QuestionsIs the mind the brain?The ghost in the machine: a category mistake
Is the mind the brain?The question is badly put

The ghost in the machine: a category mistake

The ghost in the machine

Gilbert Ryle 1900 · 1976The 'ghost in the machine': looking for the mind as one more thing is a category mistake.
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What it claims

The ghost-in-the-machine theory is "one big mistake" of a special kind: a category mistake. There are not two things, mind and body, which could be said to be identical or different: "Where is the mind, and is it the brain?" is a badly posed question.

Why

Mental words describe ways of acting, not a hidden thing: looking for the mind as an object is a category mistake.

The same idea through history
René Descartes1641The "official myth" Ryle attacks: the mind is a thing distinct from the body.
Gilbert Ryle1949The myth is a category mistake: the mind is not one more thing beside the body.
Ludwig Wittgenstein1953The same diagnosis by another route: sensation words do not refer to inner objects.
In short

"The ghost in the machine: a category mistake" is an argument by Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind, 1949, ch. I, 1949) on the question "Is the mind the brain?" (answer: the question is badly put). Its claim: The ghost-in-the-machine theory is "one big mistake" of a special kind: a category mistake. There are not two things, mind and body, which could be said to be identical or different: "Where is the mind, and is it the brain?" is a badly posed question. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P1). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Concept of Mind, 1949, ch. I
Valid with an implicit premise

"Is the mind the brain?" The question seems to assume two candidates: a thing called "mind" and a thing called "brain", and we wonder whether they are the same. Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) argues that this is the trap. In his view the dominant theory since Descartes, which he ironically calls the "dogma of the Ghost in the Machine", makes a category mistake: it treats the mind as one more thing, whereas talking about mind is talking about how people act, speak and think. If that is right, the question gets neither "yes" nor "no": it is badly posed.

P1 · implicit premiseWhen we look, as for one more thing, for what is not a thing of the same type as the others, we make a category mistake. The visitor to Oxford who has seen the colleges, libraries and laboratories and asks "but where is the University?" looks beside the buildings for what is the way they form a whole.
P2The official theory, which comes mainly from Descartes, treats the mind as one more thing: bodies are in space and subject to mechanical laws, minds are not in space nor subject to those laws, and each person would thus live through two parallel histories, one public, one private.
P3The words of mental life (intelligent, attentive, angry, resolute) describe mainly ways of acting, speaking and reacting, with their abilities and tendencies, not events that would take place in a second location. Ryle says he wants only to rectify the logic of these "mental-conduct concepts".
So the ghost-in-the-machine theory is "one big mistake" of a special kind: a category mistake. There are not two things, mind and body, which could be said to be identical or different: "Where is the mind, and is it the brain?" is a badly posed question.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P1, the computer finds a case where the myth treats the mind as a thing and the mind describes a way of acting, with no mistake at all: nothing forbids a word from naming both a thing and a way of acting.
Valid with P1. Ryle does not state P1 in this form: it sums up what his examples show (the University, the military division, team spirit). Once accepted, the conclusion follows: if the myth treats as a thing what is not one, it is a category mistake. The weak point lies elsewhere: P3 is far from obvious, as the history of objections shows.
Analogy. A foreigner watches his first game of cricket. He sees who bowls, who bats, who keeps wicket. Then he asks: "But who looks after team spirit?" No one: team spirit is not one more player, it is the way each one plays. The example is Ryle's.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Hilary Putnam ("Brains and Behavior") 1963 · attacks premise 3

If "being in pain" meant only behaving like someone in pain, pain could not be told from its imitation: a perfect actor behaves like someone suffering without suffering. And conversely, Putnam imagines "super-Spartans", people who have so thoroughly learned to show nothing that they are in pain without anything giving it away. Pain is therefore not a way of behaving.

Ryle replies
Ryle (written in 1949, before Putnam) Ryle's reply on pretending
Ryle examines the worry that all conduct might be sham. He answers that this menace is "empty": we know what shamming is, it is behaving as people who are not shamming behave. Without sincere cases, we could not be fooled by the hypocrite.
The debate goes on (our summary) This reply covers the actor, not the super-Spartans: they are in pain with nothing showing, which is another problem. For most philosophers of mind these objections ended logical behaviourism, and Putnam himself proposed functionalism in its place. Ryle's defenders say that his "dispositions" are not mere gestures, that they can be inhibited, and that he is in any case not the behaviourist he is caricatured as. The debate on this point goes on.
Descartes (Meditation VI) 1641 · attacks the conclusion

Descartes holds it certain that he, that is his mind, is "entirely and truly distinct" from his body and may exist without it. This is exactly what Ryle calls a myth. For Descartes, on the contrary, it is the first thing we know.

Ryle replies
Ryle Ryle, ahead of the objection
Ryle foresees that he will be taken for someone denying well-known facts about mental life. He answers that he only aims to "rectify the logic" of mental-conduct concepts: he does not deny that we think, suffer or decide, he refuses to describe those facts as events in a hidden place.
The debate goes on (our summary) A Cartesian answers that the certainty of being in pain, of being conscious, is not a matter of language: it is lived experience, and describing it as a disposition to act changes its content. On this point the discussion continues with the philosophers of consciousness.
Ullin T. Place ("Is Consciousness a Brain Process?") 1956 · attacks premise 3

Place accepts that many mental concepts (believing, knowing, being intelligent) can be analysed as dispositions to act, but argues that this is not the case for sensations and consciousness: these are real, and brain science will tell what they are. Ryle's analysis therefore leaves a remainder, and that remainder may be precisely the brain.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Ryle in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) We did not find a reply from Ryle to Place. Ryleans can say that the word "sensation" also has a use learned in public, as Wittgenstein argues. Materialists answer that, even if so, this does not say what goes on in the head: the mind-brain identity question then returns, but on narrower ground.
What today's voices say
Defend it
Steven PinkerHe names the 'ghost in the machine' as a false dogma about the mind.