A central part of his programme was to classify concepts according to their 'category' or 'logical type'. His most famous work, The Concept of Mind (1949), is an attempt to show that philosophers have misled themselves by assigning concepts which purport to refer to minds and mental qualities to the wrong category. (One assigns words to categories according to their 'logical behaviour'; thus 'know' does not behave like 'read' — at least in some respects — since one can read carefully or carelessly but one cannot know something carefully or carelessly; similarly one can do some reading for half an hour but one cannot 'do some knowing' for half an hour.) Descartes, according to Ryle, had correctly recognized that men were different from machines but had mistakenly characterized the difference by suggesting that some human movements were the result of 'non-material' or 'non-mechanical' causes. A second 'world' had therefore to be invented — a 'mental' world — to house such entities; it belonged in the same category as the 'physical' world but contained non-spatial and non-mechanical happenings. The postulation of such a 'world' is scathingly referred to by Ryle as 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine'. He is not saying that there is no such world, since this would be to repeat the same category mistake; he is arguing that the counting of 'worlds' is misguided and that we are misleading ourselves if we raise questions couched in 'ghost-in-machine' terms. He argues instead that many mentalistic words are dispositional in character: thus to describe a person as intelligent does not imply that occult events going on 'in the mind' are influencing other events going on 'in the body'; it indicates some of the things which he is disposed to do if particular circumstances arise. Other mentalistic words, such as 'solve', 'detect', and 'see', are 'achievement' words: that is to say, they are used when certain processes or activities have been brought to completion and do not relate to shadowy processes or activities going on 'somewhere else'.
In his later writings (see Collected Papers, 1971, and the posthumously published On Thinking, 1979) he argues that when a person is described as thinking (like Rodin's Le Penseur) it does not follow that there is a single activity, for example operating with words or symbols, that is invariably going on. Other published works include Dilemmas (1954) and Plato's Progress (1966).
Ryle's views have sometimes been described as 'behaviourist', and they do indeed have a certain amount in common with the radical behaviourism of B. F. Skinner. In particular both thinkers are in agreement in their opposition to methodological behaviourism: neither wishes to say that 'mental events' exist alongside 'physical events' but are not suitable objects for scientific study. Skinner's attack on 'autonomous man', however, is less sophisticated than Ryle's attack on 'the Ghost in the Machine'; mental-conduct words, for Skinner, are 'perquisites of autonomous man' (1972: 15), and the suggestion that such words are not all of the same logical type is not considered. In addition Skinner writes at times like a traditional determinist, whereas Ryle correctly recognizes that the question, 'Does this action merit praise or blame?' is of a different logical type from the question, 'What were this action's causal antecedents?'. An extension of Skinner's position might be to say that for its own purposes a science of behaviour requires a language without the explanatory superstructures implied by disposition words, and that it is for this reason — not simply for doctrinaire behaviourist reasons — that mentalistic words should not figure in scientific reports on human and animal behaviour. Ryle, however, unlike Skinner, is concerned with the use of mentalistic words for workaday purposes, and, apart from his admonition to philosophers, he is not attempting to argue that our ways of talking require revision.
The final chapter of The Concept of Mind offers an account of the subject matter of psychology. Its main thesis is that psychology should not be regarded as though it were a kind of counterpart to Newtonian physics, concerned with 'mental' phenomena as opposed to 'physical' ones.
The Cartesian picture left no place for Mendel or Darwin. The two-worlds legend was also a two-sciences legend, and the recognition that there are many sciences should remove the sting from the suggestion that 'psychology' is not the name of a single homogeneous theory. Few of the names of sciences do denote such unitary theories, or show any promise of doing so.
For those interested in psychology perhaps the most important message from Ryle's work is that insufficient attention to correct categorization can lead to false contrasts, to misleading analogies, and indeed to downright bad theorizing. It is a message which, up to now, not all practising psychologists have fully taken to heart.
(Published 1987)
— T. R. Miles
- Bibliography
- Lyons, W. (1980). Gilbert Ryle: An Introduction to his Philosophy.
- Skinner, B. F. (1972). Beyond Freedom and Dignity.
- Wood, O. P., and Pitcher, G. (eds.) (1970). Ryle: A Collection of Critical Essays.
