- Length
- 348 pagesRoutledge, 60th anniversary edition 2009, with an introduction by Daniel Dennett
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
The Concept of Mind
The book that named the ghost in the machine and set out to exorcise it. Ryle argued that three centuries of philosophy of mind had been built on a mistake about how mental words work, and made a phrase so successful that it is now used by people who have no idea it was his.
- Date
- 1949
- Author
- Gilbert Ryle
- Region
- Oxford
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 308 years
The book that made philosophy of mind a subject in the English-speaking world, and whose phrase for the position it attacks has outlived every detail of the attack.
What the book says
An attack on the picture of the mind as an inner theatre, conducted by showing that the picture rests on a grammatical mistake. Ryle calls the doctrine the ghost in the machine, and names its error a category mistake - the kind of confusion made by a visitor shown the colleges, libraries and laboratories of a university who then asks where the university is. The visitor has taken a term belonging to one logical category and treated it as belonging to another. The official doctrine does the same with mind and body: it puts them in the same category, two things of the same sort, one physical and one not, and then cannot explain how they interact. Ryle's alternative is to look at how mental language actually works. To say someone is intelligent is not to report a hidden inner event accompanying their action; it is to say something about how they do things - that they can correct themselves, adapt, notice mistakes. Knowing how is not a species of knowing that. Motives are dispositions rather than occurrences. Imagining is not looking at inner pictures. The mind is not a place where things happen.
What it argues
That mental terms do not name inner episodes and that treating them as if they did generates every classic problem about mind. The positive proposal is dispositional: statements about beliefs, motives, knowledge and character are largely statements about what someone would do under various conditions, and are verified by watching them rather than by inspecting an inaccessible interior. The distinction between knowing how and knowing that carries a great deal of it - a competence is not a store of propositions, and treating skill as the application of internally rehearsed rules starts a regress, since applying a rule intelligently is itself a skill. What follows is not that minds do not exist, but that a mind is not a thing of the kind the question presupposed, and that self-knowledge is not privileged access to a private stage.
What it answered
Descartes, and the philosophy of mind that had inherited his framework without examining it. Ryle also has a target closer to home: the sense-data theories that had dominated Oxford and Cambridge, which he thought were the Cartesian inner theatre in a new costume. The book belongs to the ordinary-language movement, whose method was to look at how the relevant words are actually used before theorising about what they name.
How it argues
By examples, dozens of them, and by making the opposing picture look silly rather than by refuting it formally. Ryle's method is to take a mental term, show the range of ordinary uses, and demonstrate that the theory cannot accommodate them - and his prose is the wittiest in twentieth-century philosophy, full of clowns, cricketers and absent-minded professors. The cost is that a reader who does not already feel the pull of the target may not see what has been established, and the argument rarely states its conclusion as a thesis.
The moment
Oxford immediately after the war, with philosophy dominated by attention to ordinary language and Ryle at the centre of it as Waynflete Professor and editor of Mind. He had spent the war in intelligence work. The book appeared four years before Wittgenstein's Investigations and reaches many similar conclusions by a different route, which has kept the question of influence alive.
How it travelled
As a phrase and as a method. The ghost in the machine entered general English and is used in journalism, fiction and film by people with no interest in Descartes. Within philosophy the book founded a subject: philosophy of mind as a distinct field in the analytic tradition dates from around here, and behaviourism, functionalism, identity theories and eliminativism all define themselves in relation to the picture Ryle attacked. Dennett, who wrote the introduction to the sixtieth anniversary edition, was his student.
The strongest objection
That the dispositional account leaves out the thing it was meant to explain. If a pain is a disposition to wince and complain, then a person who feels a pain and conceals it perfectly has no pain, which is false; and if believing something is a disposition to behave in certain ways, the same belief will produce entirely different behaviour depending on what else the person wants. The general form is that dispositions have to be specified in terms of other mental states, which cannot all be cashed out behaviourally without circularity. Ryle denied he was a behaviourist and the denial is fair - his target is a picture rather than an ontology - but the analyses he offers are hard to distinguish from one, and the treatment of conscious experience is the thinnest part of the book.
Why read it
Because it is funny, which nothing else in this section can claim to the same degree, and because the first chapter on the official doctrine and the chapter on knowing how are among the most useful forty pages in modern philosophy. It requires no background at all.
- First printed
- 1949
- First in English
- 1949
- Digitised
- No
Ryle's later work, particularly the Tarner Lectures published as On Thinking, revisits the treatment of thinking, which was the part he was least satisfied with.
Written in English. In copyright.
Where it stands
Live. Almost nobody holds Ryle's dispositional analysis in its original form, but the knowing-how distinction is a substantial current literature, the regress argument about rules is used constantly, and the diagnosis of Cartesianism as a category error is the starting point for most contemporary work on the mind.
On quoting this book
In copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Ryle is a behaviourist is the standing question and he spent years denying it. What he owed to Wittgenstein, whose Investigations appeared four years later but whose lectures had circulated, is disputed and Ryle was reticent about it. Whether the category-mistake diagnosis actually shows dualism to be incoherent, as opposed to unattractive, is argued. And whether the book has anything adequate to say about conscious experience is widely thought to be its weakest point, including by philosophers sympathetic to everything else in it.