Descartes Myth- Gilbert Ryle Summary PDF

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Descartes’ Myth -Gilbert Ryle

The Official Doctrine According to Ryle, Descartes’ theory of mind-body dualism can be summarised as follows. With the doubtful exceptions of idiots and infants every human being has, or is, both a body and a mind. The body and the mind are ordinarily “harnessed” together, but the mind may subsist after the death of the body. He finds the theory generally accepted, even with its adherents admitting its shortcomings. Ryle, however, holds that the doctrine’s central principles themselves are unsound. According to the official doctrine, human bodies are in space and time, subject to mechanical laws, and observable externally. Minds are in time but not in space, and their operations are not subject to mechanical laws. The workings of a mind are not witnessable by others. A person therefore lives through two collateral histories, one physical and public, the other mental and private. One can observe- with no reliance on the senses- the existence and nature of one’s own mental states and operations. This direct cognisance is supposedly immune from doubt, unlike sense-based reports of concurrent episodes in the physical world. Ryle offers a brief refutation here by mentioning Freudian ideas of the subconscious, impulses, unacknowledged thoughts, and so on. This inner-outer antithesis is a metaphor, since minds cannot be spatially inside anything. But how do external physical stimuli generate mental responses, or decisions framed in the mind bring about mechanical movement? Ryle points out that underlying the mind-body bifurcation is a profound philosophical assumption: that there are two different kinds of existence or status. What has physical existence is composed of matter, or else is a function of matter; what has mental existence consists of consciousness, or else is a function of consciousness. A body can jolt another, perceive it sensibly, etc but there is no such direct causal connection between minds. A mind can impact another only indirectly and through the public physical medium. The inner life is one of absolute isolation; one mind has no access to another. So, Ryle says, one can only make problematic inferences from observed behaviour- movements analogous to one’s own- to mental workings analogous to their own. With no possibility of observational corroboration, an adherent of this theory has no good reason to believe that there do exist other minds. Positing these, she still finds herself unable to discover their individual characteristics and workings. Ryle says philosophers found it necessary to construct theories of the nature and place of minds because we do regularly wield these concepts with general correctness, and correct them when needed. But the logical geography of the official doctrine entails that there can be no regular, effective use of these mental-conduct concepts regarding any mind other than one’s own.

The Absurdity of the Official Doctrine Ryle calls the doctrine “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine”. He wishes to prove it false not in detail but in principle. He says it isn’t riddled with mistakes; rather, it is “one big mistake” of a special kind: a category-mistake. It represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category, when they actually belong to another. For example(s): a) A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown its colleges, libraries, playing fields, departments, offices, etc. At the end he asks, “But where is the University?” It has to be explained to him that the University is not another institution counterpart to what he has seen, but their co-ordination, the way they are organised, is the University. b) A child witnessing the march-past of a division has battalions, squadrons, etc., (of the division) pointed out to him. He then asks when the division is going to appear. He has mistakenly allocated the division to the same category as the units already seen. c) A foreigner watching his first game of cricket learns the functions of the bowlers, batsmen, umpires etc. Then he wonders whose role it is to exercise esprit de corps. But this is not an additional operation of the same sort. Nor is it something such that a player is at a given moment either catching, or bowling, or displaying team spirit. The above three category-mistakes were all made by people unfamiliar with the concepts or words involved. The category-mistakes Ryle finds theoretically interesting are those made by people who are perfectly competent to apply concepts. To illustrate: A student of politics has learned the differences and connections between the British, the French and the American Constitutions, and also those between, say, Parliament, the Home Office, and the Church of England. But he cannot meaningfully answer a question about the inter-institutional connections between the Church, the Home Office and the British Constitution. For the British Constitution is not an institution in the same sense as the others. So relations which can be asserted or denied to hold between the Church and the Home Office cannot be asserted or denied to hold between either of them and the British Constitution. Similarly, a person may have specific relations to another; but he cannot have these to ‘the Average Taxpayer’. He could talk about the Average Taxpayer, but could not come across him on the street. Now, so long as the British Constitution is treated as a counterpart to the other institutions, it will seem like a “mysteriously occult institution”; and so long as one considers the Average Taxpayer an actual fellow-citizen, he will tend to think of him as “an elusive insubstantial man, a ghost who is everywhere yet nowhere”: and this, clearly, is how the Cartesian mistake presents the mind. A person’s thinking, feeling and purposive doing cannot be described in the idioms of physics, chemistry and physiology; therefore, they must be described in counterpart idioms. As the human body is a complex organised unit, so must the human mind be, though made of a different sort of stuff and with a different sort of structure. As the human body is a field of causes and effects, so the mind must be, though in non-mechanical, non-material terms.

The Origin of the Category-mistake As a man of scientific genius, Descartes could not but endorse Galileo’s methods, which potentially provided a theory covering all bodies in space. Yet as a devout Catholic, Descartes could not accept the corollary that human nature differs from clockwork merely in complexity. The mental- or the soul, in his precious theology- could not be just a variety or by-product of the mechanical. Ryle says Descartes and subsequent philosophers took the following escape-route. Since mental-conduct words do not regard mechanical processes, they must be construed as talking about non-mechanical processes. Using cause-effect laws analogous to mechanical ones, the difference between ‘intelligent’ and ‘unintelligent’ human behaviours must lie in their causation; so, the latter come from material movements and the former from mental workings. The mind-body dichotomy is thus represented merely as differences inside a common framework of categories. Descartes never leaves the grammar of mechanics, describing minds only in negations of the specific descriptions he gives to bodies. Thus represented, minds are not merely ghosts harnessed to machines, but themselves spectral machines, ‘governor-engines’ of a special kind inside the mechanical engine of the body. Bodies are rigidly governed by a deterministic system of mechanical laws. But in describing the mental with analogous terms and laws, we run into the problem of free will. How do we reconcile the description of the mind as drawn from the categories of mechanics with the knowledge that higher-grade human conduct is not so? Within the official doctrine, one person could never get access to the postulated immaterial causes behind the utterances of another human body. He could not tell the difference between a lunatic and a rational person or a human and a robot based on overt behaviour. The question regarding the behaviour of bodies subject to natural physics versus that of intelligent beings arose because everyone already knew how to apply mental-conduct concepts. So, the new causal hypothesis could not be the source of the criteria used for it. Descartes, Ryle explains, had mistaken the logic of his problem. Instead of asking about the criteria for demarcation between the automated and the purposive, he asked “Given that the principle of mechanical causation does not tell us the difference, what other causal principle will tell it us?” He realised the problem was not one of mechanics and assumed it must therefore be one of some counterparts to mechanics. Ryle brings out the absurdity of conjoining terms of different types. When we say ‘There are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements’, or ‘There occur mental processes and physical processes’, these are “illegitimately conjoined propositions”. Neither of these is absurd in itself. There do occur mental processes like doing long division or making a joke. But this phrase does not mean the same sort of thing as ‘there occur physical processes’, and, therefore, it makes no sense to conjoin or disjoin the two1. The expressions ‘there exist minds’ and ‘there exist bodies’ do not indicate two different species of existence. This dissipates the contrast between mind and matter, but not by the “absorption” of one by the other. The seeming contrast is shown to be illegitimate. The belief in a polar opposition between the two is rooted in the belief that they are terms of the same logical type. So, both Idealism and Materialism are answers to an improper question. Reducing either ideas or matter to the other presupposes the legitimacy of the disjunction ‘Either there exist minds or there exist bodies (but not both)’. 1

Historical Note The official theory doesn’t derive solely from Descartes, or even from a more widespread anxiety about the implications of seventeenth century mechanics. He name-checks schools of thought that influenced it: Scholastic and Reformation theology; Stoic-Augustinian theories of the will, embedded in Calvinist doctrines; Platonic and Aristotelian theories of the intellect, which shaped orthodox doctrine of the immortal soul. Descartes was reformulating already prevalent theological doctrines of the soul in the new syntax of Galileo. He adds that the dichotomy may be a myth, but that doesn’t mean it did no good. Myths are significant when new in that they improve upon and dispel older myths, thereby aiding the march of progress of thought and theory....