Ryle vs dualism

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Gilbert Ryle’s attack on dualism

Introduction

It is striking, at least to me, how few references there are to The Concept of Mind in contemporary philosophy. This may be because, as Gilbert Ryle recognised, his book would be “stigmatized as ‘behaviourist’” (Ryle, 1973 [1949]: 308), which is a pity because his arguments against dualism are as relevant today as they were in 1949. Although he discussed briefly their historical origins, his main purpose was to attack contemporary dualistic tendencies, not so much those revealed in our everyday speech and folk psychology, as those in the more considered territory of the philosophy of mind. He sets out the issues in his first chapter.

The Official Doctrine

There is a doctrine about the nature of minds which is so prevalent amongst theorists and lay people that it deserves to be called the “official doctrine”. In outline it is this. Human bodies are in space and are subject to the mechanical laws which govern all other objects in space; their processes and states are publicly observable. Minds are not in space and are not subject to mechanical laws; their workings are private. A person has two histories: a public history of the body and a private one of the mind. This leads to the problem of how the histories are connected: how does what the mind wills result in the movement of the limbs and how does light and sound impinging on eyes and ears, respectively, result in perception?

But the actual transactions between the episodes of the private history and those of the public history remain mysterious, since by definition they belong to neither series. They can be inspected neither by introspection nor by laboratory experiment. They are theoretical shuttlecocks which are forever being bandied from the physiologist back to the psychologist and from the psychologist back to the physiologist (ibid: 14).

There is an opposition between mind and matter. What happens to one body in space is mechanically connected to other bodies in space, but minds are insulated from one another without any direct causal connection between them. A person has two histories because he occupies two worlds: an “outer” physical world and an “inner” mental world, where “outer” and “inner” are used metaphorically since minds do not occupy space. A person has the best possible knowledge of his own mind, particularly its present conscious state and workings, with the exception of any Freudian hidden tributaries. Besides this, a person can introspect, that is perceive inwardly, on what is passing through his mind. Again, he is supposed to have perfect knowledge of these observations. “Sense-perceptions can, but consciousness and introspection cannot, be mistaken or confused” (ibid: 16). In contrast, a person has no direct access to the workings of other minds. He only has privileged access to the workings of his own mind; the workings of other minds are occult. He cannot infer that similar bodily movements are expressive of similar thoughts. He might even wonder if there exist minds other than his own.

Our ordinary mental-conduct words concerning the characters and higher-level operations of people, must under this doctrine, be construed as referring to actual or potential episodes in their secret histories. A person, through either direct awareness or introspection, has privileged access to his own stream of consciousness; he alone can say authentically whether such words are correctly applied, but no-one else has similar assurance in commenting on his conduct or state of mind. Yet, as Ryle says, we are able to make such comments correctly most of the time and correct them if we find we are mistaken. It is just this ability which led philosophers to construct theories of mind which seek to establish its nature and the “logical geography” of our successful use of mental-conduct concepts, but the geography of the official doctrine entails that such concepts cannot be effectively used with respect to other people’s minds.

The Absurdity of the Official Doctrine

Ryle refers to this official doctrine “with deliberate abusiveness, as ‘the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’” (ibid: 17). It is completely false and rests on a collection of category mistakes. It represents the facts of mental life as belonging to one type, when they belong to another. As an example of a category mistake, a foreigner is introduced to the game of cricket, in particular the roles undertaken by the players: bowling, batting, wicket keeping and fielding. He is perplexed and says “but there is no one left on the field to contribute the famous element of team-spirit” (ibid: 18). He has made the mistake of thinking that team-spirit is another cricketing operation, rather than the degree of collective commitment in which the roles are performed. He has misunderstood the concepts involved. The theoretically interesting mistakes are those made by people who apply concepts competently in most situations but occasionally in their abstract thought misallocate them to the wrong types. Consider these examples: (i) the Church of England, the Home Office and the British Constitution: the first two are British institutions but the Constitution is not an institution in that sense; (ii) John Doe, Richard Roe and the Average Taxpayer: Doe may be a friend, relation, enemy or acquaintance of Roe but cannot be any of these to the Average Taxpayer. If a student of politics thinks the British Constitution is a counterpart of the other institutions, he might think of it as a “mysteriously occult institution”. If Doe thinks the Average Taxpayer is a fellow citizen, he might think of him as “an elusive insubstantial man, a ghost who is everywhere yet nowhere” (ibid: 19). In a similar way, category mistakes are the source of the two-worlds doctrine. They have led to the idea of a person as a ghost mysteriously residing in a machine, because, as a person’s thoughts, feelings and action-inducing purposes cannot be described in physical, chemical or physiological terms, they must be described in a counterpart terminology. As the body is a complex, organised unit, so the mind must be another complex unit, though made of different stuff and organised in a different way. As the body, like any other material object, is a field of causes and effects, so the mind is another field of causes and effects, though not mechanical ones (ibid: 20).

The Origin of the Category Mistake

This arises chiefly from Descartes, who, whilst embracing the success of the Galilean scientific method in producing a mechanical theory covering every object in space, as a religious and moral man, could not accept, as Hobbes did, the discouraging corollary that “human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork” (ibid: 20). His solution was an innovative reformulation of ideas which included not just the new mechanics, but also Stoic and Augustinian theories of the will, taken up in Calvinistic doctrines, as well as Platonic and Aristotelian theories of the intellect, influential in doctrines on the immortality of the soul. He and subsequent philosophers used the following natural, but mistaken, accommodation. Since mental-conduct words cannot be understood as signifying physical processes they must signify non-physical processes. Just as mechanical laws explain the motion of physical objects as the effect of the motion of other physical objects, so different laws must explain the workings of minds as the effect of other workings of minds. The difference between intelligent and non-intelligent behaviour must be one of causation; although the motion of limbs and tongues may have mechanical causes (the movement of material particles), they may also have non-mechanical causes (the working of a mind).

Differences between the physical and the mental were seen as differences within common

categories of ‘thing’, ‘stuff’, ‘attribute’, ‘state’, ‘process’, ‘change’, ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. Minds are things but different sorts of things from bodies; mental processes are causes and effects, but different sorts of causes and effects from bodily movements (ibid: 20).

Just as a confused student might see the British Constitution as an institution, like the Home Office but also very different, so those arguing against mechanism put forward the para-mechanical hypothesis of minds as originators of causal processes, like machines but also very different.

A major problem with this hypothesis was evident at the outset: how could minds affect and be affected by bodies? In his attempt to answer this question, Descartes, while keeping to a mechanical framework, used “an obverse vocabulary” to describe minds: they are not in space, they are not publicly observable. “Minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just bits of not-clockwork” (ibid: 21). A mind is more than a ghost attached to a machine, it is itself a spectral machine which governs the “outer” bodily machine. No-one knows how it does this, since it is invisible, does not occupy space, has no weight and cannot be taken apart. Another problem follows on from this. If minds are in the same category as bodies, and bodies are subject to mechanical laws, it seemed reasonable to suppose that minds are subject to similarly rigid, but non-mechanical, laws. How, then, is it possible to have free will?

Ryle thinks it curious that the fallacy in this view was not recognised at the time. Descartes, like us, could distinguish the different qualities of mind expressed overtly in behaviour, but instead of asking by what criteria we make these distinctions, he asked by what causal principle we make them, given that the principle of mechanical causation does not provide an answer. He had mistaken the nature of the problem. Realising the problem was not one of mechanics, he assumed it was one of some counterpart to mechanics.

“When two items belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them” (ibid: 23). Conversely, category mistakes are exemplified in the formation of conjunctions (or disjunctions) of items belonging to different categories. So we can say someone purchased a left-hand glove and a right-hand glove, but not that they purchased a left-hand glove, a right-hand glove and a pair of gloves. The more tenuous the connection, the more absurd the conjunction, for example the joke: “She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair” (ibid: 23). Here the conjunction is of an emotional state and a transporting device, two very different kinds, whose only connections are the use (in different senses) of the preposition “in” and the circumstance of coming home. The official doctrine makes pairings that are just as absurd, if less obviously so. It maintains there exist bodies (more specifically, brains) and minds, there occur physical processes and mental processes, and that movements of the body have physical causes and mental causes. Showing that they are absurd is the task Ryle sets himself in subsequent chapters, by establishing what corollaries follow when different mental concepts are viewed through the lens of the doctrine. Note that talking of these conjoined items individually, for example, of minds in one sense and of brains in another, is not absurd.

If it makes no sense to conjoin them, then it makes no sense to contrast them either, since that assumes they are opposites in some way, which in turn implies they are of the same logical type. As Ryle says:

If my argument is successful […] the hallowed contrast between Mind and Matter will be dissipated, but dissipated not by either of the equally hallowed absorptions of Mind by Matter or Matter by Mind (ibid: 23).

Hence (an exclusive) Materialism and Idealism are also mistaken. The ‘reductions’ of the mental to the physical or the physical to the mental presuppose the disjunction “either there exist minds or there exist bodies (but not both)” (ibid: 24).

The Charge of Behaviourism

In a later chapter, Ryle briefly outlines the origins of behaviourism, its motivation and misconceptions. It arose as a “theory about the proper methods of scientific psychology” to emulate the methods of other sciences in obtaining results from “repeatable and publicly checkable observations and experiments”. According to Ryle, early behaviourists seemed to be divided as to whether reports on introspection and consciousness were myths or just insusceptible to scientific examination.

It was not clear whether they were espousing a not very sophisticated mechanistic doctrine, like that of Hobbes and Gassendi, or whether they were still cleaving to the Cartesian para-mechanical theory […]; whether, for example, they held that thinking just consists in making certain complex noises and movements or whether they held that though these noises and movements were connected with ‘inner life’ processes, the movements and noises alone were laboratory phenomena (ibid: 309).

Ryle says that it does not matter if these early behaviourists held to a mechanical or para-mechanical view: there were wrong in either case. This programme though did have the benefit of exposing just how shadowy were our supposed inner life occurrences. Novelists and dramatists have always been content to exhibit people’s thoughts and motivations through their imaginings, facial expressions, gestures, utterances and actions. “In concentrating on what Jane Austen concentrated on, psychologists began to find that these were, after all, the stuff and not the mere trappings of their subjects” (ibid: 309). Ryle is not denying that we have thoughts, motivations, emotions and feelings; rather, by drawing attention to the external signs which reveal them, he is showing that on an everyday level minds are not mysterious at all. Whatever we think of that approach and its degree of success, the persistence of dualism, and the impediment it constitutes in forming a concept of mind, underscores why we should pay attention to Ryle’s message: the two-worlds category mistake is being made still.

The Persistence of Dualism

Dualism has not gone away, although there has been a transition from a dualism of substances to one of properties and a more subtle dualism implicit in the distinction between the phenomenal and the intentional. One of the reasons why dualism has persisted is the fear that by abandoning it we are reduced to the mechanical. But if we are machines, we are not the sort of machines that could be built currently by men or robots, rather we are living machines that have taken billions of years of evolution to bring about. As Ryle observes, the bogey of mechanism has been receding not least because of the rise of the biological sciences:

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man (ibid: 310).

Concluding remarks

Ryle makes clear what the mind is not: it is not some mysterious insubstantial thing, it is not a field of causes that mirrors physical space as a field of causes, it is not a counterpart to the brain, it does not belong to the same category as the brain and it makes no sense to conjoin or disjoin the two. On an everyday level, we are quite familiar with the workings of the mind, not just in ourselves but in others too through their expressions, body language, verbal reports and behaviour generally. Ryle does not attempt to tackle directly what the mind is, its ontology, nor does he explain how it comes to be, how it is implemented. His purpose was to expose the logical flaw in the philosophy of his day; a flaw still present over seventy five years later.

While neuroscience is making increasing progress in elucidating the structure, connections and workings of the brain, and now at last is investigating consciousness itself, philosophy of mind has not advanced to the same degree, despite much work being done of a very high standard. One does not have to be any sort of behaviourist to appreciate that it is time to pay heed once more to Ryle’s arguments and to abandon the dualist metaphysics which misconceives the mind and its relation to processes in the brain. It is time to adopt a more scientific outlook, making use of discoveries in the biological sciences and, in addition, drawing on computer science for a rich source of insight and metaphor.

Just as natural philosophy was transformed into the experimental and theoretical branches of physics, so should the existing metaphysics of mind, in part at least, give way to neuroscience and, to a lesser extent, psychology and the science of information processing. A new, leaner, scientifically-oriented philosophy of mind should emerge, one which will be better able to characterise what mind is. This philosophy will tackle epistemological questions on the method and discoveries of the related sciences and challenge their underlying ontological assumptions, and, in considering the wider implications of these discoveries, it will contribute to philosophical debates around determinism, personhood, ethics and religion.

Bibliography

Ryle, G. (1973 [1949]) The Concept of Mind, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books.