The Concept of Mind
Based on Wikipedia: The Concept of Mind
The Ghost You Never Knew You Believed In
Somewhere in your mind, right now, there's a ghost. You've never seen it. You can't point to it. But you probably believe it's there—a little invisible captain steering the ship of your body, watching through your eyes, thinking your thoughts in some private theater of consciousness. This ghost has haunted Western philosophy for over three hundred years, and in 1949, a British philosopher named Gilbert Ryle decided it was time for an exorcism.
His book, The Concept of Mind, didn't just critique an abstract philosophical theory. It attacked something most of us assume without even realizing we assume it: that our minds are separate from our bodies, that thinking is something different from doing, that there's an inner "you" pulling the levers of an outer physical machine.
Ryle called this belief "the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine." And he set out to prove it was nonsense.
Descartes' Myth
To understand what Ryle was fighting against, you need to understand René Descartes. The seventeenth-century French philosopher is famous for saying "I think, therefore I am"—cogito ergo sum. But that famous phrase was just the tip of an enormous philosophical iceberg.
Descartes divided reality into two completely different kinds of stuff. There was res extensa—extended stuff, meaning physical matter that takes up space. Your body, a rock, a tree, a planet. And then there was res cogitans—thinking stuff, meaning minds or souls that don't take up any space at all. Your consciousness, your thoughts, your will.
This division seemed to solve some problems. It explained why minds felt different from bodies. It preserved a role for the soul in an increasingly mechanistic scientific worldview. It made room for free will in a universe that otherwise seemed governed by physical laws.
But it created a puzzle that philosophers have struggled with ever since: if mind and body are completely different kinds of things, how do they interact? When you decide to raise your arm, how does that immaterial decision cause your physical arm to move? Descartes suggested that the interaction happened in the pineal gland, a small structure in the brain, but this just pushed the mystery back a step. How does an immaterial mind touch a material gland?
For three centuries, philosophers proposed increasingly elaborate solutions to this "mind-body problem." Some said God synchronized mind and body like two clocks. Some said they only appeared to interact. Some said everything was really mind. Some said everything was really matter.
Ryle took a different approach. He said the whole question was based on a mistake.
The Category Mistake
Imagine a visitor being shown around Oxford University. Their guide takes them to see the colleges—Balliol, Magdalen, Christ Church. They visit the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum, the science laboratories, the playing fields. After seeing all of this, the visitor asks with genuine puzzlement: "But where is the University?"
The visitor has made what Ryle calls a "category mistake." They've assumed that "the University" is the same kind of thing as a college or a library—another building you could point to, another place you could visit. But "the University" isn't another thing alongside the colleges and libraries. It's a way of talking about how all those colleges and libraries are organized and related to each other.
Ryle argued that Descartes made exactly this kind of mistake with the mind. When we talk about bodies, we talk about them in certain ways—they have location, they move through space, they can be measured and weighed. Descartes assumed that minds must be the same kind of thing, just with opposite properties—no location, no extension, no physical measurability. Mind and matter were supposed to be "polar opposites."
But this is like saying that "she came home in floods of tears" and "she came home in a sedan chair" are polar opposites. The phrases use similar grammar, but they describe completely different categories of things. Tears are an emotional state; a sedan chair is a mode of transportation. They're not opposites because they're not even playing the same game.
The mind, Ryle argued, isn't a thing at all—not a physical thing, and not a ghostly non-physical thing either. When we talk about minds, we're talking about how people behave, what they can do, how they're disposed to act in various circumstances. To ask "where is the mind?" is like asking "where is the University?"—a question based on a confused assumption about what kind of thing you're looking for.
Knowing How Versus Knowing That
One of Ryle's most influential arguments concerns the difference between two kinds of knowledge. There's "knowing that"—knowing facts, being able to state propositions. And there's "knowing how"—being able to do things skillfully.
Consider a skilled chess player. She knows how to play chess. But this knowledge isn't a separate mental process that happens before she moves the pieces. It's not that she first performs invisible mental calculations and then translates them into physical moves. Her knowledge just is her ability to make good moves, to see threats, to recognize patterns, to execute strategies.
The Cartesian view suggests that all intelligent behavior must be preceded by intellectual operations—that before you can do something skillfully, you must first think about it in some internal mental theater. But this leads to an infinite regress. If every intelligent act requires a prior act of thinking, and thinking is itself an intelligent act, then thinking would require prior thinking, which would require prior thinking, and so on forever.
Ryle's solution is elegant. Intelligent behavior doesn't require ghostly mental operations behind the scenes. The intelligence is in the behavior itself. When we say someone is thinking, we're not reporting on invisible inner processes; we're describing how they're acting—carefully, attentively, adaptively, skillfully.
Dispositions, Not Events
If minds aren't ghostly inner theaters, what are they? Ryle's answer involves the concept of dispositions.
Glass is brittle. This doesn't mean there's some invisible brittleness hiding inside the glass, waiting to emerge. It means that if you strike the glass with sufficient force, it will shatter. Brittleness is a disposition—a way of describing how something will behave under certain conditions.
Similarly, Ryle argues, mental states are dispositions. To say that someone believes it will rain is not to report on a ghostly event happening in their mental theater. It's to say they're disposed to carry an umbrella, to predict rain in conversation, to feel unsurprised when rain arrives. To say someone is intelligent is not to claim they have a powerful ghost operating their machinery. It's to say they're disposed to solve problems, to learn quickly, to adapt to new situations.
This doesn't mean mental talk is meaningless. It just means mental talk describes patterns of behavior and disposition, not hidden inner events. When you say "I'm angry," you're not reporting on a private sensation accessible only to you. You're describing a complex pattern—feeling hot, wanting to lash out, being disposed to snap at people, and so on.
Crucially, dispositions are not the same as the behaviors they explain. The brittleness of the glass is not the same as any particular shattering event. It's what makes the shattering intelligible. Similarly, your intelligence is not the same as any particular clever act. It's what makes your clever acts part of a pattern.
The Accusation of Behaviorism
Ryle's critics were quick to label him a behaviorist—someone who believes that mental states are nothing but patterns of observable behavior. This was a serious accusation. Behaviorism, as developed by psychologists like John Watson and B.F. Skinner, was seen as reducing human beings to stimulus-response machines, denying the reality of consciousness, feelings, and inner experience.
Ryle accepted the label, at least partially, but insisted his view was more nuanced. He wasn't denying that people have inner experiences—sensations, images, feelings. He was denying that these experiences constitute a separate mental realm, logically distinct from the physical world.
Richard Webster, a later commentator, argued that Ryle's acceptance of the behaviorist label was unfortunate, because it misrepresented his actual position. Ryle never claimed that there's nothing going on when you close your eyes and imagine a sunset. He claimed that this imagining is not an event in a ghostly inner world, separate from the physical world. It's part of what you do, how you behave, how you're disposed to act.
Interestingly, Ryle criticized both Cartesian dualism and strict behaviorism for the same reason: they're both too mechanistic. Cartesian dualism pictures the mind as a kind of ghostly machine that controls the physical machine of the body. Behaviorism pictures humans as biological machines responding mechanically to stimuli. Both views, Ryle thought, miss something essential about human intelligence—its flexibility, its creativity, its capacity to follow and break rules, to act skillfully without following explicit procedures.
The Style of the Argument
The Concept of Mind is unusual among philosophy books for several reasons. It contains almost no footnotes. The philosopher John Searle, who believes that philosophical quality varies inversely with bibliographical references, considered this a mark of the book's excellence. It's written in vivid, witty English, full of memorable examples and striking phrases.
Stuart Hampshire, reviewing the book in the journal Mind, compared Ryle's style to Kant's—not in substance but in approach. Where Kant wrote in dichotomies, Ryle wrote in epigrams. Hampshire found this style effective but sometimes troubling: the epigrams "effectively explode on impact, shattering conventional trains of thought, but...leave behind among the debris in the reader's mind a trail of timid doubts and qualifications."
Not everyone was charmed. Herbert Marcuse, the German-American philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, criticized Ryle's tone for moving "between the two poles of pontificating authority and easy-going chumminess." Marcuse saw this as characteristic of philosophical behaviorism more generally—a kind of false common sense that masked deeper ideological commitments.
Philosophical Influences and Connections
Ryle didn't develop his ideas in isolation. He was part of a broader movement in mid-twentieth-century British philosophy that focused on the careful analysis of ordinary language. Philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, and P.F. Strawson shared a conviction that many philosophical problems arise from confusions about how words work.
Wittgenstein, in particular, had argued in his later work that meaning is not a matter of private mental images but of public use. When you understand a word, you know how to use it in various contexts—not because you've consulted an inner definition, but because you've mastered a public practice. This insight deeply influenced Ryle's treatment of mental concepts.
A more surprising influence is Arthur Schopenhauer, the nineteenth-century German pessimist. According to the philosopher Bryan Magee, the central thesis of The Concept of Mind was anticipated by Schopenhauer, whose works Ryle had read as a student and then largely forgotten. Ryle apparently didn't realize the connection until someone pointed it out after the book was published. Whether this represents genuine independent discovery or unacknowledged influence remains a matter of scholarly debate.
Iris Murdoch, the philosopher and novelist, compared The Concept of Mind to Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness—an unlikely pairing at first glance. Sartre was the epitome of continental philosophy, dense and abstract; Ryle was the epitome of analytic philosophy, clear and concrete. But Murdoch saw a shared project: both philosophers were trying to overcome the Cartesian split between mind and world, to show that consciousness is not a thing enclosed within itself but a way of being engaged with reality.
The Legacy of the Ghost
The Concept of Mind has been called the founding document of philosophy of mind as a professional discipline. Before 1950, questions about the nature of mind were scattered across epistemology, metaphysics, and psychology. After Ryle, they constituted their own field, with its own journals, conferences, and career paths.
The book's influence on subsequent philosophy has been enormous, though often indirect. Many later philosophers disagreed with Ryle's specific arguments but accepted his framing of the issues. The mind-body problem became less about how two different substances interact and more about how mental descriptions relate to physical descriptions.
Yet Richard Webster notes something puzzling. If Ryle's arguments were as powerful as they seemed—if they really did dissolve the mind-body problem rather than merely solving it—why hasn't there been a revolution in how we think about ourselves? Why do neuroscientists still talk about finding the neural correlates of consciousness, as if consciousness were a ghostly thing that needed physical correlates? Why do ordinary people still feel that there's an "inner me" distinct from their behavior?
Part of the answer may be that Ryle's view, despite his protestations, really does seem to leave something out. When you close your eyes and see a vivid mental image, it seems like something is happening—something inner, something private, something that wouldn't show up in any description of your outward behavior. Ryle can say this is just another disposition, another pattern of behavior, but the felt quality of experience seems resistant to this analysis.
Philosophers after Ryle have struggled with this residue. Some have tried to accommodate it within broadly Rylean frameworks. Others have concluded that Ryle went too far, that there really is something irreducibly subjective about consciousness. The debate continues.
The Ghost Persists
Perhaps the most interesting thing about The Concept of Mind is not its arguments but its failure to fully exorcise the ghost. Seventy-five years later, we still talk about our minds as if they were inner theaters. We still feel like ghosts operating machines. The Cartesian picture, whatever its philosophical problems, captures something about how experience actually feels.
Maybe this is just a sign that we haven't fully absorbed Ryle's lesson. Maybe with enough philosophical therapy, we could stop thinking of ourselves as ghosts and start thinking of ourselves as the things we do—our skills, our dispositions, our engagements with the world.
Or maybe the ghost is not so easily banished. Maybe there really is something it's like to be you, something that can't be reduced to behavior or dispositions, something that would be left out of even the most complete description of everything you do and can do.
Ryle gave us the vocabulary to ask these questions clearly. He showed that the mind-body problem might be a pseudo-problem, generated by linguistic confusion rather than genuine metaphysical mystery. Even if he was wrong about the details, he changed what the questions are. That's as much as any philosopher can hope to accomplish.
The ghost is still there, haunting the machine. But now, at least, we know its name.