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

Every human being has both a body and a mind.

Derived partly from Descartes

Mental Existence

Physical Existence

Our bodies are in space and

time

Our minds are in time but not

space.

There is the external world of

the body that is public.

There is the internal world of

the mind that each person has
sole access to

Ghost in the Machine

Ryle calls the official

doctrine the dogma of the
Ghost in the Machine.

Ryles 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 youre 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, Thats
great that you showed me all these things, but you havent 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 doesnt 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 doesnt 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.

Ryles 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
Johns, we assume that the
word hates describes a mental
action of Johns, 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
its 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 peoples 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

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
Johns.

Rather, it refers to the

inclination on Johns part to
engage in various physical
actions.

John is likely to kiss Jill,

John is likely to ask Jill out

on dates

John is likely to send Jill

flowers on Valentines Day

John is likely to say things to

Jill like I love you

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"