Gilbert Ryle The Concept of Mind (original) (raw)
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Tendencies in Contemporary Philosophy of Mind
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The paper surveys the three major metaphysical strategies in 'framing' the mind: dualism, reductionism, and eliminativism. An evaluation of their achievements is being made in order to outline the perspectives of three main explanatory approaches to the mind: functionalism (dualistic and reductionistic), connectionism (eliminativistic), and the emerging view of the so called dynamic systems theory. The last is described as the most adequate according to contemporary condition of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind.
It has been five years since the appearance of the second edition. Philosophy of mind remains a vibrant, thriving field, and this is a good time to update and improve the book.
First published in 1949, Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind is one of the classics of twentieth-century philosophy. Described by Ryle as a 'sustained piece of analytical hatchet-work' on Cartesian dualism, The Concept of Mind is a radical and controversial attempt to jettison once and for all what Ryle called 'the ghost in the machine': Descartes' argument that mind and body are two separate entities. As well as rejecting dualism about the mind, Ryle goes much further, arguing that more recent materialist or functionalist theories of mind do not solve the Cartesian puzzle either and even accept some of its fundamental, mistaken, propositions. It is because of these mistaken propositions that associated problems, such as mental causation and 'other minds', arise in the first place. Ryle builds his case via an erudite and beautifully written account of the will, emotion, self-knowledge, sensation and observation, imagination and the intellect. Some of the problems he tackles, such as the distinction between 'knowing how and knowing that', challenged some of the bedrock assumptions of philosophy and continue to exert important influence on contemporary philosophy. A classic work of philosophy, The Concept of Mind is essential reading for anyone interested in the nature of the mind and human behaviour. This sixtieth anniversary edition includes a substantial commentary by Julia Tanney. Together with the reissue of both volumes of Ryle's Collected Papers, it provides essential reading for new readers interested not only in the history of analytic philosophy but in its power to challenge major currents in philosophy of mind and language today.
Organon F
Physicalism demands an explication of what it means for something to be physical. But the most popular way of providing one-viz., characterizing the physical in terms of the postulates of a scientifically derived physical theory-is met with serious trouble. Proponents of physicalism can either appeal to current physical theory or to some future physical theory (preferably an ideal and complete one). Neither option is promising: currentism almost assuredly renders physicalism false and futurism appears to render it indeterminate or trivial. The purpose of this essay is to argue that attempts to characterize the mental encounter a similar dilemma: currentism with respect to the mental is likely to be inadequate or contain falsehoods and futurism leaves too many significant questions about the nature of mentality unanswered. This new dilemma, we show, threatens both sides of the current debate surrounding the metaphysical status of the mind.
6. Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind
It ought to be obvious that phenomenology has a lot to say in the area called philosophy of mind. Yet the traditions of phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind have not been closely joined, despite overlapping areas of interest. So it is appropriate to close this survey of phenomenology by addressing philosophy of mind, one of the most vigorously debated areas in recent philosophy. The tradition of analytic philosophy began, early in the 20th century, with analyses of language, notably in the works of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then in The Concept of Mind (1949) Gilbert Ryle developed a series of analyses of language about different mental states, including sensation, belief, and will. Though Ryle is commonly deemed a philosopher of ordinary language, Ryle himself said The Concept of Mind could be called phenomenology. In effect, Ryle analyzed our phenomenological understanding of mental states as reflected in ordinary language about the mind. From this linguistic phenomenology Ryle argued that Cartesian mind-body dualism involves a category mistake (the logic or grammar of mental verbs— " believe " , " see " , etc.—does not mean that we ascribe belief, sensation, etc., to " the ghost in the machine "). With Ryle's rejection of mind-body dualism, the mind-body problem was re-awakened: what is the ontology of mind vis-à-vis body, and how are mind and body related? René Descartes, in his epoch-making Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), had argued that minds and bodies are two distinct kinds of being or substance with two distinct kinds of attributes or modes: bodies are characterized by spatiotemporal physical properties, while minds are characterized by properties of thinking (including seeing, feeling, etc.). Centuries later, phenomenology would find, with Brentano and Husserl, that mental acts are characterized by consciousness and intentionality, while natural science would find that physical systems are characterized by mass and force, ultimately by gravitational, electromagnetic, and quantum fields. Where do we find consciousness and intentionality in the quantum-electromagnetic-gravitational field that, by hypothesis, orders everything in the natural world in which we humans and our minds exist? That is the mind-body problem today. In short, phenomenology by any other name lies at the heart of the contemporary mind-body problem. After Ryle, philosophers sought a more explicit and generally naturalistic ontology of mind. In the 1950s materialism was argued anew, urging that mental states are identical with states of the central nervous system. The classical identity theory holds that each token mental state (in a particular person's mind at a particular time) is identical with a token brain state (in that person's brain at that time). A stronger materialism holds, instead, that each type of mental state is identical with a type of brain state. But materialism does not fit comfortably with phenomenology. For it is not obvious how conscious mental states as we experience them— sensations, thoughts, emotions—can simply be the complex neural states that somehow subserve or implement them. If mental states and neural states are simply identical, in token or in type, where in our scientific theory of mind does the phenomenology occur—is it not simply replaced by neuroscience? And yet experience is part of what is to be explained by neuroscience.
The second cognitive turn in the philosophy of mind
I briefly reconstruct the debate on the mind-body problem from 1945 to nowadays. First of all, by means of G. Ryle’s (1949) philosophical behaviorism mental states are not considered something “internal”, subjective and therefore only introspectively accessible. They are publicly observable behavioral dispositions. Philosophical behaviorism belongs to the so called “linguistic turn” in philosophy. This behavioral approach to the mental was criticized and largely abandoned in the 1960s and 1970s by the supporters of physicalism (or mind-brain identity) and functionalism. Neither the physicalists nor the functionalists wanted to return to the Cartesian dualism. Nevertheless, they thought that being anti-Cartesian does not imply to accept behaviorism. They distinguished dualism from mentalism. In contrast to the behaviorists, they thought that mental states are real internal causes of behavior (and not simply behavioral dispositions) even though these internal causes are not identical to very mysterious spiritual events, as it is supposed by dualists. They are normal brain processes that can be described either directly in neurological terms (physicalism) or more abstractly in functional terms, i.e. by comparing them to a software implemented by a brain activity that is difficult to directly reconstruct (functionalism). Since the 1980s functionalism has been (and is still now) harshly criticized by many points of view. Scientific dignity has been restored to the study of consciousness. However, within this return to the study of consciousness it is necessary to distinguish the approach of those who essentially re-propose a return to Cartesian dualism or to the phenomenology of E. Husserl from the point of view of those philosophers or neuroscientists who especially since the 1990s intend to completely renew the traditional conception of the mental in the light of new experimental data and new theories on the brain offered by cognitive neuroscience (e.g. G.M. Edelman and G. Tononi among the neuroscientists and C.D. Dennett and the Churchlands among the philosophers).