Chapter Eleven - ‘An Inculcated Caring’: Ryle on Moral Knowledge

Summary

A Third Kind of Knowledge

In a number of his writings, Ryle warns us of the ill consequences of regarding knowing how as a species of knowing that. Philosophers have too often, he thinks, taken propositional knowledge as a model for the knowledge of techniques, procedures and practices. Ryle was a great anti-reductionist, a great pluralist; so it comes as no surprise to find that he did not regard knowing how and knowing that as together exhausting the types of knowledge. In ‘On Forgetting the Difference between Right and Wrong’ (1971), he argues that moral knowledge, or certain important species of moral knowledge, represent a third kind of knowledge, one that cannot be reduced to either or both of the other two. The reason for this is that a person who learns what Ryle summarizes as ‘the difference between right and wrong’ is someone who learns to care about and take seriously such things as telling the truth, resisting certain temptations and so on. And this is why, as he writes,

it is ridiculous to say one has forgotten the difference between right and wrong. To have been taught the difference is to have been brought to appreciate the difference, and this appreciation is not just a competence to label correctly or just a capacity to do things efficiently. It includes an inculcated caring, a habit of taking certain sorts of things seriously. (Ryle 1971, 387– 88)

The concept of forgetting is out of place here, Ryle suggests, because we think of forgetting as losing something, e.g. some ‘equipment’, rather than as changing in some way:

If I have forgotten a date or become rusty in my Latin, I do not think of this as a change in me, but rather as a diminution of my equipment. In the same way, a person who becomes less or more conscientious is a somewhat changed person, not a person with an enlarged or diminished stock of anything. (1971, 388)