Gilbert Ryle Quotes on Mind
Gilbert Ryle's Concept of Mind (1949) gave Oxford ordinary-language philosophy its most influential book and the canonical critique of Cartesian mind-body dualism. The doctrine of the ghost in the machine — the dualist picture of an inner mental theater inhabiting a separate physical body — Ryle argued to be a category mistake, treating mental terms as if they referred to inner private occurrences when their actual logical grammar is the dispositional analysis of intelligent behavior. The framework anticipated philosophical behaviorism without quite endorsing it, defined the Oxford philosophical scene against which the later Wittgensteinian and Austinian work was set, and supplied much of the philosophical background against which contemporary philosophy of mind has been argued.
Quotes
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“The dogma of the ghost in the machine.”
Ch. I: Descartes' Myth, (2) The Absurdity of the Official Doctrine -
Attributed to Gilbert Ryle:
“Knowing how is not reducible to knowing that.”
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Attributed to Gilbert Ryle:
“It is not a contingent fact about thinking that it is bound up with language.”
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Attributed to Gilbert Ryle:
“We can know how to play chess without knowing the propositional rules.”
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Attributed to Gilbert Ryle:
“The official doctrine, which hails chiefly from Descartes, is something like this: with the doubtful exceptions of idiots and infants in arms, every human being has both a body and a mind.”
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“The mind is its own place and in his inner life each of us lives the life of a ghostly Robinson Crusoe. People can see, hear and jolt one another’s bodies, but they are irremediably blind and deaf to the workings of one another’s minds and inoperative upon them.”
Ch. I: Descartes' Myth, (1) The Official Doctrine -
“Ch. II: Knowing How and Knowing That, (2) Intelligence and Intellect”
It is of first-rate importance to notice from the start that stupidity is not the same thing, or the same sort of thing, as ignorance. There is no incompatibility between being well-informed and being silly, and a person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts. -
“To see is one thing; to picture or visualise is another. A person can see things, only when his eyes are open, and when his surroundings are illuminated; but he can have pictures in his mind’s eye, when his eyes are shut and when the world is dark.”
The Concept of Mind(1949) | Ch. VIII: Imagination, (2) Picturing and Seeing