Response to anthony Ryle

Dear Editor

Thank you for giving me a chance to respond to Dr Ryle's letter. At the beginning, he rejects the arguments of some of the contributors on consciousness in your recent issue (BJP 21(1), Autumn ). I'll comment on the points that relate to my own paper.

I presume I am one of the targets of Dr Ryle's first numbered paragraph

- I said I thought science as we have known it since Galileo (four centuries ago for us, three centuries ago for William James) cannot encompass the fact of consciousness. Dr Ryle appears to disagree. However, his quotations from James, with whom he then appears to agree, are precisely along the lines of my own argument, and the second one is virtually a summary of the point my paper was making. I think Dr Ryle has confused the issue by implying James is offering a definition of ‘science’. In fact, James is carefully using the word ‘philosophy’, presumably because he is acutely aware what a linguistic minefield these arguments tread in. (I am always happy to find myself in agreement with William James who, in his breadth of interest and determination to keep psychology in touch with philosophy, is very much one of my own sources of inspiration.)

In his second paragraph, Dr Ryle claims that to equate brain function with experience is a category mistake. I agree entirely. But he then says I provided a ‘supreme example’ of this mistake when I suggested that brain science may come to show us more precisely what we mean by some of the terms we derive from introspection. Here I think he has misunderstood my point. I illustrated it by using the example of memory. By introspection, we become aware that we seem to have different sorts of memory.

Neuroscience can help us to see clearly that there are indeed different sorts of memory - short-term, episodic, procedural, semantic, etc - by showing that they are stored in different locations in the brain. This clarifies the fact that they truly are different sorts of memory, not merely different versio