Ryle vs. official doctrine on how to explain an intentional action

Table of Contents

Foreword

1. The ontological view of the official doctrine: Mind-body parallelism
1.1 The ontological view of the official doctrine: Mind-body interactionalism
1.2. The difficulties of the official doctrine

2. Ryle vs. the official doctrine
2.1 The notion of dispositional properties
2.2 Dispositional statements

References

Foreword

The main objective of this paper is to discuss how official doctrine and Gilbert Ryle explain how one performs an intentional action. Gilbert Ryle developed his theory of mind in his book “The Concept of Mind” (1949) against the Cartesian dualism. The official doctrine¹ mainly originates from René Descartes “mind-body dualism”.

Concerning the official doctrine, I aspire to elucidate two main aspects: Firstly, I will epitomize important aspects of mind-body “parallelism”. More precisely, I will illustrate, taking into account the official doctrine, that mind and body are two separate entities. Secondly, I will illustrate mind-body “interactionalism”.

Gilbert Ryle criticizes the official doctrine by claiming that the “central principles of the doctrine are unsound and conflict with the whole body what we know about minds when we are not speculating about them (Ryle, 1949:11). He says that official doctrine is utterly erroneous in terms of its principle. According to Ryle, the official doctrine perverted the type- distinction between disposition and exercise into its division of occult mental causes and their overt physical effects. According to Ryle, to say that, for example, someone is intelligent or skillful is to attribute a dispositional property to that person (see below).

1. The ontological view of the official doctrine: Mind-body parallelism

According to the ²official doctrine, both mind and body are separate entities which every human has, however, infants and idiots are excluded from having these two entities. Minds and bodies are normally tied together. The body is considered to be mortal and after the death of the body, the mind may retain its existence and function (cf. Ryle, 1949:11, cf. Tanney, 2007).

Bodies exist in space; they are dependent on mechanical laws, and their operations are externally observable. By contrast, minds do not exist in space. They are not subject to mechanical laws and their functions are imperceptible.

Speaking of this bifurcation of mind and body, according to the o fficial

doctrine, there are two worlds, namely, the physical and the mental world. Operations of the body are in the physical, but operations of the mind happen in the mental world. The happenings of the physical world are public, but the happenings of the mental world are private (cf. Ryle, 1949:11). In other words, the physical world is the external world, but the mental world is the internal world. It is also postulated that there are two different types of existence, namely, physical existence and the mental existence. It has been considered that the physical existence has the essential characteristic of being both in space and time, on the contrary, mental existence has the necessary feature of being only in time. The physical existence consists of matter, but the mental existence is composed of consciousness.

According to the official doctrine, every human has access only to his own mind, thus mental states and processes are considered to be (or are normally considered to be) conscious states and processes. Consciousness in this regard means that each person is (normally) aware of the events of his or her own mind. It is assumed that each person can practice introspection from time to time: “Not only can he view and scrutinize a flower through his sense of sight and listen to and discriminate the notes of a bell through his sense of hearing; he can also reflectively or introspectively watch, without any bodily organ of sense, the current episodes of his inner life” (Ryle, 1949:14). In accordance with the official doctrine, it is not possible to have direct access to the inner life of somebody else. In other words, it is not possible to know what happens in the mental world of a person since the workings of one’s mind is occult to another person. People cannot do more than making guesses from the overt behavior of someone’s body about his or her occult mental events (cf. Ryle, 1949:14).

1.1. The ontological view of the official doctrine: Mind-body interactionalism

According to the official doctrine, “what the mind wills, the legs, arms and the tongue execute; what effects the ear and the eyes has something to do with what the mind perceives; grimaces and smiles betray the mind’s mood and bodily castigations lead, it is hoped, to moral improvement” (Ryle, 1949:12).

According to this assumption, there is a relationship between the mental and

the physical world (see below). Mental states are unobservable, immaterial, internal states which have causal influence on the physical performances of persons (cf. Blackburn, 2008:230). How does mind interact with the body? Whenever someone performs a physical act, there is some sort of prior “theorizing” involved. More precisely, there is some kind of non-mechanical processes which cause the physical acts (see below). Why did the advocates of the official theory believe that mental states are subject to non-mechanical laws? They believed that mechanical laws explain movements in space which have been caused by some other movements in space. They thought that there must be some other laws by which non-spatial workings of minds could be explainable, therefore, they believed that workings of minds which are non- spatial are caused by some other non-spatial functions of minds (cf. Ryle, 1949:19). “[...] The agent must first go through the internal process of avowing to himself certain propositions about what is to be done […]; only then can he execute his performance in accordance with those dictates” (Ryle, 1949:29).

(T) When an agent S performs an act x, the act x is planned and steered by an internal act of prior theorizing. Suppose I lift a stone from the ground.

According to (T), this act of lifting a stone was preceded as well as caused by a prior internal act of theorizing about lifting the stone. According to the official doctrine, whatever physical act one performs, is preceded by an internal act of theorizing. The first one is subjected to mechanical laws, whereas the second one is subjected to non-mechanical laws. There are two things one always does, namely, physical act and internal act (i.e. theorizing). According to this assumption, an archer, for example, must theorize before he is able to shoot at the target. In this respect, the advocates of the official theory may argue in this way: The archer's physical act may be called “intelligent” or “unintelligent” depending on whether or not he is able to shoot at bull's eye (or at least near to the targeted point). If an archer is not able to shoot at the target at all, his physical act (shooting) may be considered as an “unintelligent” act. By contrast, if an archer is able to often shoot at the bull's eye, his physical act is considered as an “intelligent” act. How do the advocates of the official theory argue when considering an action “intelligent” or “unintelligent”? In short, a physical action is considered to be “intelligent” or “unintelligent”

according to the prior act of theorizing. “The difference between the human behaviours which we describe as unintelligent must be a difference in their causation […] (Ryle, 1949:19). It suggests the idea to say that if theorizing is “intelligent”, physical acts will be intelligent too. And also: If theorizing is “unintelligent”, physical acts will be unintelligent too.

1.2 The difficulties of the official doctrine

There are two main difficulties concerning the official doctrine: (I) the mind- body problem and (II) the problem of other minds. The ontological view of the official doctrine leads to mind-body problem since the official doctrine cannot coherently elucidate how mind and body interact with each other. More specifically, the interaction between private world and the public world remains mysterious (cf. Ryle, 1949:12). The epistemological view of the official doctrine leads to the problem of other minds (cf. Ryle, 1949:13, cf. Tanney, 2007). As aforementioned, minds are private; one would only make guesses from the overt action of someone about his occult workings of his mind. There is no connection between the minds, so it is not possible for someone to know about the workings of someone's mind. According to the official doctrine, it is only possible for someone to know about the workings of his own mind. “A person’s present thinkings, feelings and willings, his perceiving, remembering and imaginings are intrinsically ‘phosphorescent’; their existence and their nature are inevitably betrayed to their owner” (Ryle, 1949:14). On this view, it is unclear how the advocates of the official doctrine believe that there are other minds than their own. According to Ryle, even if one believes that there are other minds which are harnessed to bodies, one cannot claim to be able to “discover the individual characteristics of minds, or the particular things that they undergo an do” (Ryle, 1949:15).

“When someone is described as knowing, believing or guessing something, as hoping, dreading, intending or shirking something, as designing this or being amused at that, these verbs are supposed to denote the occurrence of specific modifications in his (to us) occult stream of consciousness” (Ryle, 1949:15).

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¹ Ryle labels “Cartesian dualism“(mind-body dualism) “official doctrine“ or “the dogma of the Ghost in the machine”. He also uses some other phrases such as “the legend” and “double life theory”.

² “The ontological commitment of the view is that there are two different kinds of things, body and mind, that are somehow harnessed together […]“ (Tanney, 2007).