Editing Gilbert Ryle (section)

===Philosophy as cartography===
{{cquote|The philosophical arguments which constitute this book are intended not to increase what we know about minds but to rectify the logical geography of the knowledge we already possess.<ref>Concept of Mind p 1</ref>
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Ryle thought it no longer possible to believe that a philosopher's task is to study mental as opposed to physical objects. In its place, Ryle saw a tendency of philosophers to search for objects whose nature was neither physical nor mental. Ryle believed, instead, that "philosophical problems are problems of a certain sort; they are not problems of an ordinary sort about special entities."<ref name="Stanford Encyclopedia" />

Ryle analogises philosophy to [[cartography]]. Competent speakers of a language, Ryle believes, are to a philosopher what ordinary villagers are to a mapmaker: the ordinary villager has a competent grasp of his village, and is familiar with its inhabitants and [[geography]]. But when asked to interpret a map of that knowledge, the villager will have difficulty until he is able to translate his practical knowledge into universal cartographic terms. The villager thinks of the village in personal and practical terms, while the mapmaker thinks of the village in neutral, public, cartographic terms.<ref name=":0">Ryle, Gilbert. 1971. "Abstractions." In ''Collected Papers'' 2. London: Hutchinson.</ref>{{Rp|440–2}}

By mapping the words and phrases of a particular statement, philosophers are able to generate what Ryle calls '''implication threads''': each word or phrase of a statement contributes to the statement in that, if the words or phrases were changed, the statement would have a different implication. The philosopher must show the directions and limits of different implication threads that a "concept contributes to the statements in which it occurs." To show this, he must be tugging at neighbouring threads, which, in turn, must also be tugging. Philosophy, then, searches for the meaning of these implication threads in the statements in which they are used.<ref name=":0" />{{Rp|444–5}}