Behaviorism: Ryle's Critique of the "Ghost in the Machine"

Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949) opens with one of the most influential attacks on Cartesian dualism in twentieth-century philosophy, arguing that the very idea of the mind as a private, non-physical entity somehow housed within and directing the physical body — which Ryle famously derides as "the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine" — rests on a category mistake. Ryle illustrates the concept with the example of a foreign visitor shown the colleges, libraries, playing fields, and administrative offices of a university and who then asks, "But where is the university?" — mistakenly supposing the university must be some further thing over and above the buildings and institutions already shown, when in fact "the university" simply names the way those various things are organized. Descartes, on Ryle's diagnosis, makes an analogous mistake: after cataloguing all the various observable things a person does — walking, talking, calculating, remembering — he supposes there must be some further hidden entity, the mind, that does these things "inside," when talk of a person's intelligence, memory, or perception is really talk about that person's dispositions to behave in certain ways under certain circumstances, not reports about a separate ghostly cause operating behind the behavior.