Here's another application of Ryle's view. Ryle has a lot to say about self-knowledge, has a chapter in his book on that very topic. Of course, in criticizing the view that he wants to reject, he talks about what he refers to as, according to the ghost in the machine kind of position, refers to a two-fold dimension of privileged access. The first fold, the first aspect of it, he calls phosphorescence, what sometimes is referred to as consciousness. The idea of phosphorescence, the image there is, if something is happening in my mind then it�s, as it were, inherently glowing and therefore I can't miss it, I can't fail to notice that it's occurring. Now, Ryle might refer to that as consciousness in the sense that, when I'm having an experience, when something mental is happening, I've also got something higher order that is directed upon that experience. This is connected up with the higher order thought theory of consciousness. That's one aspect of the traditional notion of privileged access, and the other aspect of it is what you might call introspection or, alternatively, infallibility of introspection. The idea there is that, if I think something's in my mind, then I cannot be mistaken in that view. Remember Descartes thought, I can look inside the contents of my own mind and find things like the idea of an infinite substance. Descartes and a contemporary proponent to that view is going to say, Even if I can't find something like that, I can still know for sure that, for example, it seems to me as if I'm sitting in a chair, or it seems to me as if I've got a dull ache in my left ankle. Those are cases of introspection and more precisely of infallible introspection. So, to put it a little bit more formally, phosphorescence is the view that if something is happening in my mind that I'm aware of it, and introspection/infallibility is the view that, if I think something's happening in my mind, then it in fact is. Now, you can imagine objections to both of those views. Consider any possible objection to the phosphorescence idea. This is an idea that goes back to David Hume. Imagine Hume says that you are standing on the balcony outside of a building and you stand there, for example, talking to a friend. You find that the supportive balcony has just given away and you're now plummeting through the air towards the ground at a very high speed. You'll probably experience panic at that point. You will have a case of panic. There's a mental phenomenon going on inside you, the emotion of extreme fear that we call panic, but you probably also don't have enough mental space as it were to notice, "Hey, you know what? I'm feeling some panic." Probably, your mind is just full of the experience of panic, of abject terror as you fall through the air. So here's a case in which you've got a mental phenomenon, the panic, but there's not a higher order mental event that is taking notice of it and that would be, it seems, a counter example to the idea of phosphorescence. We'll see in our next class another challenge to this view that comes from the idea of the unconscious. The psychoanalytic tradition suggests there are lots of unconscious phenomena that activate your behavior, that cause you to behave in various ways, but of which you're not aware. Ryle also talks about what he refers to as the systematic elusiveness of I. In that idea, you can have a number of higher order thoughts directed towards lower order mental phenomena, but it's not clear that that process could go on forever. It seems like there's some high order thought, perhaps it's the 17th order, that you're not able to note, take cognizance of by virtue of an 18th order cognitive event or mental event. So, the systematical elusiveness of the I is the idea that there is no way in which I can take complete and comprehensive view of what's going on inside of my mind, the idea being that the viewer is going to herself not be subject to that very view. Those are potential objections to the phosphorescence idea. Potential objections to the infallibility idea, infallibility introspection idea. Common case is like self-deception. When I tell myself, for example, that I'm feeling happy about something when in fact I'm not particularly happy about it, when I tell myself that I'm content with a certain situation or that I'm frustrated with a certain situation, I might be deceiving myself. Willfully or not, we'll come to see those in more detail when we talk about self-deception later on. But it does seem as if there are cases in which I might believe that something is going on inside of my mind, but, in fact be mistaken. So, you can see objections to both the phosphorescence and infallibility idea. Ryle gives next example of how a person can be deceived, that I think show some nuances to how things can happen in everyday human life. He gives the example of man whistling Tipperary, Tipperary being a famous British song that, for example, soldiers famously would sing as they're going into battle. Ryle writes, "Someone may be aware that he's whistling 'Tipperary' and not knowing that he's whistling it in order to give the appearance of a sang-froid, a kind of devil may care attitude, which he does not feel. Or, again, he may be aware that he's shamming sang-froid without knowing that the tremors which he is trying to hide derive from the agitation of a guilty conscience. He may know that he has an uneasy conscience but not know that this issues from some specific repression." So Ryle suggests that a person might be behaving in a everyday nonchalant manner and be mistaken about the reasons for their behaving in the way that they do. So, Ryle wants to give a number of different possible objections to the traditional ghost in the machine picture of self-knowledge, that many of us on some level feel a certain amount of sympathy towards. Ryle wants to suggest you want to extrude that from your thinking about the nature of your knowledge of yourself and so that raises the question, what should we put in its place? Ryle has a positive view of the nature of self-knowledge. If our question is, "How and in what way and to what extent we know our own minds?" his answer is brazenly simple one, "I know what's going on in my mind and I know better generally speaking than what's going on other people's minds, simply because I hang out with myself more than I do with other people, and even though my eyes are directed outward away from my body, still I'm generally speaking cognizant of what I'm doing." If you're the kind of behaviorist that Ryle is, you therefore would expect that since my thinking as we just saw, my thinking is something that's discernible right there in my behavior, at early version of the embodied cognition idea, then I know what I'm thinking, because I know what I'm doing, I know how I'm behaving. So it is that for Ryle, I have self-knowledge alright, but it's the same kind of knowledge that you could have of me. There's nothing special distinctively privileged about my knowledge of myself. In fact, you can also imagine that especially because our eyes are directed outward not towards our own bodies, generally speaking, you can imagine that over a period of time, one person could get superior knowledge of somebody else's mind to what that person has of her own mind. So imagine a couple that has been together for many, many decades. It might be that after once we enter decade number five or six, one of them generally knows what's going on in the mind of the other better than that other one does about her own mind. That at least is an implication of Ryle's view. So for Ryle introspection is fine as long as you take it off its pedestal and think about how I can adjust backed by virtue of the fact that I can watch myself doing, watch my behavior and introspection as possible and there's an asymmetry between my knowledge of myself, my knowledge of others, but that asymmetry is de facto but not de jure. I happen, generally speaking, to know myself better than I know others because I spend more time with myself, generally speaking, than I do with others. But if I spend many decades with another person, then given that my eyes tend to be more likely focused on her than I am, than my own body for example, it may well happen that I come to know her mind better than I know my own. Many of you might have had experiences in which, for example, a significant other says, "Hey," for example, "You're angry," and then you notice, "Oh yeah, I guess I'm kind of angry." I'm doing the things that I generally do when I'm angry. I started clenching my fists and my lip curls or my left eyebrow starts to twitch and you hadn�t noticed that, while the person who knows you well had noticed that, and she might thereby have cut down to your emotional state even before you did. So, Ryle's view of self-knowledge, he does think that there's such a thing as self-knowledge, but he wants to demystify it, take it off the pedestal, and say it's just something that we happened to have, but it's just because we are able to observe our own behavior, nothing especially exciting about it as a result.
