Ryle and the Ghost in the Machine (05-Feb-2004)

Reading : Western Philosophy III.10 "The Myth of the 'Ghost in the Machine'" Ryle describes Descartes' view as "the official doctrine", deriding it as "The Myth of the 'Ghost in the Machine'". According to this view:

This presents two problems:
  1. How do mind and body interact (if they are in polar opposition)?
  2. How do different minds interact (given that they're private/inner)?
    in fact, if we can solve (1) then (2) is also solved: since the only way people interact is through the material world (unless telepathy exists)
Ryle says that the reason Descartes comes up with this view is that he found himself with a foot in two camps: on the one hand, he was a scientist and couldn't deny that science provides mechanical explanations of the way the material world works, but on the other, Descartes' religious beliefs meant that he needed to come up with a way to fit the spiritual aspect into the picture.

Ryle describes "category-mistakes": he says that it is meaningless to use X and Y to form a conjunction ("X AND Y") or disjunction ("X OR Y") unless X and Y are of the same logical type. So for example:

Ryle says that to treat "mind" as being in the same category as "matter" is to commit a category mistake. So the statement "everything is either mind or matter" is meaningless, because "mind" isn't the same logical type as "matter".

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