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Ryle on Descartes Myth

Ryle: identifies a particular kind of mistake that he thinks Descartes has made in separating the mind and the body into two distinct kinds of substances Once we recognize this error, we also recognize why Idealism and materialism are false. The kind of mistake? A category mistake. The Official Doctrine: what Ryle debunks Everybody has both a mind, and a body They can exist separately mind might continue after body, body persists after mind is gone from it Bodies are extended and do not think minds are nonextended and think Bodies are public, minds are private What does this mean? (People) Bodies: Anyone can sense it. Any observer as good as any other for perceiving the body Subject to physical mechanical laws, same as all other physical bodies Minds: No one else can observe its goingson except the subject. Only one person can directly perceive what happens in any given mind (namely, in your own mind) Not subject to mechanical laws Privileged Firstperson access: The immediate and absolute authority one has to know what is going on in ones own mind I know what is happening in my own mind o Without having to observe my body o Without having to infer from other clues o Without the possibility of being wrong o No one else knows what is happening in my own mind They must infer from observations of what I do o They can be wrong in a way that I cannot o But, as we saw last week, this leads us to the problem of how these two kinds of substances interact. How do minds move bodies? How do bodies provide sensations to minds? o The core problem here is causal: how do things of different kinds still manage to causally affect one another? Consider: a detective spend his or her entire life following you around. They write down everything you do, but without talking to you. o They can capture events in the public, physical history: where your body goes, what happens to it, what posture you have, what facial expressions you use. o The detective cannot write down what is going on in your mind during any of this time. They might infer, Based on her expression, I think she is happy right now o But: YOU could write the other half of this biography: just the things that go through your mind. You would know this (says the Official Doctrine) without the possibility of being wrong. You would not have to infer, like the detective did. o Thus a distinction between the outer and the inner that Ryle wants to criticize Outer: Happening to your body Perceiving the world Inner: Happening in your mind (or even, in the brain, if not carefully construed) Introspection into your own thoughts. Inner perception Mental episodes, physical episodes: But where, asks Ryle do we locate the episodes that are transitions between the mental and the physical? The mental act of will getting translated into the movements of muscles? A category mistake: concerns the logical category to which facts or concepts belong To make a category mistake is to put a fact or concept in a category to which it doesnt belong. o Short version: Descartes category mistake is treating mental and physical as if they were of the same category of things, namely, substances, and then directly contrasting them with each other. Mental versus physical: they are not comparable categories, such that they can be directly contrasted Mental events just are a different kind of physical event. Not a case of two distinct histories, one mental and one physical. More like one very complicated history, with different sections of it described in different ways.

He concludes that Idealism and Materialism both make a similar mistake: accepting the mental/physical breach and then trying to reduce one to the other.

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