eye-witness reports having witnessed being done, or into what the agent confesses to having done on a particular occasion. Subordinate clauses are not wanted for a pure factual report. I diet by, inter alia, refusing lobster; there is ordinarily no further ‘by so-and-soing" to my refusing lobster. Here is an introductory list of familiar kinds of things in our adherence to which we are engaging in courses of action of chain-undertakings: policies, adopted routines, office-practices, campaigns, matches, traditions, curricula, conventions, customs, fashions, codes of manners, ceremonials, drills, regimens, schedules, styles, rituals, compacts, time-tables, recipes, techniques, procedures, gambling-systems, agendas. …A person follows a programme of any of these and other kinds, 1) not by executing any single here-and-now infra-action; 2) nor by executing any random procession of such infra-actions; 3) nor, of course, by executing any supposed supra-action; but 4) only by regularly or duly (etc.) conducting his appropriate infra-actions in intentional subordination to the programme. It follows that for our mystified Behaviourist there need be nothing here-and-now visible, or audible to distinguish what our student practising a bit of German pronunciation is doing from what his parrot and the German announcer are also doing at the same moment in pronouncing aloud the cacophonous dissyllable ‘schrecklich’. Our Behaviourist’s mystification is gratuitous. After all, in methodically studying a stretch of our student’s phonetic behaviour, he is himself engaged in a chain-undertaking of his own, namely, he is conducting an organized stretch of infra-acts of watching, listening, tape-recording, card-punching, note-taking, etc. The student is methodically rehearsing a bit of German pronunciation; he cannot do this suddenly. Our Behaviourist is equally, methodically observing this methodical rehearsal; and he cannot do this suddenly either. A worded programme of his own research-project would in its turn have to embody such negatives, conjunctions, quantifiers, etc., as ‘not’, ‘when’, ‘unless’, ‘any’, ‘at the same time as’, ‘most’, ‘either …or’, ‘in order not to’, etc. These subordinate-clause-introducers would exhibit the tactical subordinations of his own infra-acts to his own supra-undertaking. He may be a bit worried by the Cartesian menaces of his own question to the student, ‘How, if at all, do your alleged ‘purposive’ practisings of the dissyllable ‘schrecklich’ differ, since they do not audibly, from merely mechanical repetition of it?’ He should be no less worried – or else no more – by the Cartesian menaces of our question to him, ‘How do your own allegedly ‘scientific’ tapings of the student’s phonemes differ, if they do differ, from mere reflex tapings of them?’ Like dieting, neither practising nor researching is an action; like dieting, practising and researching are purposive Higher Order chain undertakings under which various actions proper are tactically conducted. Our researcher might, at this point, argue from the tensing of, e.g., ‘He was dieting intermittently last month’, or ‘I am soon going to stop dieting’, i.e., from the grammatical fact that the verb to ‘diet’ is an active verb, used in tense-specific ways, to the conclusion that dieting is not, (like knowing and possessing), a Hexis, but rather something actual and ‘on-going’. If so, he would be quite right. But he might go on to argue that therefore dieting is an action or an activity, and then he would be quite wrong. For, as we now know, there is at least one other option; it might be a course of action – of course, that is just what it is. This error in logical grammar might now tempt him into philosophical troubles of a very familiar kind. He sees at once that the invalid’s imputed unique action of dieting cannot be identified with his today’s breakfast-consumption of a lightly boiled egg, since yesterday, being on the same diet, he consumed a poached egg. Moreover, his wife, who is not dieting, also ate a lightly boiled egg today. But nor can his supposed unique action of dieting be identified with this evening’s fish-eating, for similar reasons. Consequently, his supposed unique action of dieting – which, qua, a particular action, cannot be subject to tense-general, disjunctive, negative, conditional, etc., qualifications – will have to be a particular something that the invalid does other than eating either eggs or toast or fish, etc. His required separate and unique action of dieting thus evaporates into an uncatchable, non-bodily intake of immaterial fare – although they typed prescription up there on his mantelpiece mentions no such ‘private’ feedings on ‘mental’ victuals; and although his wife has no metaphysical difficulties in discerning whether or not the invalid is still adhering to his regimen. Rather like the camera-proud boy who looked in vain for a mammal to photograph, so our grammar-hobbled researcher looks in vain for a particular gastronomic act of just dieting. Similarly, since the student’s supposedly unique action of studying the German language cannot be equated with this particular piece of syllable-pronunciation, with that momentary operation of dictionary-consulting, or with any of those temporary bits of listening to German radio-talks, therefore it has to be identified instead with some particular but jellyfishy, ‘internal’ act or process in which there is no using of tongue, pen, eye or ear, and in which, therefore, no German words are pronounced, read, written down or listened to – which is absurd. Our imaginary researcher had been unmindful of the (logico-grammatical) fact that the doctor’s type dietary-prescription was, in fact or in effect, laced with such syntactical expressions as ‘whenever’, ‘never’, ‘sometimes’, ‘regularly’, ‘if’, ‘unless’, ‘only’, ‘not on the same occasion as…’, ‘any’, ‘either…or’, etc., none of which could enter into the description of that the invalid might be ‘caught’, whether by himself or by his wife, in the act of doing either inwardly or outwardly, at a particular moment. The category-difference of, say, the particular action of eating a piece of toast from the Higher Order course of action of dieting was misconstrued as the supposed mere ‘sortal’ differences of doing a particular overt or bodily thing from doing a particular crypto or ‘mental’ thing. But our imaginary researcher could be quickly brought to his grammatical senses by himself receiving form his own doctor the flat injunction ‘Diet’. For he would have to ask ‘By eating and drinking which victuals and fluids, and by avoiding which other ones, in what amounts, at what times of day, how often, in the day, prepared in what manners, consumed in what combinations, over how long a period, etc.?’ Asking such questions is asking for the controlling programme of a course of gastronomic actions and abstentions; whereas the command ‘Eat that piece of toast’ is obeyable or disobeyable as it stands, just by the eating or by the not eating of that piece of toast. For this command carries no ‘any’, ‘whenever’, ‘unless’, ‘not with…’, or ‘frequently’, etc. It has no subordinate clauses. Of course, in real life no one would thus misconstrue the active verb to ‘diet’ as signifying a jellyfishy action, if only for the simple but not basic, reason that dieting is notoriously too long-term an affair to be counted as one action. To the question ‘What was he doing when you saw him over the garden-wall?’ the answer ‘He was in the act of dieting would be as obvious a jocosity as ‘He was in the act of wheat-growing, or in the act of mastering the pronunciation of German’. But it would not be so obvious a jocosity to give to the question ‘What was he doing when you saw him in the railway-station?’ the reply ‘He was waiting for the mid-day London train’. Yet waiting, too, whether briefly or protractedly, is a chain-undertaking, and it is one into the worded programme of which, among other syntactical expressions, the word ‘not’ would occur in a specially dominant position. For to wait for a train is (nearly enough) intentionally-not-to-move-far-from-where-the-wanted-train-is-due-to-come-in-at-any-moment-before-it-comes-in. Why cannot one suddenly wait for a train? If seven men are all on the platform waiting for the train, the positive answer to the question ‘What was So and So in the act of doing when you saw him there?’ would be answered, not by ‘..not-moving-far-from-the-train’s-arrival-lace’, but by ‘pacing to and fro’, ‘smoking his pipe’, ‘chatting to the station-master’, ‘gazing up the railway track’, or ‘trying to do the crossword puzzle without a pencil’. Between the seven or seventy such infra-things that the seven train-awaiting travellers were witnessed in the act of doing there need have been no visible, audible or introspectable similarities. The significant, though unphotographable and unintrospectable similarity was their common Supra-policy, namely, their all alike resolutely not doing any of the various things that would remove them far from the train’s arrival-platform. Their purposely not going for a country walk, say, is not only not itself a piece of country-walking or, of course, one of town-walking, but it is not an action of any alternative sort either, e.g., of a jellyfishy sort. We have not been told what someone is doing, not even when he is doing ‘internally’, when we have been told what he is abstaining from doing. Waiting for a train, like keeping a secret of postponing writing a letter, is not an action. It is not even a negative action. (An action, cannot, any more than a collision or a comet, be negative). Rather it is a course of action or a chain-undertaking with a negative supra-purpose tactically governing its infra-actions and inactions.
Application I want, in the end, to achieve an impartially anti-Dualist and anti-Reductionist categorial, re-settlement of at least some ‘mental acts’ and ‘mental processes’, including, especially, the cogitations of Le Penseur. I am hoping to have found, in this notion of courses of action, a hitherto unsponsored categorial hostel in which the logical grammarian may, at once unmysteriously and unreductively, at once unprivately and unpublicly house the notion of pondering. In this hostel it will be under the same roof as (though on a higher and airier floor than) such notions as dieting, waiting, wheat-growing, exploring, spring-cleaning, studying, puppy-training, etc.
Experimenting and Practising In nearly all fields of human activity there is scope for trying new things out, originating, inventing, exploring, essaying, testing, having a shot, in a word, for track-hunting; and there is scope for habituation, practising, consolidating, mastering, rehearsing, getting used to, going over, training, in a word, for path-rolling. An experiment need not be a laboratory experiment; it can be a culinary, a pedagogic, a house-decorating, a political, a metrical, a school-teaching, or a rock-climbing experiment. Similarly, I may try to master by practice as well a sonata as a piece of pronunciation, the breast-stroke, a golf-swing, a proof, a surgical technique, a figure of the syllogism, a verse-form or a ritual. The owner of a new car, golf-club or camera tries to find out what he can do and cannot do with it by a variety of continuously altering experiments; and later, or at the same time, he may try to acquire control of it by repeatedly performing the same operations with it. Only where there is exploration, innovation, origination, enterprise or the essaying of something new, can there be experimenting; only where there is intentional repetition, acclimatisation, rehearsal, consolidation or self-drilling can there be the intention to school oneself in something. Experimenting is essaying the un-habitual in order to acquire the knowledge of something; practising is self-habituation or rehearsing in order to fix the knowledge or possession of something. Experiments and rehearsal are educatively intended, i.e., undertaken with the purpose of self-tuition. Now, neither experiments nor practising is an action. The commands ‘experiment’ and ‘practise’, like the commands ‘begin’, ‘continue’ and ‘obey’, ‘repeat’, can be neither obeyed nor disobeyed unless explicitly or implicitly completed by, e.g., verbs specifying the concrete infra-actions by doing which one would be making the experiment or giving oneself the practice. Like puppy-training, practising, i.e., self-training, is not one or several infra-actions but a tactical or Higher Order conduct of them. Like exploring, experimenting is taking new infra-steps in order to find out by taking them what happens when…., or what exists where…; etc. It is not those steps; it is the exploratory conduct of them. If I experimentally turn a tap, I do not do two things. I experiment by turning on the tap; yet my experiment may be a failure, though I succeed in turning the tap or vice versa. The success/failure conditions of the experiments are different from those of the tap turning. Similarly, making a practice golf-stroke is not making two muscular movements. I practise the stroke by just e.g. putting. But still the success/failure conditions of giving myself this practice are different from those of making this putt. I may hole out from a distance with this practice-putt and yet not be improved in my putting by this and the other practice-putts that I have taken today. And vice versa. We can no apply these truisms about experimentation and self-drilling directly to the notion of thinking. Le Penseur, in trying to solve a problem, is certainly to be described, with hardly a tinge of metaphor, as exploring or researching. He is, therefore, engaged in a Supra-undertaking, and one to which are tactically subordinated various infra-actions, steps or moves to which his thinking does not reduce. More specifically, his thinking will have at least our two features 1) of tentativeness, having a shot of experimentation; and 2) of practice or self-drill. He will be trying out new hypotheses, new wordings, new arguments, new illustrations, etc (and probably discarding as useless or wrong most of these tentatively made moves). He will also be repeatedly going over things which he has not yet discarded, partly in order to prepare himself for the future exploitation, re-examination, emendation, or publication of them. To compare a relatively great thing with a relatively small thing: The guest of honour is today occupied off and on in composing his after-dinner speech for tomorrow’s banquet. His oration is, we may suppose, not to be instructive, but amusing, sentimental, valedictory and reminiscent. His thinking is not the thinking out of a theoretical problem, but the thinking up of an audience-pleasing sequence of phrases, sentences, anecdotes, sentiments, etc. As his speech is to be fresh, he has today to improvise or invent, i.e., to think up new things to say, and new ways of saying them. He is having, in his head or on paper, to try out candidate-phrases, candidate-sentences, anecdotes, witticisms, etc.,; and he is doing a good deal of tentative cancelling, tentative expanding, tentative compressing, tentative paraphrasing, tentative rearranging, and so on. Moreover, since his is to deliver his speech viva voce, he must today try to make himself, if not word-perfect, at least decently fluent; so he must do a good deal of piecemeal path-rolling, i.e., rehearsing, in his head, on paper or aloud. He has quite a lot of ‘homework’ to do, partly constructing, cancelling and correcting, partly consolidating; or partly trying new things out and partly practising some of these new things. It now stands out that Le Penseur, (Newton, perhaps, or Pythagoras or Milton or you or Plato), must be partly occupied in his own analogous tasks of essaying, cancelling, correcting and consolidating. An hypothesis, a proof, an epic, a table-turning rebuttal – these are not, indeed, audience-pleasing orations; but no less than such orations do they need to be thought up and then thought over. Here, too, the thinking is a Higher Order undertaking, or, rather, a nexus of such undertakings, that govern but do not reduce to their subordinate, momentary steps and candidate-steps.
Conclusion We now know one unmysterious reason why our attempts, whether introspective or behavioural, to ‘catch’ oneself or another thinking performing the mental acts of which, while still grammatically hobbled, we expected Thought to consist is the same as the reason why we would equally vainly try to catch oneself or someone else in the here-and-now act of puppy-training, house-building, exploring, language-studying, train-awaiting, spring-cleaning, constituency-nursing, oration-composing or wheat-growing. Indeed, it is pretty obvious that our ponderings have something important in common with each one of these (mundane) Higher Order undertakings. Our mental work has a policy, however nebulous, behind it and a discipline, however mild, in it – else it is not deliberating. One thing that pondering could not be is a mere procession of separate moves or acts. I remember how when I was a young man I was troubled, - as I daresay you have been troubled – by the seemingly contemptible intermittentness or fleetingness of my thinkings. I fancied that real thinkers could go on wrestling with an issue continuously, perhaps for hours on end, without pauses, or switches of attention. They, I supposed, stuck to their intellectual tasks like plough horses moving unremittingly up and down their furrows. Yet there was I, meaning well, but just drifting, flitting, alighting, flapping, sipping, resting and taking wing again – a mere butterfly, instead of a plough horse, Of course, I did not then realise that the task of excogitating something is, like angling, a chain-undertaking, in which a considerable sporadicness or intermittency of the infra-acts of infra-moves is perfectly compatible with the prosecution of the total undertaking being cumulative, progressive and even sometimes successful. The housewife spring-cleaning her house works but with all manner of pauses, interruptions, telephonings, re-reading letters before throwing them away, watering the flowers, chatting to her neighbours, looking out of the windows, and so on. Yet by the end of the day her house has been properly spring-cleaned. The wheat-farmer can take his seaside holiday in February without postponing or diminishing his September harvest. Puppy-training has to be a sporadic, intermittent and repetitive thing; yet it may result in a well-trained sheep-dog within a few weeks or months. There is a lot of sheer waiting in angling, and in pondering; but the angler and thinker do not have to make excuses for these spells of calculated un-business.
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