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The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle The Concept of Mind First published in 1949, Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind is one of the classics of twentieth-century philosophy. Described by Ryle as a ‘sustained piece of analytical hatchet-work’ on Cartesian dualism, The Concept of Mind is a radical and controversial attempt to jettison once and for all what Ryle called ‘the ghost in the machine’: Descartes’ argument that mind and body are two separ- ate entities. As well as rejecting dualism about the mind, Ryle goes much further, arguing that more recent materialist or functionalist theories of mind do not solve the Cartesian puzzle either and even accept some of its fundamental, mistaken, propositions. It is because of these mistaken propositions that associated problems, such as mental causation and ‘other minds’, arise in the first place. Ryle builds his case via an erudite and beautifully written account of the will, emotion, self-knowledge, sensation and observation, imagination and the intellect. Some of the problems he tackles, such as the distinction between ‘knowing how and knowing that’, challenged some of the bedrock assumptions of philosophy and continue to exert important influence on contemporary philosophy. A classic work of philosophy, The Concept of Mind is essential reading for anyone interested in the nature of the mind and human behaviour. This sixtieth anniversary edition includes a substantial commentary by Julia Tanney. Together with the reissue of both volumes of Ryle’s Collected Papers, it provides essential reading for new readers interested not only in the history of analytic philosophy but in its power to challenge major currents in philosophy of mind and language today. Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) was a lecturer in philosophy at Christ Church College Oxford and in 1945 was elected to the Waynflete Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy; a position he held until his retirement in 1968. He was Editor of the journal Mind for almost twenty-five years. Julia Tanney is Senior Lecturer of Philosophy at the University of Kent, and has held visiting positions at the Universities of Picardie and Paris-Sorbonne. ‘This new edition of Ryle’s classic work, with a substantial critical study by Julia Tanney, will make possible a re-assessment of Ryle and of the revolutionary potential of The Concept of Mind. Tanney’s essay challenges every aspect of the familiar conception of Ryle’s thought, and shows that his ideas, properly understood, reveal fundamental problems within contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Ryle’s approach to philosophy of mind is, she claims, not even one which we have room for in our usual understanding of what the “possible positions” are in philosophy of mind. Tanney’s treatment of Ryle is complex and subtle, and opens up important new ways of thinking in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language.’ Cora Diamond, University of Virginia, USA THE CONCEPT OF MIND Gilbert Ryle First published 1949 by Hutchinson This edition published 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © The Estate of Gilbert Ryle: Hertford College, University of Oxford © 2009 Julia Tanney for Critical Commentary All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Ryle, Gilbert, 1900–1976 The concept of mind / by Gilbert Ryle. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Mind and body. I. Title. BF161.R9 2009 128′.2 – dc22 2008054171 ISBN 0-203-87585-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0–415–48547–9 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–87585–0 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–48547–0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–87585–8 (ebk) CONTENTS Rethinking Ryle: A Critical Discussion of The Concept of Mind by Julia Tanney ix Introduction lix CHAPTER I DESCARTES’ MYTH 1 (1) The Official Doctrine 1 (2) The Absurdity of the Official Doctrine 5 (3) The Origin of the Category Mistake 8 (4) Historical Note 12 CHAPTER II KNOWING HOW AND KNOWING THAT 14 (1) Foreword 14 (2) Intelligence and Intellect 14 (3) Knowing How and Knowing That 16 (4) The Motives of the Intellectualist Legend 21 (5) ‘In My Head’ 24 (6) The Positive Account of Knowing How 28 (7) Intelligent Capacities versus Habits 30 (8) The Exercise of Intelligence 33 (9) Understanding and Misunderstanding 39 (10) Solipsism 47 vi CONTENTS CHAPTER III THE WILL 49 (1) Foreword 49 (2) The Myth of Volitions 50 (3) The Distinction Between Voluntary and Involuntary 56 (4) Freedom of the Will 61 (5) The Bogy of Mechanism 62 CHAPTER IV EMOTION 69 (1) Foreword 69 (2) Feelings versus Inclinations 70 (3) Inclinations versus Agitations 78 (4) Moods 84 (5) Agitations and Feelings 89 (6) Enjoying and Wanting 91 (7) The Criteria of Motives 94 (8) The Reasons and the Causes of Actions 97 (9) Conclusion 98 CHAPTER V DISPOSITIONS AND OCCURRENCES 100 (1) Foreword 100 (2) The Logic of Dispositional Statements 101 (3) Mental Capacities and Tendencies 109 (4) Mental Occurrences 118 (5) Achievements 131 CHAPTER VI SELF-KNOWLEDGE 136 (1) Foreword 136 (2) Consciousness 138 (3) Introspection 145 (4) Self-Knowledge Without Privileged Access 149 (5) Disclosure by Unstudied Talk 162 (6) The Self 166 (7) The Systematic Elusiveness of ‘I’ 175 CONTENTS vii CHAPTER VII SENSATION AND OBSERVATION 179 (1) Foreword 179 (2) Sensations 181 (3) The Sense Datum Theory 189 (4) Sensation and Observation 200 (5) Phenomenalism 212 (6) Afterthoughts 217 CHAPTER VIII IMAGINATION 222 (1) Foreword 222 (2) Picturing and Seeing 223 (3) The Theory of Special Status Pictures 225 (4) Imagining 232 (5) Pretending 234 (6) Pretending, Fancying and Imaging 240 (7) Memory 248 CHAPTER IX THE INTELLECT 255 (1) Foreword 255 (2) The Demarcation of the Intellect 256 (3) The Construction, Possession and Utilisation of Theories 260 (4) The Application and Misapplication of Epistemological Terms 266 (5) Saying and Teaching 282 (6) The Primacy of the Intellect 287 (7) Epistemology 290 CHAPTER X PSYCHOLOGY 292 (1) The Programme of Psychology 292 (2) Behaviourism 300 Index 304 RETHINKING RYLE A Critical Discussion of The Concept of Mind Julia Tanney I INTRODUCTION Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind was published in 1949 both to wide acclaim and to general bemusement. It was anticipated by its critics as a book that would, if not set the agenda for philosophy of mind, then at least preoccupy it for the then foreseeable future. Now, more than sixty years after its initial publication, we are in a better position to appreciate its legacy. Although Ryle published on a wide range of topics in philo- sophy (notably in the history of philosophy—especially Plato—and in philosophy of language), including a series of lectures centred on philo- sophical dilemmas, The Concept of Mind remains his best known and most important work. Through this work, Ryle is thought to have accomplished two major tasks. First, he was seen to have put the final nail in the coffin of Cartesian dualism. Second, as he himself anticipated, he is thought to have argued on behalf of, and suggested as dualism’s replacement, the doctrine known as philosophical (and sometimes analytical) behaviourism. Sometimes known as an ‘ordinary language’, sometimes as an ‘analytic’, philosopher, Ryle—even when mentioned in the same breath as Wittgenstein and his followers—is considered to be on a different, somewhat idiosyncratic (and difficult to characterise), philosophical track. To credit Ryle with demolishing substance dualism and paving the way for behaviourism is to underestimate his achievement. Hardly anyone x RETHINKING RYLE working in philosophy of mind today takes seriously the view Ryle describes in his book as ‘the official doctrine’—the view he ridicules as ‘the myth of the ghost in the machine’. It is widely agreed that the chaff of philosophical behaviourism has long been discarded while the wheat has been appropriated by the philosophical doctrine of functionalism. Func- tionalism in one of its many forms is widely accepted in the philosophy of mind today (and it gains its appeal by appearing as the best philosophical articulation of underlying assumptions in the cognitive sciences). It is a view that is thought to have saved the ‘reality’ of the mental from the ‘eliminativist’ or ‘fictionalist’ tendencies of behaviourism while acknow- ledging the insight (often attributed to Ryle) that the mental is importantly related to behavioural output or response (as well as to stimulus or input). According to a reasonably charitable assessment, the best of Ryle’s lessons has long been assimilated while the problematic has been discarded. If there are considerations still brewing from the 1930s and 1940s that would threaten the orthodoxy in contemporary philosophy of mind, these lie somewhere in the work of Wittgenstein and his followers—not in Ryle. I shall argue that the view just outlined, although widespread, repre- sents a fundamental misapprehension of Ryle’s work. First, the official doctrine is dead in only one of its ontological aspects: substance dualism may well have been repudiated but property dualism still claims a number of contemporary defenders.
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