If there is a founding document in the contemporary philosophy of mind proper, Ryle's book is it. First, there is a spirited attack on the Cartesian picture of mind as a "ghost in the machine." Second, there is a relentless attack on the doctrine of privileged access, the view that the mind is transparent to its owner, and that we each have unmediated and incorrigible access to our own mental states. Third, there is the proposal that "mind," the Cartesian conception of mind, at any rate, is simply a mystifying way of speaking about certain behavioral dispositions of the organism. According to Ryle's logical behaviourism [a description added later by others], just as "solubility" is nothing mysterious, referring simply to the disposition of a substance to dissolve in liquid, likewise talk of mental states, talk of "belief" and "desire," is, as far as it is meaningful, talk of dispositions of the organism to behave in certain ways. It is ironic that the locus classicus of contemporary philosophy of mind argued in a sense that there was really no such thing as "mind" as traditionally understood.
We remark that a
disposition for certain materials to dissolve in certain liquids is what is also known as a
potential. A question then is what is potential and what is action or activity? It seems that whatever other name we use for mind, potential and action are interlocked in numerous negative feedback loops.
Two decades after
Concept appeared, Ryle said that he had committed some "howlers" in that book. His material on motivations and imagination needed revision, he told Magee.
[zw7] Also, Ryle said if given the chance he would cancel much material concerning the intellect and replace it with his newer insights. Yet, what
Concept has to say on intellect and related topics "don't give me a guilty conscience."
Whatever Ryle might or might not have written at a later point, our job is to critique the book (and not criticize the man).
In particular, the concept of mind that Ryle wishes to debunk is the Greek idea of soul as mind, or psyche – and clearly we are supposed to conclude that, if no mind exists, then neither does an immortal soul
[GV25a]. (That point is not proved and, according to some theologians and philosophers, is not a safe assumption.) So, before further addressing Ryle's ideas, let us digress briefly on the notion of
soul and some related concepts.
Bird of pray?
What is the soul? Of course this has long been a question of compelling force. The concept of
soul, which he takes as synonymous to
mind, is Ryle's target. He aims to delegitimize the concept of
mind/soul as a category mistake. In that case, we had better have some idea of what these terms may mean.
In a discussion of ancient Egyptian beliefs, the anthropologist E.O. James wrote,
From very early times each individual was believed to have an invisible immortal "soul" or ghost which often assumed the form of a bird with a human head, that either survived death or came into existence at the time of the dissolution. To this conception of the ba that of the ka was eventually added.
[1xaa]
Such representations, plainly, served the purpose of words. So the image-word, or description, is equivalent to this description: "the something associated with a human that flies away upon death."
Immortality follows from the idea that the spirit continues after death.
James also observed,
To what extent these highly complex interpretations of the constitution and survival of human personality can be regarded as of prehistoric origin and significance is difficult to say. The conception of the ka as a vital essence, a guardian spirit and an alter ego would seem to represent very ancient and primitive connotations, as does the ghostly ba of the dead man.
The fact that human spirit life can be construed to arise from early attempts to structure the world does not of course imply that there is no spirit world. We may safely say that later thinkers used these primitive ideas to convey their thoughts on what we may see as alternate reality.
In early times, some thought the spirit simply evaporated. Others thought the spirit must stay with a body that was intact in one place underground in order to "rest." Otherwise it would be condemned to wander aimlessly, with no prospect of rest. Moreover, some generalized the concept of underground burial to an underground realm, which later was further generalized into high-sky realms, and so forth.
I agree with a number of scholars that the notion of gods in part emerged from the animism
[cv20] that early man imputed to the planets, the sun and the moon. This, in turn, would lead to generalizations of pantheons of beings on high, whether on Mount Olympus or elsewhere out of human reach
[GV25]. In addition, we can also conjecture that early tribes elevated ancestors to the status of gods by this progression: a splinter group has survived with only young people to lead the way. They make decisions based on "Father said this..." and "Father said that..." The next generation acquires this custom, which is often useful for settling disputes. "Father" becomes very much de-concretized over the generations, living on as but a memory core and an abstraction.
We see a remnant of this cultural meme in modern ancestor worship in the Far East and elsewhere.
As human bands merged, one would expect a political agreement to assure the acceptance of the guiding god of the other band, leading to pantheons. (This effect is quite obvious in Indic history and proto-history – and of course pantheism is implicit in the projection of human tendencies onto celestial objects.)
Father's status was always high, but now he has become disembodied as a spirit (or granted a super-body with super-hero powers). Now if such a belief train is welded to the belief train that Father's spirit lives on somewhere in the underworld or elsewhere, the status of "god" is virtually assured. (Curiously, though the concept of underworld did not always connote the sinister, that connotation gained popularity because of the underground/underworld association with death, which most people feared and hence saw as sinister.)
In addition, we have the early custom of burial of the dead, possibly for sanitation reasons but also no doubt to spare relatives excessive grief. Children might be told "your brother has gone to live in a nice place underground." Over time such a children's tale becomes a basic belief. The custom of covering graves with stones doubtless arose in part to serve as grave-markers, perhaps so that relatives could be consoled with the notion that their loved one was resting comfortably below ground.
Even so, very importantly, the stones were placed to prevent animals from digging up the remains and eating them. Why would such a happenstance worry Paleolithic humans? Very plausibly, the custom arose in order to make sure the loved one's rest was undisturbed. An added worry was that if the remains were eaten and-or scattered the person would no longer exist and the spirit would have no home.
We should beware assuming that a paleolithic religious sense included belief in high gods or sky gods. We may properly conjecture that burial customs show a notion of personal continuation in some sort of afterlife and that European cave art implies generations of belief in the power of sympathetic magic
[ip18] to assist in the hunt. Also, we may accept that animism, as a basic mind-set of hunter-gatherers, is a defining requirement for religious beliefs
[GV25].
For an excellent discussion, see
Hunter-Gatherers and the Origins of Religion
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4958132/
According to that study,
hunter-gatherers, being fundamentally egalitarian, show little if any evidence of belief in "high gods," which would be seen as rulers.
But, in the next stage of human society – pastoralism – belief in "high gods" begins to emerge.
Pastoral societies, we have been told, tend to develop a belief in a care-giver God, a belief which is analogous to how pastoralists oversee their flocks and herds.
Assuming that early pastoralists were also early agriculturalists, their lone tribal god would have migrated with the agriculturalists after they settled down and split from the pastoralists. The need for new social norms in which various tribes settled near each other and intermingled would have required a social contract, or treaty. The use of a higher authority to witness agreements was necessary. So, for a city-state with surrounding farms, a number of pastoral gods would have been handed down. One would be chosen for the entire community, with the other gods tolerated as lesser deities, though to its core community the "lesser" deity remained preeminent.
The early Hebrews
[yuh0] may have been monotheistic while still pastoralists. But once many became farmers, the tendency to henotheism is apparent. The ten commandments appear, objectively speaking, to state a treaty agreement among tribes, each of which, to begin with, probably had its own god, including the Canaanite god El. (From my perspective, a probable secular history need not be inconsistent with a given theological history. Each would be a distinct way of interpreting approximately the same set of recorded facts.)
[yuh1]
In early Egypt and Greece, write philosophers Solomon and Higgins
[1xaaa]
, the human soul was a "somewhat pathetic being incapable of existing in any significant sense unless it was embodied." And for the Greek pluralist Democritus, the soul was not much of anything, just another atom or combination of atoms.
"But with Pythagorus and Orphic cults, the soul took on new significance," they write. "It may have still needed a body, but it found new ones, through reincarnation. And with Pythagorus, Socrates and then Plato, the soul became the seat of the intellect as well as of virtue." For Plato, the soul became part of the World of Forms and perforce eternal. On the other hand, Aristotle
[ub15] saw the soul as the essence that belongs to everything alive. In the case of man, that essence is encapsulated by the concept of rationality. This soul/essence does not survive death, but is intrinsic to the body
[FT11].
In the views of Plato, we see some correspondence with the ideas of the soul given in the Gospels and in the writings of Christian philosophers.
Christian philosophical
[vp57] (as opposed to intuitive) conceptions of the soul were strongly influenced by Augustine, whose ideas in turn were influenced by Plato and Plotinus.
As Justin Hannegan
[1xbbb]
observes:
In lieu of the full Platonic doctrine, Augustine describes the soul as a “composite of two substances, a soul and a body.” Man is two things together, united into a single living unity. According to Augustine’s most mature definition, “Man is a rational substance consisting of soul and body.”
At death, however, the soul is separated, and remains in existence on its own until the resurrection of the dead [gk63] , when it is reunited with the body.
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