The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian) / quote 53 of 254
Ryle's category mistake
But why is this apparently simple error so common? A convincing explanation was offered by Gilbert Ryle in his 1949 classic The Concept of Mind. Ryle accused dualists of making what he called a ‘category mistake’. They started from the correct idea that thoughts, feelings and sensations were not physical things. The category mistake was to conclude that they must therefore be a different kind of thing, a non-physical thing. But there is another, more plausible alternative: they are not things at all. Rather, thinking and feeling are what brains and bodies do. Mind should not be thought of a substance, but as a kind of activity. Category mistakes are encouraged by conventions of language. When a word used to describe something is a noun, it is tempting to think that the word it describes is an object of some kind. So, if ‘mind’ is a noun, then minds must be things. But all sorts of nouns are not physical things, yet we do not think that they are some kind of other, ghostly thing. You can’t measure love in physical terms, despite the chuckles from a group of teenagers when I illustrated this point by saying it would not make sense to say ‘my love for you is six inches long’. But no one would conclude that therefore love is a nonphysical object. Nor would denying it was such an object suggest you did not think it was real. Another example would be a song, which is not identical either with any written score nor any particular performance. A song is real, but it is not a physical or non-physical object.