Ryle claims that the notion that body and mind are two
different entities is a logical mistake consisting in viewing the mind as
publicly inaccessible, not witnessable by other observers, private (p.13): ‘The
verbs, nouns and adjectives, with which in ordinary life we describe the wits,
characters and higher-grade performances of the people with whom we have to do,
are required to be construed as signifying special episodes in their secret
histories … When someone is described as knowing, believing or guessing
something, as hoping, dreading, intending or shirking something, as designing
this or being amused at that, these verbs are supposed to denote the occurrence
of specific modifications in his (to us) occult stream of consciousness. Only
his own privileged access to this stream in direct awareness and introspection
could provide authentic testimony that these mental-conduct words were
correctly or incorrectly applied. The onlooker, be he teacher, critic, biographer
or friend, can never assure himself that his comments have any vestige of truth.
Yet it was just because we do in fact all know how to make such comments, make
them with general correctness and correct them when they turn out to be
confused or mistaken, that philosophers found it necessary to construct their
theories of the nature and place of minds. Finding mental-conduct concepts
being regularly and effectively used, they properly sought to fix their logical
geography. But the logical geography officially recommended would entail that
there could be no regular or effective use of these mental-conduct concepts in
our description of, and prescription for, other people’s minds.’ (p. 17)
Having thus outlined ‘the official theory’, Ryle declares it
to be a category-mistake: ‘It represents the facts of mental life as if they
belonged to one logical type or category (or range of types or categories) when
they actually belong to another.’ (p. 17) He explains what he means as follows:
‘When two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct
conjunctive propositions embodying them. Thus a purchaser may say that he
bought a left-hand glove and a right-hand glove and a pair of gloves. “She came
home either in flood of tears and a sedan chair” is a well-known joke based on
the absurdity of conjoining terms of different types. It would have been
equally ridiculous to construct the disjunction: “She came home either in flood
of tears or else in a sedan chair”. Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine
does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there
occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes
of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements. I shall argue
that these and other analogous conjunctions are absurd … I am not denying that
there occur mental processes … But I am saying that the phrase ‘there occur
mental processes’, does not mean the same sort of thing as ‘there occur
physical processes’, and, therefore, that it makes no sense to conjoin or
disjoin the two.’ (p.23)
The alleged absurdity of conjoining or disjoining the two
allows Ryle to avoid difficulties in which the ‘official theory’ was embroiled,
such as the following: ‘The actual transactions between the episodes of the
private history and those of the public history remain mysterious … they can be
inspected neither by introspection nor by laboratory experiment. They are
theoretical shuttlecocks which are forever being bandied from the physiologist
back to the psychologist and from the psychologist back to the physiologist.’
(p.14) ‘There was from the beginning felt to be a major theoretical difficulty
in explaining how minds can influence
and be influenced by bodies. How can a mental process, such as willing, cause
spatial movements like the movements of the tongue? How can a physical change
in the optic nerve have among its effects a mind’s perception of a flash of
light? This notorious crux by itself shows the logical mould into which
Descartes pressed his theory of the mind.’ (p. 21)
The philosophical consequences of avoiding the logical
‘absurdity’ of conjoining or disjoining of mental and physical processes, as
Ryle puts it, are colossal: ‘First, the hallowed contrast between Mind and
Matter will be dissipated, but dissipated not by either of the equally hallowed
absorptions of Mind by Matter or of Matter by Mind, but in quite a different
way. For the seeming contrast of the two will be shown to be as illegitimate as
would be the contrast of ‘she came home in a flood of tears’ and ‘she came home
in a sedan chair’. The belief that there is a polar opposition between Mind and
Matter is the belief that they are terms of the same logical type.’ (p. 23)
I rack my brain in vain trying to understand what Ryle means
when he says that ‘the belief that there is a polar opposition between Mind and
Matter is the belief that they are terms of the same logical type’, and I
cannot understand how can this opposition be dissipated when one realises that
Mind and Matter are not of the same logical type. I cannot understand in what
way my maintaining that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur
physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of
corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements can be viewed as
wrong in the light of the absurdity of conjoining terms of different types such
as “She came home either in flood of tears and a sedan chair”.
Perhaps it might help if I bring in one of the rare passages
where Ryle mentions a physicist and a physiologist: ‘When a person talks sense
aloud, ties knots, feints or sculpts, the actions which we witness are
themselves the things which he is intelligently doing, though the concepts in
terms of which the physicist or physiologist would describe his actions do not
exhaust those which would be used by his pupils or his teachers in appraising
their logic, style or technique. He is bodily active and he is mentally active,
but he is not being synchronously active in two different ‘places’, or with two
different ‘engines’. There is the one activity, but it is one susceptible of
and requiring more than one kind of explanatory description.’ (p.50)
Ryle speaks here in fact of three kinds of explanatory
description: 1/ The terms in which we describe these actions as we witness
them, appraising their logic, style or technique. This is the kind of
explanatory description with which he is himself preoccupied throughout his
book, ‘observing the ways in which these concepts actually behave’ instead of
construing them ‘as items in the descriptions of occult causes and effects’ (p.
113) He does not explain how the same actions can be described by 2/ a physicist
and 3/ a physiologist, but he gives a clue to what he means: ‘there need be no
physical or physiological differences between the descriptions of one man as
gabbling and another talking sense, though the rhetorical and logical
differences are enormous (l. c.).’ A physicist might agree that there need be
no physical differences, but I cannot see a neurophysiologist agreeing that there need
be no neurophysiological differences between the two.
To make this point, let me quote Roger Carpenter and
Benjamin Reddi’s Neurophysiology: ‘On
the one hand we have all the unspeakable wonders of our minds; on the other
hand, when we open up the skull and peep inside all we see is a porridgy lump
containing millions and millions of untidy neurons. The fundamental problem of
neuroscience is that of linking these two scales together: can we trace the
relationship between molecular and cellular mechanisms all the way to what was
going on in Michelangelo’s head as he painted the Sistine Chapel?’ (5th
edition, Hodder Arnold 2012, p. 9) With such aspirations, neurophysiology can
hardly fail to aspire to registering in its terms the difference between
gabbling and talking sense.
But here is a more important observation that I must make at
this point. Although a physicist cannot register the difference between
gabbling and talking sense in terms of his science, he can explain to us the
physics of how speaking effects the air, of how this effect is propagated in
the form of regular waves of pressure through the air, and of how it effects
the ear drum of the listener. In this sense there is a correspondence between
what we see and hear and what the physicists can tell us about it. This
correspondence breaks down when neurophysiology steps in: the sound energy is
transduced into nervous energy propagated by auditory pathways into the
auditory cortex and the incident light is transformed into electrical changes
sent by the optic nerve to the visual cortex in the brain. In the brain there
is no sound and no light; since we hear sounds and see the world around us only
thanks to and on the basis of the activity of our auditory and optical nerve
cells and our auditory and visual cortex, the chemical and electrical
activities in our auditory and optical nerve cells and in our auditory and
visual cortex must be transformed into what we hear and what we see. Everything
that we can hear and see is thus linked to and at the same time and by the same
token separated from the outside world.
Let me turn back to Ryle: ‘No metaphysical Iron Curtain
exists compelling us to be for ever absolute strangers to one another …
Similarly no metaphysical looking-glass exists compelling us to be for ever
disclosed and explained to ourselves (p. 173) … it was wrong from the start to
contrast the common objects of everyone’s observation, like robins and cheeses,
with the supposed peculiar objects of my privileged observation, namely my
sensations, since sensations are not objects of observation at all. We do not,
consequently, have to rig up one theatre, called ‘the outside world’, to house
the common objects of anyone’s observation, and another, called ‘the mind’ to
house the common objects of some monopoly observations. The antithesis between
‘public’ and ‘private’ was in part a misconstruction of the antithesis between
objects which can be looked at, handled and tasted, on the one hand, and
sensations which are had but not looked at, handled or tasted on the other.’
(p. 198)
Throughout The Concept
of Mind, Ryle is preoccupied with debunking the separation between the ‘private’
and the ‘outside’ world. And in one respect he is perfectly right, for the
world I see in front of my eyes is my mind in action. But the moment I realise
this – thanks to neurophysiology – I begin to appreciate how essential it is
for every human being to view the ‘outside world’ perceived by the mind as the
world outside; this can be done only by virtue of the distinction between
‘private’ and ‘public’ domain within the framework of the mind.
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