Descartes’ Myth

Gilbert Ryle

In this piece, Ryle sets out a view about the philosophy of mind that he calls the “official doctrine,” and then he criticizes this view.

He suggests that the official doctrine rests on a category mistake.

The article was written in 1949; The Concept of Mind

Official Doctrine

❖ Our bodies are in space and time

❖ There is the external world of the body that is public.

❖ Our minds are in time but not space.

❖ There is the internal world of the mind that each person has sole access to

❖ Every human being has both a body and a mind.❖ Derived partly from Descartes

Physical Existence Mental Existence

“Ghost in the Machine”

❖ Ryle calls the official doctrine “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.”

❖ Ryle’s project in this short selection is to argue that this dogma is a category mistake.

Ghost in the Machine

❖ Ryle simply accused Descartes of having misconceived the facts.

❖ Descartes has imagined that there is a ‘ghost’ inside us which works a merely mechanical body.

❖ He has not grasped that words like ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’ label groups of behavior, not actual things.

Category Mistake

❖ He labels Descartes’ error as a ‘category mistake’.

❖ A category mistake is defined as a linguistic error in which one mistakes one type of word for another.

❖ His three examples are thinking that a university is a thing other than its colleges, or an army division is not just a group of soldiers, or team spirit is something more than just the behavior of a sports team.

University Example❖ So you imagine that you’re taking someone on a tour of Los Medanos

College and you show them all the buildings, you show them the playing fields, you show them the classrooms, and then they say, “That’s great that you showed me all these things, but you haven’t shown me the university yet.”

❖ Ryle goes on to say, “It has then to be explained to them that the university is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories, and offices which he has seen. The university is just the way in which all that he has seen is organized. When they are seen and when their coordination is understood, the university has been seen. He was mistakenly allocating the university to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong.”

❖ So here we have a classic example of a category mistake, of a person who doesn’t understand the way that the way university is used, as opposed to words like College Complex, words like Math Building, words like Student Union.

❖ Words like Student Union and College Complex refer to concrete entities. These are nouns that refer to actual objects, things.

❖ The word university, though also a noun, has a very different kind of meaning. It doesn’t refer to a concrete object, to an individual thing. It refers to a specific type of relationship between objects.

❖ The university, in a sense, is the relationship between the various buildings, institutions, etc., etc., etc.

Ryle’s Argument

❖ “John hit Bill.”

❖ The verb refers to a physical action, the action of hitting someone. So what the sentence is telling me is that one person struck another.

❖ “John hates Bill.”

❖ An identical grammatical structure and the word hates looks like it plays exactly the same role in the sentence as the word hit plays in the first.

❖ The idea is that since hit describes a physical action of John’s, we assume that the word hates describes a mental action of John’s, a thought.

This is an example of a Category Mistake…

❖ We see a sentence like “John hit Bill” and we understand what that means.

❖ We understand how to interpret the word hit. When you see a sentence like “John hates Bill,” we think that it’s to be interpreted in precisely the same way.

❖ That since the word hit refers to a physical action, the word hates must refer to a mental action — to a thought.

❖ But Ryle is arguing that mentalistic verbs do not refer to mental objects or mental activities.

Well, the question is: “Well, what do they refer to then?

What does a mentalistic verb mean?”

❖ Ryle says our mentalistic vocabulary is a kind of shorthand for describing people’s behavioral

dispositions.

Consider the mentalistic sentence “John loves Jill”

❖ Ryle says that what we really mean when we say something like John loves Jill is we mean

❖ John is likely to kiss Jill,

❖ John is likely to ask Jill out on dates

❖ John is likely to send Jill flowers on Valentine’s Day

❖ John is likely to say things to Jill like I love you

❖ In other words, the word love is a shorthand for all of these behaviors that John is inclined to engage in with respect to Jill.

❖ The mentalistic verb love does not refer to a mental action of John’s.

❖ Rather, it refers to the inclination on John’s part to engage in various physical actions.

Double Causation

❖ Ryle points out that if we have a mind and a body, then every human action will have two causes, one the result of the physical laws of the brain, the other the product of purely mental laws.

❖ (This point leads to the later theory of ‘Anomalous Monism’).

Logical Behaviorism❖ Logical Behaviorism: our talk about beliefs, desires,

pains, etc. is not talk about ghostly or physical inner episodes, but instead about actual and potential patterns of behavior; for example, the sentence “S wants (believes, feels) …” means that S is disposed to act in such and such a way.

❖ This is not so much a theory of what mental states are as much as a theory about how best to understand the vocabulary we use to talk about them, mentalistic terms like “belief,” “desire,” “feeling,” etc.

Functional Psychology

William James

William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician.

The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, James was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the "Father of American psychology"