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“I’ll have a Ryle of beer please”

Brian Leiter

Philosopher David Lobina writes:

Apropos of a debate in the UK regarding whether to keep the pint as a measure of beer or go metric instead (for health reasons, or otherwise), Gilbert Ryle makes an appearance in the Letters section of the Guardian (link here):

May I suggest that the new measure be called the Ryle? This after the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle who, as Charlotte Vrijen tells us in her PhD dissertation: “… gave his name to a measure of beer, roughly three‑quarters of a pint. Christ Church had special glasses made for these ‘Ryles of beer’. He used to say that sometimes half a pint was too small a measure and a pint too large. Once he stated that he would prefer to be remembered for having invented a measure of beer than for having written The Concept of Mind.”
Alec McHoul
Mundijong, Western Australia

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8 responses to ““I’ll have a Ryle of beer please””

  1. Nicholas Denyer

    Was Ryle alluding to the complaint in George Orwell's 1984 that "A ‘alf litre ain’t enough. It don’t satisfy. And a ‘ole litre’s too much. It starts my bladder running."?

    Reply
  2. Tom Hurka

    At 3/4 of an imperial pint a ryle is 12 ounces, which is the exact size of a Canadian (and maybe American?) beer bottle and therefore of a standard Canadian glass of beer. That's indeed a sensible size but Ryle wasn't "inventing" anything. He was just catching up to more advanced parts of the world.

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  3. oldster

    Ryle was proud of having observed that sometimes one standard measure was too small and the double of that measure was too large? To confuse that with philosophic insight is surely a category mistake.
    And as for introducing a new intermediate measure, this is no lasting solution– it is equally evident that sometimes 3/4 will be too big, and 1/2 too small; sometimes 3/4 will be too little and 1 pint too much. Shall we introduce the 5/8 and 7/8s measures, and give them honorific names as well? We could call the entire progression "Zenos" of beer, only that lofty sage would have looked down with Hellenic disgust on the whole barbarian custom of drinking fermented grains.

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  4. Roger Albin

    Since this is a crowd that values thinking:

    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-7568(24)00117-X/fulltext

    open access

    Reply
  5. Jake

    Not to be exceptionally pedantic but: A British Imperial pint is 20oz. So, 3/4 of that is pretty close to an American pint (maybe Canadian, too?), especially if the bartender is stingy and doesn't fill it to the brim.

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  6. Dean C. Rowan

    If not a ryle, then a goldilocks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldilocks_principle

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  7. SRK

    The 3/4 pint is called a "schooner" in most of Australia (no idea about the etymology), and generally speaking it's the preferred size in NSW and Queensland. But in Victoria we don't muck around, we just drink pints.

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  8. Phil

    In the UK, beer can legally be sold over the bar in pint, half, third and two-thirds measures; the two-thirds measure (a relatively recent innovation) is referred to here as a schooner.

    However, we're not talking about US pints but Imperial pints: a US pint (473 ml) is 5/6 of an Imperial pint of 568 ml. A US (and Canadian?) 12-oz measure is 3/4 of a 473 ml pint, i.e. 355 ml; this is actually 5/8 of an Imperial pint. A 3/4-pint Ryle would be 426 ml – getting on for a full US pint. Our actually-existing 2/3 measure equates to 379 ml, or just under 13 US fl. oz.

    Our cans and bottles are metricated, however: I regularly buy beer in bottles at 330 and 500 ml, and cans at (for some unknown reason) 440 ml. Also, some 12 oz/355 ml bottles and cans make it across the Atlantic – and occasionally a particularly 'patriotic' brewer will bring out a 568 ml bottle. (Package sizes of 568 ml, 453 g etc are perfectly legal, as long as they're not labelled with the 'old' measure. Presumably the rule is relaxed for imports, as long as they do carry the metric measure.) It makes it quite difficult to tell at a glance which is stronger than which – another factor in how much beer one wants to drink, although not one Ryle mentions.

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