When I was still teaching, I used to spend several class sessions in my Philosophy of Psychology course on Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949). It could be rough going at times. Some students found the idea of a disposition obscure, while others found it hard to conceive that our mentalistic vocabulary could refer to anything but mental states and events. Most difficult for them was the idea that the respective languages of our natural sciences and our folk-psychologically inflected social sciences might have radically different grammars, in the Wittgensteinian sense of the word: meaning, roughly, conditions and implications of use.
I wouldn’t discuss the whole book with them, but only the first chapter – in which Ryle articulates his critique of what he calls “the official doctrine” on the mind and body – and the last, in which he describes the nature of psychological inquiry. He distinguishes between two types of dualism, both of which he criticizes, but the latter of which is the more interesting target and which usefully connects his thought with that of Wittgenstein, Wilfrid Sellars, and others.
The first is the substance dualism most commonly identified with René Descartes. The mind is alleged to be a non-physical substance, while the body is a physical one, with the same being true of their respective activities: bodily movement involving physical activity and thinking, involving mental activity. Descartes never tells us what a non-physical substance is — only what it is not — and offers no account of how mental activity is supposed to affect bodily activity, other than a story about the pineal gland which, even were it not false, would fail to address the issue insofar as the gland is itself physical. To be fair to Descartes, he was “backed into” substance dualism because of the conception of physicality prevalent in his day: ‘physical’ meant “material,” and ‘material’ meant “substantial and taking up space,” characteristics that minds and thoughts seemed to lack.
The second is what I’ll call “explanatory dualism,” the idea that our mentalistic and bodily vocabularies denote discrete variables that are related causally to one another: i.e., that mental states/activities cause bodily states/activities and vice versa. It is a kind of Newtonianism applied to behavioral science. Just as one body colliding with another causes the latter to move, so believing, hoping, wanting, hating, fearing, and other “mental states” are supposed to cause us to attest, pursue, attack, flee, and engage in myriad other actions. This second part of the dualist thesis survived the discrediting of its substance-dualist component and is actually dominant in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science today. And with Ryle long gone, it has been Oxford’s Peter Hacker who has been leading the charge against it, referring to it as “Crypto-Cartesianism.”
Ryle says that this picture arises from what he calls a “category mistake,” in which we “represent the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category, when they actually belong to another.” Ryle gives several examples of the sort of mistake he is thinking of, but the last is the most apt with regard to understanding the category mistake involved in explanatory dualism:
A foreigner watching his first game of cricket learns what are the functions of the bowlers, batsmen, the fielders, the umpires, and the scorers. He then says…, “I see who does the bowling, the batting, and the wicket-keeping; but I do not see whose role it is to exercise esprit de corps.” [I]t would have to be explained that he was looking for the wrong type of thing. Team-spirit is not another cricketing-operation supplementary to all of the other special tasks. It is, roughly, the keenness with which each of the special tasks is performed…”
The most important lines in the example are the ones that come at the end:
[P]erforming a task keenly is not performing two tasks. Certainly exhibiting team-spirit is not the same thing as bowling or catching, but nor is it a third thing such that we can say that the bowler first bowls and then exhibits team-spirit or that a fielder is at a given moment either catching or displaying esprit de corps.
Ryle’s “insight,” then — or at least, the insight that I have taken on board — is that our mentalistic vocabulary and grammar, while superficially resembling that which we use in describing bodily and physiological activity in terms of “surface grammar” — viz. “John wants to go to the store”; “John goes to the store”; “The muscles in John’s legs do such-and-such” — actually represent a fundamentally different kind of discourse. Now, Ryle takes mentalistic language to be essentially dispositional — “John wants to go to the store” really means something like “John is likely to do things like walk or drive to the store” — but, I think that when we employ mentalistic forms of language, we place our neurological activity and bodily movements in a sociocultural/axiological framework in which they have a specific significance and role; in which actions are individuated by their relevant aims and ends, rather than by the motor movements they involve. So, while I take my lead from Ryle in thinking that the traditional treatment of mental states in the philosophy of mind involves a category mistake, I depart from him with regard to what the mistake is. Ryle thinks we mistake what is really a behavioral disposition for a kind of mental “activity,” while I think that we mistake what is really a teleologically framed discourse — one of aims, means, ends, goods, and bads — for the language of cause and effect.
Identical motor movements — say, for example, my hand opening and dropping a piece of paper into a bin — may constitute entirely different actions. On one occasion, it may be throwing something out, while on another it may constitute voting. Different aims are involved and the two actions have different standards of success and failure. In the first, I succeed if the paper lands in the bin and is subsequently taken by the garbage collector and fails if I miss and it remains uncollected, while in the second, I succeed if my vote is logged and counted and fail if it is not.
The framework I am describing is one in which we are persons who act, rather than simply organisms that move, and it is the one in which all of our social, civic, and moral forms of life take place. Physiological events are socially, morally, and politically significant qua actions. As mere motor movements they are not. Hands opening and closing and dropping pieces of paper into bins have no social, moral, or political significance, per se, but disposing of one’s trash and voting do. What makes a hand opening and closing and dropping a piece of paper count as one action or the other, is a matter of it being interpreted as a means to one end or another, with the ends being represented as distinct goods. And all of this, as Wittgenstein has taught us, depends on a network of social agreements and understandings. Our account of hands opening and closing and dropping things may be of the Newtonian “A-events make B-events happen” variety, but our account of voting and trash disposal and the like are not.
This entails no dualism of substrate, as Descartes thought, but it does entail a multiplicity of “language games” and of explanations; a fundamental “disunity,” as Jerry Fodor put it in his 1974 paper, “Special Sciences (or the Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis),” among the various frameworks (explanatory and otherwise) that we employ to engage with human affairs. And as Wilfrid Sellars observed, these frameworks cannot be reduced to or eliminated in favor of one another, but must be joined together in order to provide a complete, “stereoscopic” picture. From his paper, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (1963):
To think of a featherless biped as a person is to think of it as a being with which one is bound up in a network of rights and duties. From this point of view, the irreducibility of the personal is the irreducibility of the ‘ought’ to the ‘is’. But even more basic than this (though ultimately, as we shall see, the two points coincide), is the fact that to think of a featherless biped as a person is to construe its behaviour in terms of actual or potential membership in an embracing group each member of which thinks of itself as a member of the group.[T]he conceptual framework of persons is the framework in which we think of one another as sharing the community intentions which provide the ambience of principles and standards (above all, those which make meaningful discourse and rationality itself possible) within which we live our own individual lives. A person can almost be defined as a being that has intentions. Thus the conceptual framework of persons is not something that needs to be reconciled with the scientific image, but rather something to be joined to it. Thus, to complete the scientific image we need to enrich it not with more ways of saying what is the case, but with the language of community and individual intentions, so that by construing the actions we intend to do and the circumstances in which we intend to do them in scientific terms, we directly relate the world as conceived by scientific theory to our purposes, and make it our world and no longer an alien appendage to the world in which we do our living.
