Chapter 2, Part AGhost slips Ryle's grasp

A discussion of

The Concept of Mind

by Gilbert Ryle
(Oxford 1949)

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¶ Ghost slips Ryle's grasp was originally posted Friday, August 4, 2017.
¶ For computer documents, ordered footnotes are unnecessary. Each footnote designation uses an arbitrary alphanumeric code, which links to the note. If the link fails, try pasting it in the browser bar.
¶ I have been updating this article regularly since it was first posted in August 2017 and the original is barely recognizable in the current version. I have done what I can to smooth out the accumulated lumpiness. Minor revisions are still possible.
¶ In my discussion, I have found it useful to follow the thought over the years of Bertrand Russell, who gave Ryle's book a scornful review [kg97].
¶ Revision dates are listed on this page.
¶ I have been adding footnotes at will (thus the unconventional footnote system), but I shall keep a special site for relevant matter and remarks that I don't peg to particular parts of the essay via footnotes. You may view that planned site as a rambling appendix. I hope to be able to use those posts in a new essay, though I have not yet decided upon a theme. So please check my site θ https://thetaman.blogspot.com/ for entries in the Ryle Appendix
¶ You may find the many footnotes on this blog and on the θ blog to be a useful research tool.
¶ A very useful supplement to this critique is the essay 'Conversation with Gilbert Ryle'
in Modern British Philosophy by Bryan Magee.[zw7]
¶ A very useful survey of the mind/body problem in general is the anthology Immortality edited by Paul Edwards (be forewarned about Edwards's strong atheist bias) [ds45].
¶ Consider archiving these pages via The Wayback Machine, https://archive.org/web/

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Part A: O soul o mio

How does one exorcise a ghost from a machine? First we must dispense with the idea that man is a machine. He is, one infers, a determinate system that is not crudely mechanical. By dispensing with the "bogy of mechanism" we are in a position to carefully define our terms, dodging various "category mistakes," so that we can safely cast out the ghost.

This summarizes, as I understand it, the line of reasoning laid down by Ryle in his book, The Concept of Mind, published in 1949. Ryle was a professor of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford. In my estimate, Ryle is mistaken because – judging by the content of his book – he had virtually no knowledge of science or mathematics. Also, he admitted that he had never studied any psychology,[zw7] even though the histories of philosophy and psychology show the two topics to be very closely interleaved. Notwithstanding, a legend persists that Ryle has solved the Cartesian mind-body problem. I aim to convince the modern reader that he did no such thing [Km74].

At issue is Ryle's comprehension of the term mechanism. As a philosophical concept, mechanism is often applied specifically to the mind, implying only physical causes for mental activity, as opposed to dualism, which implies non-physical causes of cognition. Physicalism, discussed below, should be regarded as a purportedly more sophisticated form of mechanistic materialism.

Why take Ryle to task seven decades after his book was published? Well, just as he wished to debunk the Cartesian myth of "the ghost in the machine" many years after Descartes wrote, so we deem necessary the debunking of the legend that Ryle successfully exorcised the ghost by showing that Descartes and his followers had fallen into one or more "category errors." In fact, Ryle assuredly erred with his muddled understandings of mechanism [1x] , determinism and free will.

Let's get out of the way now the straightforward fact that any failure of Ryle cannot be taken to imply that Descartes was correct. In fact, I very much doubt that he was.

Ryle's attack on Cartesian dualism is nicely summarized in a Wikipedia article that includes this observation:

According to Ryle, mental processes are merely intelligent acts. There are no mental processes that are distinct from intelligent acts. The operations of [what we incorrectly call] the mind are not merely represented by intelligent acts, they are the same as those intelligent acts. Thus, acts of learning, remembering, imagining, knowing, or willing are not merely clues to hidden mental processes or to complex sequences of intellectual operations, they are the way in which those mental processes or intellectual operations are defined.

Ryle concedes [zw7] that dualism did not originate [GV25b] with Descartes, but argues that Descartes "put nice firm edges or labels" on dualism. Shakespeare and the Bible didn't say that the mind and the body are two different substances, though they sometimes implied that they were, Ryle says, whereas Descartes said that that was the case [AT20].

In Part IV of the Discourse on Method, Descartes gives us his basis for the dualism of mind and body:

In the next place, I attentively examined what I was and as I observed that I could suppose that I had no body, and that there was no world nor any place in which I might be; but that I could not therefore suppose that I was not; and that, on the contrary, from the very circumstance that I thought to doubt of the truth of other things, it most clearly and certainly followed that I was; while, on the other hand, if I had only ceased to think, although all the other objects which I had ever imagined had been in reality existent, I would have had no reason to believe that I existed; I thence concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature consists only in thinking, and which, that it may exist, has need of no place, nor is dependent on any material thing; so that " I," that is to say, the mind by which I am what I am, is wholly distinct from the body, and is even more easily known than the latter, and is such, that although the latter were not, it would still continue to be all that it is.

(From John Veitch's translation of 1901.)

The fact that Descartes can imagine himself without a body but not without consciousness leads Descartes to his dualism. Elsewhere, he makes plain that dualism seems to be necessitated by the mechanistic view of Nature that he has advocated, along with other Renaissance trailblazers. God could not have made humans as mere automatons, though he thought God did make animals as mere automatons that lacked true consciousness.

I do not now [5/30/20] recall whether Ryle specifically challenged Descartes on what to modern eyes appears to be fallacious reasoning. In any case, the fact that Descartes can imagine himself bodyless but not mindless does not imply that the mind is independent of the body. Descartes' observation may very well imply something else very profound, but it does not lead directly to a two-substance theory (in which substance is to mean some universal essence; in this case, the essences being matter and mind/soul).

I can accept that in this passage Descartes has indeed made an error. Surely the bouquet of a wine is not independent of the wine merely on account of its apparent ineffability. Whether we may fairly call this Cartesian fallacy a "category error," I will let pass. But in any case, even if one grants that Ryle disclosed a Cartesian error, it assuredly does not follow that the Oxford don has solved the mind-body problem.

Of course, Descartes makes a number of arguments in favor of an immaterial human soul, and I am quite sure Ryle made no attempt to rebut them one by one. (Thus, even though the above argument is mistaken, we have not here proved that Descartes has not made a good case.)

Interestingly, Descartes telegraphs the coming wave of idealism with the implication that the body and its surroundings may be a projection of the mind/soul, though he does not propose extreme solipsism. Yet even if some form of idealism were to hold, we are hard put to see why that would imply immortality of the soul – though, for Ryle, the immortality of a nonexistent ghost is not at issue.

We should note that non-dualism does not preclude a belief in immortality. In the early English Enlightenment, there was a great deal of support for strict materialism, such that the body, with its mental faculties, is resurrected on the Last Day to receive eternal life or damnation. The idea of an immortal soul was dismissed as "papist priestcraft" [NP53]. On the other side, there is the ancient notion that matter does not exist, but is part of a general delusion blinding people to the awareness that all is spirit [QW73].

Among the first modern philosophers to reject dualism in preference for straight materialism was Julien Offray de La Mettrie, author of Man as a Machine (1747), who extended to humans Descartes' argument that animals were soulless mechanistic automotons. La Mettrie's hypothesis gained enormous momentum with the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species and Descent of Man in the latter half of the 19th Century.[vr1]

Bryan Magee summarizes Ryle's Concept thus:

We tend to think of a person as consisting of a body and a mind, but it's a complete mistake to think of the mind as if it were an entity that exists and performs actions and has experiences and a history, in the way that the body exists and performs actions and has experiences and a history. 'Mind' isn't a name for that kind of thing at all: it's simply a generic term for certain categories of behavior, performance, disposition, occurrence and so on. There is no non-material entity that has or does certain things. Still less, therefore, is any such entity invisibly operating the body from inside.[zw7]

Two major strands of 20th Century philosophy -- concern for the metaphysics of mind and for the logical status of sentences about mind, come together in Ryle's Concept, writes Owen Flanagan [Rir45].

If there is a founding document in the contemporary philosophy of mind proper, Ryle's book is it. First, there is a spirited attack on the Cartesian picture of mind as a "ghost in the machine." Second, there is a relentless attack on the doctrine of privileged access, the view that the mind is transparent to its owner, and that we each have unmediated and incorrigible access to our own mental states. Third, there is the proposal that "mind," the Cartesian conception of mind, at any rate, is simply a mystifying way of speaking about certain behavioral dispositions of the organism. According to Ryle's logical behaviourism [a description added later by others], just as "solubility" is nothing mysterious, referring simply as the disposition of a substance to dissolve in liquid, likewise talk of mental states, talk of "belief" and "desire," is, as far as it is meaningful, talk of dispositions of the organism to behave in certain ways. It is ironic that the locus classicus of contemporary philosophy of mind argued in a sense that there was really no such thing as "mind" as traditionally understood.

We remark that a disposition for certain materials to dissolve in certain liquids is what is also known as a potential. A question then is what is potential and what is action or activity? It seems that whatever other name we use for mind, potential and action are interlocked in numerous negative feedback loops.

Two decades after Concept appeared, Ryle said that he had committed some "howlers" in that book. His material on motivations and imagination needed revision, he told Magee.[zw7] Also, Ryle said if given the chance he would cancel much material concerning the intellect and replace it with his newer insights. Yet, what Concept has to say on intellect and related topics "don't give me a guilty conscience."

Whatever Ryle might or might not have written at a later point, our job is to critique the book (and not criticize the man).

In particular, the concept of mind that Ryle wishes to debunk is the Greek idea of soul as mind, or psyche – and clearly, if no mind exists, then neither does an immortal soul [GV25a]. So, before further addressing Ryle's ideas, let us digress briefly on the notion of soul and some related concepts.

O soul o mio

What is the soul? Of course this has long been a question of compelling force. The concept of soul, which he takes as synonymous to mind, is Ryle's target. He aims to delegitimize the concept of mind/soul as a category mistake. In that case, we had better have some idea of what these terms may mean.

In a discussion of ancient Egyptian beliefs, the anthropologist E.O. James wrote,

From very early times each individual was believed to have an invisible immortal "soul" or ghost which often assumed the form of a bird with a human head, that either survived death or came into existence at the time of the dissolution. To this conception of the ba that of the ka was eventually added. [1xaa]

Such representations, plainly, served the purpose of words. So the image-word, or description, is equivalent to this description: "the something associated with a human that flies away upon death." Immortality follows from the idea that the spirit continues after death.

James also observed,

To what extent these highly complex interpretations of the constitution and survival of human personality can be regarded as of prehistoric origin and significance is difficult to say. The conception of the ka as a vital essence, a guardian spirit and an alter ego would seem to represent very ancient and primitive connotations, as does the ghostly ba of the dead man.

The fact that human spirit life can be construed to arise from early attempts to structure the world does not of course imply that there is no spirit world. We may safely say that later thinkers used these primitive ideas to convey their thoughts on what we may see as alternate reality.

In early times, some thought the spirit simply evaporated. Others thought the spirit must stay with a body that was intact in one place underground in order to "rest." Otherwise it would be condemned to wander aimlessly, with no prospect of rest. Moreover, some generalized the concept of underground burial to an underground realm, which later was further generalized into high-sky realms, and so forth.

I agree with a number of scholars that the notion of gods in part emerged from the animism [cv20] that early man imputed to the planets, the sun and the moon. This, in turn, would lead to generalizations of pantheons of beings on high, whether on Mount Olympus or elsewhere out of human reach [GV25]. In addition, we can also conjecture that early tribes elevated ancestors to the status of gods by this progression: a splinter group has survived with only young people to lead the way. They make decisions based on "Father said this..." and "Father said that..." The next generation acquires this custom, which is often useful for settling disputes. "Father" becomes very much de-concretized over the generations, living on as but a memory core and an abstraction.

We see a remnant of this cultural meme in modern ancestor worship in the Far East and elsewhere.

As human bands merged, one would expect a political agreement to assure the acceptance of the guiding god of the other band, leading to pantheons. (This effect is quite obvious in Indic history and proto-history – and of course pantheism is implicit in the projection of human tendencies onto celestial objects.)

Father's status was always high, but now he has become disembodied as a spirit (or granted a super-body with super-hero powers). Now if such a belief train is welded to the belief train that Father's spirit lives on somewhere in the underworld or elsewhere, the status of "god" is virtually assured. (Curiously, though the concept of underworld did not always connote the sinister; that connotation gained popularity because of the underground/underworld association with death, which most people feared and hence saw as sinister.)

In addition, we have the early custom of burial of the dead, possibly for sanitation reasons but also no doubt to spare relatives excessive grief. Children might be told "your brother has gone to live in a nice place underground." Over time such a children's tale becomes a basic belief. The custom of covering graves with stones doubtless arose in part to serve as grave-markers, perhaps so that relatives could be consoled with the notion that their loved one was resting comfortably below ground.

Even so, very importantly, the stones were placed to prevent animals from digging up the remains and eating them. Why would such a happenstance worry Paleolithic humans? Very plausibly, the custom arose in order to make sure the loved one's rest was undisturbed. An added worry was that if the remains were eaten and-or scattered the person would no longer exist and the spirit would have no home.

We should beware assuming that a paleolithic religious sense included belief in high gods or sky gods. We may properly conjecture that burial customs show a notion of personal continuation in some sort of afterlife and that European cave art implies generations of belief in the power of sympathetic magic [ip18] to assist in the hunt. Also, we may accept that animism, as a basic mind-set of hunter-gatherers, is a defining requirement for religious beliefs [GV25].

For an excellent discussion, see

Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958132/

According to that study, hunter-gatherers, being fundamentally egalitarian, show little if any evidence of belief in "high gods," which would be seen as rulers.

But, in the next stage of human society – pastoralism – belief in "high gods" begins to emerge. Pastoral societies, we have been told, tend to develop a belief in a care-giver God, a belief which is analogous to how pastoralists oversee their flocks and herds.

Assuming that early pastoralists were also early agriculturalists, their lone tribal god would have migrated with the agriculturalists after they settled down and split from the pastoralists. The need for new social norms in which various tribes settled near each other and intermingled would have required a social contract, or treaty. The use of a higher authority to witness agreements was necessary. So, for a city-state with surrounding farms, a number of pastoral gods would have been handed down. One would be chosen for the entire community, with the other gods tolerated as lesser deities, though to its core community the "lesser" deity remained preeminent.

The early Hebrews [yuh0] may have been monotheistic while still pastoralists. But once many became farmers, the tendency to henotheism is apparent. The ten commandments appear, objectively speaking, to state a treaty agreement among tribes, each of which, to begin with, probably had its own god, including the Canaanite god El. (From my perspective, a probable secular history need not be inconsistent with a given theological history. Each would be a distinct way of interpreting approximately the same set of recorded facts.)[yuh1]

In early Egypt and Greece, write philosophers Solomon and Higgins [1xaaa] , the human soul was a "somewhat pathetic being incapable of existing in any significant sense unless it was embodied." And for the Greek pluralist Democritus, the soul was not much of anything, just another atom or combination of atoms.

"But with Pythagorus and Orphic cults, the soul took on new significance," they write. "It may have still needed a body, but it found new ones, through reincarnation. And with Pythagorus, Socrates and then Plato, the soul became the seat of the intellect as well as of virtue." For Plato, the soul became part of the World of Forms and perforce eternal. On the other hand, Aristotle [ub15] saw the soul as the essence that belongs to everything alive. In the case of man, that essence is encapsulated by the concept of rationality. This soul/essence does not survive death, but is intrinsic to the body [FT11].

In the views of Plato, we see some correspondence with the ideas of the soul given in the Gospels and in the writings of Christian philosophers.

Useful article on ancient Greek notions of soul
https://web.archive.org/web/20200507125504/https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-soul/

Christian philosophical [vp57] (as opposed to intuitive) conceptions of the soul were strongly influenced by Augustine, whose ideas in turn were influenced by Plato and Plotinus.

As Justin Hannegan [1xbbb] observes:

In lieu of the full Platonic doctrine, Augustine describes the soul as a “composite of two substances, a soul and a body.” Man is two things together, united into a single living unity. According to Augustine’s most mature definition, “Man is a rational substance consisting of soul and body.”

At death, however, the soul is separated, and remains in existence on its own until the resurrection of the dead [gk63] , when it is reunited with the body.

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Go to Next Part
https://ghostbust999.blogspot.com/2020/04/part-b.html

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