Abstract
This chapter argues that Gilbert Ryle’s account of misleading expressions, which is rightly considered a milestone in the history of analytic philosophy, is continuous with Brentano’s. Not only did they identify roughly the same classes of misleading expressions, but their analyses are driven by a form of ontological parsimony which sharply contrasts with rival views in the Brentano School, like those of Meinong and Husserl. Section 1 suggests that Ryle and Brentano share a similar notion of analysis. Section 2 spells out the notion of misleading expression by means of the surface-grammar/truth-conditions distinction, which I argue is implicit in their accounts. Section 3 zooms in on a specific class of misleading expressions, namely expressions about ficta. Finally, Sect. 4 draws the consequences of what precedes for a correct understanding of the notion of meaning.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Interestingly, Ryle is not the only analytic philosopher to defend that view. G.E. Moore makes approximately the same points in 1933–1934 (see Moore 2004, 165–171).
- 3.
Ryle himself retrospectively talks of the ‘Occamizing zeal’ deployed in his early writings (Ryle 2009b, xx).
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
See e.g. (Brentano Ms. EL 80, 13.001[3]–13.002[7]): ‘Regarding names, the question arises as to what they mean. They mean: (1) not themselves; (2) not the act of presentation or the presentation; (3) not what is presented as presented; (4) and yet they do not seem to denote the things (a) for many names are not names of things, they are fictions, e.g. Jupiter, [and] (b) hoc animal and hic homo would not have a different meaning. They denote something presented, though not as presented but as that as what it is presented [als das, als was es vorgestellt wird]. This accommodates (a) and (b), for we are presented here with a thing, albeit through the mediation of various presentations’.
- 7.
I won’t comment here on Brentano’s classification of mental phenomena. For a reconstruction, see (Dewalque 2018).
- 8.
See (Brentano Ms. EL 80, 13.018[1]–13.018[5]): ‘The name designates [bezeichnet] in some way the content of a presentation as such, the immanent object. In some way, [it designates] what is presented by means of the content of a presentation. The former is the meaning of the name. The latter is what the name names [nennt]. We say about it that it has the name [es komme der Name ihm zu]. When it exists, it is an external object of presentation. One names through the mediation of meaning’.
- 9.
Another source of errors lies in the fact of regarding syncategorematic expressions as categorematic ones, like when one takes at face value expressions such as ‘the truth of p’ of ‘the impossibility of A’ (see e.g. Brentano 1995, 322). I won’t address this kind of confusion here.
- 10.
Thomasson rightly noted that the anti-Platonistic approach to meaning is a major commonality between Ryle and Brentano: ‘Ryle—like Brentano—takes it to be a systematic mistake to conceive of the procedure of conceptual analysis as involving a description of relations among Platonized meanings or concepts’ (Thomasson 2002, 129).
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Dewalque, A. (2021). Misleading Expressions: The Brentano-Ryle Connection. In: Dewalque, A., Gauvry, C., Richard, S. (eds) Philosophy of Language in the Brentano School. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52211-7_5
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