All Six, Every Year

In Brief Encounters: Notes from a Philosopher's Diary, Anthony Kenny writes of Gilbert Ryle that he once was challenged by a woman to say whether he ever read a novel. Ryle replied that he read all six, every year. I was interested to see that early in Ryle's The Concept of Mind, in the chapter "Knowing How and Knowing That", he refers to one of the six:Now the higher-grade dispositions of people with which this inquiry is largely concerned are, in general, not single-track dispositions, but dispositions the exercises of which are indefinitely heterogeneous. When Jane Austen wished to show the kind of pride which characterised the heroine of 'Pride and Prejudice', she had to represent her actions, words, thoughts and feelings in a thousand different situations. There is no one type of action or reaction such that Jane Austen could say 'My heroine's kind of pride was just the tendency to do this, whenever a situation of that sort arose'.Daniel Dennett's introduction to the 2002 edition…