Today’s Lecture
• A comment about your Third Assignment
and final Paper
• Preliminary comments on the Philosophy of
Mind
• Gilbert Ryle
A comment about your Third
Assignment and final Paper
• I’m going to take the long weekend to grade your Third
Assignments.
• I am giving you a bonus day of grace to get your final Paper
in to me.
• Three things to note about this proposal:
• (1) It means that IF you get your paper to me, or the
assignment drop box, by 4:00 p.m. on August 11th, THEN
you will not receive any late penalties for your paper.
• (2) This extra day of grace only applies to your Paper.
• (3) Technically, this does not change the due date for the
paper (which remains August 8th).
Third in-class quiz
• Do remember that due to my oversight in
not giving a third in-class quiz, and what I
imagine would have been your stellar
performance in answering whatever
question I would have asked, each of you
have received an automatic ‘2 out of 2’ for
that ‘quiz that wasn’t’.
Churchlands interview
• Any lingering thoughts on the Churchlands?
Preliminary comments on the
Philosophy of Mind: Dualism
• In Substance Dualism, mental states are
substantially different than brain or neuronal states.
The mind, under this account, is not physical or
material.
• In Property Dualism, certain non-physical mental
properties (e.g. consciousness) emerge from the
proper functioning of our brains (see FP, p.391).
Preliminary comments on the Philosophy of Mind: Monism
(i) Methodological Behaviorism hopes to develop a science
of psychology that only regards publicly observable
contingencies when explaining or predicting behavior. There is
no appeal to an ‘inner realm’ of private mental (conscious or
unconscious) states when explaining or predicting (human or
nonhuman) animal behavior (FP, p.394).
(ii) Metaphysical Behaviorism seeks to understand, describe
or explain human and nonhuman animal behavior in terms of
physical dispositions to act (see FP, p.391). Metaphysical
Behaviorists deny that there is an ‘inner’ private realm of
mentality (see FP, pp.391, 394).
(iii) Logical Behaviorism seeks to reduce our discourse about
the mind to discourse about dispositions to act (FP, pp.39495).
Preliminary comments on the
Philosophy of Mind
• Mind-Brain Identity Theory contends that types of
mental states are nothing more than types of brain
states.
• Functionalism contends that an internal state of an
individual counts as a type of mental state if it
performs the relevant causal role, in relation to other
states of the central nervous system or non-neuronal
physiological processes, and is causally efficacious
in contributing to the subsequent behavior of the
organism that possesses it (see FP, p.391).
Gilbert Ryle
• Gilbert Ryle was a British analytic philosopher.
• He was born in 1900 and died in 1976.
• He believed that philosophy’s primary twofold task
was to (1) highlight ambiguities or confusions in
certain expressions about ourselves, the world or the
supernatural and in so doing resolve certain
philosophical difficulties that have arisen due to
these ambiguities or confusions and (2) give
reformed robust philosophical analyses of our
ordinary concepts (that do not yield unnecessary
philosophical puzzles or confusions).
Gilbert Ryle
• Our readings are only part of a larger project, this
being the first chapter of his book The Concept of
Mind, of showing the conceptual ambiguities and
confusions attaching to the way philosophers,
theologians, and others have used mental vocabulary
(e.g. terms like belief, desire, preference and the
like) (FP, p.393).
• Ryle was probably a logical behaviorist (FP, p.394).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind:
The Official Doctrine
• First thing to note about this section of the chapter is
that it is no longer true that Cartesian Dualism is the
“official doctrine” on mind (in philosophical circles)
… largely thanks to the attacks of philosophers like
Ryle.
• It is interesting to note, however, that is was so at
the time this book was written (circa 1949) … which
is not that long ago (FP, p.396).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Official Doctrine
• Cartesian Dualism proffers the following about the human
mind:
• (1) Every properly functioning human of a certain, to-bespecified maturity, has a dual nature - they are, or have, a
body and a mind (FP, p.396).
• (2) Though the mind is causally connected to the body in
life, it can survive the death of the body (and without a loss
of personal identity) (FP, p.396).
• (3) Human bodies, being in space, are subject to the various
causal regularities, or laws, of nature (FP, p.396).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind:
The Official Doctrine
• (4) The biological life of humanity is a
public affair (FP, p.397).
• (5) The human mind, which is not located in
space, is not subject to the various causal
regularities, or laws, of nature (FP, p.397).
• (6) The mental life of humanity is a private
affair (FP, p.397).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind:
The Official Doctrine
• “A person therefore lives through two
collateral histories, one consisting of what
happens in and to his body, the other
consisting of what happens in and to his
mind” (FP, p.397).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind:
The Official Doctrine
• (7) Each individual cognizer has special access to at
least some of the mental episodes making up their
inner (mental) life. This access yields certain
knowledge of these episodes (FP, p.397).
• (8) Talk of an inner (mental) and outer (physical)
world must be metaphorical. This metaphor can lead
to confusion, but the mind is not literally inside
anything (FP, p.397).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Official Doctrine
• (9) This is because the mind is in time but not space, while
the body is in both time and space (FP, p.397).
• (10) What is physical is material, or a “function of matter”
(FP, p.397).
• (11) What is mental is immaterial, consisting of
consciousness or “a function of consciousness” (FP, p.397).
• (12) We only directly know our own minds (and [at least
some of] its content). All other minds we know indirectly (if
we know of them at all) (FP, p.398).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Official Doctrine
• (13) Knowledge of our own minds is immediate (FP,
p.398).
• (14) We also possess the ability to observe our minds at
work (i.e. we have introspective access to our own minds)
(FP, p.398).
• (15) Our indirect knowledge of other minds (if we have
knowledge of other minds at all) is predicated upon
suggested analogies between our own behavior (and our
immediate knowledge that such behavior arises from
causally efficacious [albeit private] mental states) and the
behavior of others (FP, p.398).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Official Doctrine
• (16) This indirect process of getting to know other minds (if
we get to know them at all) leaves open the strong
possibility that anyone of us is mistaken about the
mindedness of another (FP, p.399).
• (17) Our use of mental vocabulary, when used to describe or
explain the behavior of another, is theoretical or
hypothetical. With a framework of understanding these
terms that is importantly first-person, they are supposed to
refer, when used correctly, to analogous private mental
episodes occurring in the mind of another (FP, p.399).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Official Doctrine
• Problems for Cartesian Dualism raised in this section of
Chapter One:
• (1) There is no available means to explain the nature of the
states which transfer data from the (immaterial) mind to the
(material) body. These states are neither introspectively
available or observationally available to the cognizer,
philosopher, psychologist or physiologist. What’s more,
they can’t be of either a material or immaterial nature. After
all, they mediate the gap between matter, or the physical,
and consciousness (FP, p.397).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Official Doctrine
• There have been attempts by some Substance
Dualists to ‘deal with’ this problem with
interactionism.
• Parallelism is the view that our mental lives
somehow, and rather mysteriously, run parallel to
the physical world (this is almost always a view held
by theists). This deals with interactionism by
denying the causal connection between mind and
body (i.e. this deals with interactionism by denying
it exists).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind:
The Official Doctrine
• Two important versions of Parallelism are:
• (i) Occasionalism and (ii) Pre-Established
Harmony Theory.
• (i) Occasionalism: This is the view that the events
in the physical and mental worlds run parallel to
each other because of the constant intervention of
God to ensure that the relevant events are in perfect
alignment as you ‘move’ from the mind to the body
(and the greater physical environment).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind:
The Official Doctrine
• (ii) Pre-Established Harmony Theory:
This is the view that God has determined
the course that the mental and physical
worlds have taken and are going to take.
The harmony between events in the
physical and mental worlds was preestablished (in God’s mind before creation).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The Official
Doctrine
• Problems for Cartesian Dualism raised in this section of
Chapter One (continued):
• (2) Only we ourselves have direct and certain knowledge of
our own minds, under this account. This produces two
problems in itself.
• (i) We know from ever growing clinical evidence of
psychology and psychiatry that introspection is not a
reliable means to know our own minds. This raises the
possibility that no one has direct and certain knowledge of
any one’s mind. Our claims of knowledge about our own
minds must, then, be verified or confirmed. But how can we
do this without trapping ourselves in a viciously circular
process of reasoning? (FP, p.398)
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind:
The Official Doctrine
• (ii) We can only have inferential arguments for the
existence of other minds. Given that (a) behavior
is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an
infallible indicator of particular mental states, or
any mental states at all, and (b) that I’m basing
this inference on an analogy with only one case,
namely my own, it really could be the case that I
am alone. After all, the inferential argument for
other minds cannot be a very strong one (FP,
pp.398-99). But this seems absurd.
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Absurdity of the Official Doctrine
• Ryle christens the official doctrine of Cartesian Dualism the
“Ghost in the machine” (FP, p.399).
• Ryle’s primary criticism of Cartesian Dualism is neither
epistemological nor metaphysical.
• He will contend that Cartesian Dualists make a logical
mistake in talking of minds, a mistake Ryle christens a
“category mistake” (FP, p.399).
• “It [i.e. the Official Doctrine] represents the facts of mental
life as if they belonged to one logical type or category (or
range of types or categories), when they actually belong to
another” (FP, p.399).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The Absurdity of
the Official Doctrine
• “University tour” example: Imagine taking a tour of
university campuses like Western, where the university
campus is relatively spread out. You’re not alone, let’s
suppose. As the tour finishes your companion turns to your
tour guide and says, “This is all fine and good, but when are
we going to see the university?”
• This is a category mistake. Your tour companion is under
the impression that the university buildings and the
associated, and various, administrative bodies fall under a
category importantly different from the category
‘university’. I.e. she is treating the university as a thing over
and above the buildings and institutional bodies she has
encountered, or has been ‘introduced’ to (FP, pp.399-400).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Absurdity of the Official Doctrine
• “Marching division” example: Imagine you have taken a
child to see a parade of the local Canadian Armed Forces.
He sees the various members of the Forces march by him,
and when it is all over asks “But when are we going to see
the Division march by?”
• This, again, is a category mistake. The child is mistakenly
treating the various members of the division as one class of
thing and the division itself as something over and above
these armed personnel (FP, p.400).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Absurdity of the Official Doctrine
• “Team spirit” example: Imagine that we are watching a
cricket match together as a group. One of us is seeing the
game for the first time, and so we explain the various roles
played by the various team members of ‘our side’. After
explaining the position of each team player, he asks “But
who is responsible for the team spirit?”
• This is a category mistake. ‘Team spirit’ is being treated as
if it is a position over above the various positions to be
taken up by a well put together team. It is thus confusing the
categories of team spirit (how the team works together as a
unit) and bowler or fielder (FP, p.400).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Absurdity of the Official Doctrine
• Category mistakes are philosophically important, and
interesting, when committed by well educated users of the
relevant natural language (FP, p.400).
• This, suggests Ryle, is what has happened with those who
hold the Official Doctrine of the Ghost in the Machine.
• Through long experience with the differing semantic
contexts in which we talk of our bodies or talk of our minds,
philosophers (and others) have mistakenly concluded that
each context indicates that the subjects of discourse are
importantly different things, though on the same level of
being (FP, p.401).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Origin of the Category-Mistake
• Ryle explains the origins of this category mistake in
the following ways (note he does not yet claim to
have proved that the Cartesian Dualist has
committed a category mistake [see FP, p.401]):
• (1) Descartes was both a person of science and
religion. As his religious sensibilities ran counter to
the contemporary understanding of the physical
world, he refused to go any further than the human
body when defending the mechanistic view of the
world (FP, p.401).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Origin of the Category-Mistake
• (2) Differences in ontology where needed to justify
this refusal, and so Descartes (and others)
committed himself (and themselves) to a
metaphysical category mistake that became known
as substance dualism (FP, p.401). But this generated
its own problems, like interactionism, the problem
of the freedom of the will and the problem of other
minds. These problems only emerge, Ryle suggests,
if you suppose mind and body to be importantly two
different categories of thing (FP, pp.401-02).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Origin of the Category-Mistake
• The common test for a category mistake is seeing if two (or
more) terms can be legitimately conjoined in the same
sentence.
• So claiming “I bought a left-hand glove and a right handglove” is perfectly fine, but I make an important category
mistake if I claim that “I bought a left-hand glove and a
right hand-glove and a pair of gloves”.
• Being a pair of gloves is not some-thing over and above
being a matched set of a left-hand and right-hand glove (FP,
p.403).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Origin of the Category-Mistake
• Cartesian Dualists, according to Ryle, make this
kind of mistake when talking, in the same sentence,
of simultaneously occurring mental processes and
physical processes as if they are importantly
different kinds of things, or categories of things, but
at the same level of existence.
• I.e. the fundamental mistake is thinking that, when
we talk in this way, we are talking of two kinds of
things that are on the same ontic level [or level of
being] (FP, p.403).
Chp.1 of The Concept of Mind: The
Origin of the Category-Mistake
• An interesting consequence of Ryle’s position is the
claim that both Materialism and Idealism are
mistaken metaphysical theses.
• A reduction of the mental to the physical, or a
reduction of the physical to the mental, only makes
sense if they exist in the same way, or are competing
classes of things at the same level of being ... which,
according to Ryle, they are not (FP, p.403).