The English philosopher Gilbert Ryle referred to what he called the “official theory” in the philosophy of mind: mind-body dualism. He classed this theory as “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine”. (Ryle admitted that his characterisation involved “deliberate abusiveness”.) Ryle saw mind-body dualism as being rooted in the Christian religion. The Christian position on the soul is that “after the death of the body [the] mind may continue to exist and function”. However, before that, the “body and [ ] mind are ordinarily harnessed together”. Mind-body dualism makes philosophical sense of the Christian position.
Ryle on Galileo and Descartes
In 2019, the English philosopher and panpsychist Philip Goff laid the blame for mind-body dualism at the feet of Galileo. Indeed, he wrote a book called Galileo’s Error. Gilbert Ryle, some 70 years before Goff, also picked up on this moment of philosophical and scientific history. Ryle stated that Galileo
“showed that his methods of scientific discovery were competent to prove mechanical theory which should cover every occupant of space”.
Human beings are occupants of space. But are human minds or souls too? Descartes, for one, didn’t think so. Ryle himself continued:
“Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius he could not but endorse the claims of mechanics, yet as a religious and moral man he could not accept, as Hobbes accepted, the discouraging rider to those aims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork. The mental could not be just a variety of the mechanical.”
It doesn’t make sense to state that clocks are moral and religious entities. And neither does it make sense to state that clockwork human beings can be moral and religious beings. So something needed to give.
Ryle on the Mind-Body Link
Much has been made about how the mind and the body can’t be united if they really are two different ontological categories with very different properties. (Descartes notoriously joined them at the pineal gland in the brain.) Ryle himself picked up on this problem by stating the “official doctrine” as that being “minds are not in space, nor are their operations subject to mechanical laws”. What’s more, “[t]he workings of one mind are not witnessable by other observers, its career is private”. This is where behaviourism steps in. The working of another’s mind may not be witnessable by other observers, but his or her behaviour (including overt speech) is.
The mind can be “inspected” by the owner of that mind. The behaviour and brain of that human subject can be inspected by various sciences. Ryle noted the problem of tying these two approaches together. In other words, how can an “inner life” be linked to the brain or to behaviour? This link itself, according to Ryle, “can be inspected neither by introspection nor by laboratory experiment”. The two ends of the link can be explained, but not the link itself. Thus, Ryle detected the problem of
“theoretical shuttlecocks which are forever being bandied from the physiologist back to the psychologist and from the psychologist back to the physiologist”.
In a crude sense, the fact that there are two disciplines dealing with the same phenomenon screams dualism. But that needn’t be the case. This can be a case of ontological monism living alongside conceptual dualism. Or in a Wittgensteinian manner, we have two “language games” which refer to, or discuss, the same thing.
So Ryle made certain points that had been endlessly made by other philosophers and scientists. He asked:
“How can a mental process, such as willing, cause spatial movements like the movements of the tongue? How can a physical change in the optic nerve have among its effects a mind’s perception of a flash of light?”
The American philosopher Donald Davidson, some 30 years later, made exactly the same point. He gave a very concrete example of this:
“1) Mental Events: perceivings, notings, calculations, judgements, decisions, intentional actions, changes of belief.
“2) Physical Event: the sinking of the Bismarck.”
The mental events in 1) brought about physical event 2).
Indeed, Davidson also replicated Ryle’s position on conceptual dualism.
Ryle on Other Minds
Ryle also made the point that if the mind is non-spatial and non-physical, then there is “no direct causal connection between what happens in one mind and what happens in another”. So, here, rather than focussing on the “external world” an its relation to minds, Ryle focussed on the relation of minds to minds. In other words, if the soul has the nature it is deemed to have, then what can explain the relation of minds to minds? Ryle offered a “behaviorist” or Wittgensteinian solution to this problem. He stated that
“[o]nly through the medium of the public, physical world can the mind of one person make a difference to the mind of another”.
Put in basic terms, human persons can only make a difference to the minds of other human persons by relying on his/her own physical behaviour and vocal expressions, and the other person’s physical behaviour and vocal expressions. Intuitively, this may be seen as automatically factoring out minds completely. However, this will depend on the definition of the word “mind” within this context.
Ryle’s Behaviourism?
Ryle believed that the mind or soul is not a thing or an object. Thus, if the mind isn’t an thing, then it’s not something which can be deemed to be a “repository [that can] house objects that something called the ‘the physical world’ is forbidden to house”. It is then that Ryle offered his controversial behaviorist alternative to this way of looking a things. To talk of the mind
“is to talk of the person’s abilities, liabilities and inclinations to do and undergo certain sorts of things, and of the doing and undergoing of these things in the ordinary world”.
It is this aspect of Ryle's philosophy which created the most controversy. In other words, his problems with dualism struck a chord with many philosophers in the 1940s, 50s, 60s and onward. However, his behaviourist angle came to be seen as being problematic. Indeed, those problems, at least retrospectively, seem obvious.
The best way of charactering the problems is to quote the philosopher John Cottingham. He wrote:
“It is not clear, however, that this approach can cope successfully with what happens when, for example, someone sits in an armchair for half an hour, just *thinking* intensely about a problem.”
In simple terms, it’s being claimed here that there are no behavioural manifestations of this case of thinking intensely. Yet isn’t there something “going on” that no other person is aware of? If behaviour is the be all and end all of mind, then this person mustn’t have a mind when thinking intensely in his armchair. Yet this is a bizarre conclusion. Perhaps Ryle might have argued that he could have expressed his thoughts behaviourally. (This is classed as dispositional behaviourism.) Sure. But he didn’t!
The behaviourist position, then, seems a little absolute and categorical. It can’t deal with this person thinking intensely on his armchair… Or can it? The behaviorist position may be that it’s of course the case that this person was thinking intensely in his armchair. However, it terms of public discourse, science, intersubjectivity and meaning, he might as well not have been…
This person needed to express his thoughts to other persons in order for those other persons to have any awareness of his thoughts. Yet that still doesn’t stop it from being the case that this person thought intensely without exhibiting any behavioural manifestations of that thinking. So how did Ryle, or the behaviourists, deal with that?
Was Ryle a Reductionist?
It is clear that Ryle found reductionism in the philosophy of mind problematic. He told his readers that
“as is true, a person’s thinking, feeling and purposive doing cannot be described solely in the idioms of physics, chemistry and physiology”.
This isn’t to say that these things aren’t physical phenomena: it’s just to say that they can’t be reduced to the “idioms” found in physics, chemistry and physiology.
Ryle went into more detail when he criticised both idealism and materialism. He stated that
“the ‘reduction’ of mental states and processes to physical states and processes, presupposes the legitimacy of the disjunction ‘Either there exists minds or there exists bodies (but not both)’”.
On the surface at least, it does seem that if a materialist reduces the mental to the physical, then he mustn’t recognise the mental as a different “substance” — or at least a different something. Ryle, on the other hand, argued in terms of different “idioms” or “concepts”, not different ontological categories. (This, again, was a position developed by Donald Davidson some thirty years later.) This meant that he could accept mental concepts and idioms without thereby committing himself to the mind being a substance or thing. Ryle clarified this in the following way:
“It is perfectly proper to say, in one logical tone of voice, that there exists minds and to say, in another logical tone of voice, that there exist bodies. But these expressions do not indicate two different species of existence, for ‘existence’ is not a generic word like ‘coloured’ or ‘sexed’.”
The phrase “two different species of existence” is odd. However, all it really means is that minds and bodies aren’t two different ontological categories or substances.
Yet didn’t Ryle reduce a person’s thinking, feeling and purposive doing to a “person’s abilities, liabilities and inclinations to do and undergo certain sorts of things, inclinations to behave in certain ways”? That may not, however, be deemed to be a genuine reduction.
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