Evidence · Case 07 · Philosophy

Gilbert Ryle, “The Concept of Mind”

One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.

Ryle introduced the term in 1949. He said the dualist picture of the mind “represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category (or range of types or categories), when they actually belong to another,” and illustrated the error with a visitor shown the colleges and library who then asks to be shown the university, as if the university were one more building of the same kind.

Sources

Gilbert Ryle, “The Concept of Mind” (opens in a new tab)
Gilbert Ryle, “The Concept of Mind” (University of Chicago Press, 1949), chapter 1

Objections & responses

Ryle coined “category mistake” to attack the idea of an immaterial mind. Isn’t it ironic to use his term to defend an immaterial God and moral facts? A critic could say the category mistake is yours.: The irony is real; Ryle would not have been sympathetic, and his university example was deflationary by design. But a concept can be correct even if its author applied it in a direction one rejects, and only the concept is used here. The critic’s counter-charge is fair and is the actual debate: are moral facts a real category, or a category mistake? That question is taken up in the Relativism and Atheism cases. What is claimed here is narrower: that science can’t test it, so it isn’t real is itself a category mistake if there are non-physical categories, which is the question rather than the answer.

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