In warming up to his criticism of Descartes, Ryle talks about what he considers the official doctrine, which is something like Descartes view as it has been consciously or perhaps more commonly unconsciously accepted by much contemporary thought and he, Ryle characterizes this perhaps abusively as the doctrine of the "Ghost in the Machine." The idea is that, if you believe in Descartes's Dualism, you have to think of each person's mind as something like a ghost in the machine, as something that is there inside of it but in a way that doesn't make any clear sense, if you scrutinize it more carefully. So, this doctrine of the ''Ghost in the Machine'' is going to have a number of central tenets. I'll give you six. First of all, each normal person according to this doctrine has both a body and a mind. Secondly, a person's body can be destroyed, while their mind being non-physical, can continue to exist even after the body's complete destruction. Bodies are located in space and time, this is part number three, doctrine number three, and are subject to the same mechanical laws as are any other physical objects like tables, and chairs, and bowling balls, and clouds, and mountains, whereas minds are located in time but not in space. Talk of a mind as having a particular special location according to this doctrine, is not going to make literal sense. These minds are not subject to the same laws that govern physical objects. Minds may instead be subject to some distinctive psychological laws according to this view, but the laws of physics don't apply to minds according to this doctrine. Each of us, this is number five, is intimately aware of the workings of her own mind. We can introspect and know with certainty what's going on inside of us. By contrast, however, we may at best form conjectures about the minds of others, and we have no definitive way of settling whether those conjectures are correct or not. The best we can do is hypothesize what's going on inside of somebody's mind but can never know for sure, in the way that we can for sure what's going on inside of our own. Then, finally number six, minds and bodies seem to interact, but locus of that interaction can itself be neither mental nor physical. So those are six core elements of the doctrine of the ''Ghost in the Machine'' and Ryle's hoping to get you to see that if you focus on those more and scrutinize them, the idea that generates them, the dualist position that generates them, might look less obvious and less plausible than at first seemed. In particular, notice that idea of the locus of the mind and the body interacting, is that interaction a physical or non-physical thing? Either way, seems like it's going to generate some serious difficulties. Ryle's criticism of the whole ''Ghost in the Machine'' idea is going to be roughly as follows: Descartes and those who follow him are confused about the very idea of what a mind is. They're confused about the very concept of what it is to have a mind. In particular, Descartes has committed according to Ryle, what Ryle refer to as a category mistake in characterizing the mind as a substance, as well as a non-physical substance. What does that mean? What is a category mistake? A category mistake is a confusion rather logical status of a concept. Let me give you some examples to illustrate the idea. Suppose that you meet up with some friends for coffee one afternoon and they say, ''Look, we're going to have a big adventure this summer. We're going to Romania. We're going to rent bikes, and we're going to ride across the country of Romania, and see if we can find the average Romanian taxpayer. If so, hopefully we'll be able to take that person out to dinner, have some fun with him or her, and then we'll continue our journey to the other side of the country.'' Now, if you think about that, you'll probably see that the idea of the 'average Romanian taxpayer' doesn't make any literal sense. For the reason that, the idea of an average taxpayer is an abstraction from all the facts about the individual actual taxpayers that there are. Another example is as follows, suppose you're studying at university and you're happy to go there, it's a bit far away from home. So, one day, your extended family comes to visit, you take your aunts, and uncles, and cousins, and so forth around, show them the buildings and, the faculty members, and students, and the athletic facilities, and so forth. Then over dinner, you sit down with your uncle, and your uncle says, ''Thank you so much for showing us the buildings, the athletic facilities, and the students, and the faculty, and staff, and so that was great, but I'm still not sure exactly where the university is.'' If that's what your uncle says, I think you'll feel like he's confused about what a university is, and you'll probably want to say, A university is not a particular thing at the level of building or individual people or even groups of people, but rather it's a whole collection of a number of different types of things: buildings and people, institutions, traditions, expectations, norms, and so on. That's what makes up a university and probably many other things as well, and they will only make it up if they are working together with a certain degree of harmoniousness. Some people have referred to many universities as cases of ossification tempered by anarchy and that may well be true of many universities, but it can't be complete anarchy. If it's complete anarchy, you don't have a university anymore as far as I can tell. So, those are two examples of category mistakes and other example is, suppose you've taken a friend from another country to see a match of a game, perhaps it's soccer, and they've never seen a soccer game before, and you try to explain to them how the game is played, and they're following along, and at the end of the game, your friend says, ''Well, this is all great. I see where the goalie is, and the forward, and so forth that's all fine, but where is that part of soccer that is known as esprit de corps, team spirit? Which player is the one that provides the team spirit part of the game?'' Again, I think you'll feel your friend is confused. You want to explain to them that team spirit is not a particular thing that's there on the field at the level of an individual player or what the player contributes to the game, but rather, team spirit is the ability of all different players to play together in a certain way. It's a higher level notion than being a forward or a goalie for example. It's only if all the players are playing in a certain way, that they've got team spirit. So again, three examples of category mistakes that a person can make and those are relatively straightforward, relatively coherent as examples of what it would be to commit a category mistake, and that Ryle is going to try to explain why he thinks Descartes makes a category mistake of a certain kind. Just to begin to wrap your mind around where Ryle is coming from here, think about, I'm guessing many have seen the movie from 1990s called Forrest Gump, in which you've got a character that plays a man who is, at least on the face of it, a little bit slow, a little bit unusual, maybe somebody might suspect that he's got some mental disability. It's not quite clear. He had a physical disability as a young child, but he seems to have overcome it, but perhaps he still has a mental disability. But in order to respond to the criticisms that society makes of him, in order to keep his self-respect, he often cites his mother who told him when he was growing up that, ''Stupid is as stupid does.'' Probably she would say similarly, ''Smart is as smart does.'' If Ryle had been alive when the movie came out, I suspect he would have said, ''Yes, that's the right ballpark, the right general idea for thinking about what it is to have a mind. Being minded is not a matter of being made out of a certain substance, rather being minded is a matter of behaving intelligently or at least being disposed to behave intelligently.'' So, what it means to behave or being disposed to behave intelligently is going to be crucial for Ryle's understanding of what a mind is, and then he'll use that as a criticism of Descartes. So for Ryle, intelligence is not an extra thing lying behind the behavior, rather it's a feature of a certain kind of behavior. For example, think about cases of clowning. When somebody is clowning around in a witty way, making people laugh, then that's an example of intelligent behavior right there in front of you. They need to be nothing lying behind it, so to speak, that makes it be intelligent. The absence of which would keep it from being intelligent. Rather, it's the way in which the clowning is done, or playing tennis in a crafty way, or playing chess in an aggressive manner, conversing sensitively. These are all ways of behaving that are intelligent. The idea is that, the intelligence is right there in public, in the open, and it doesn't have to be thought of as being a cause of a mental occurrence, but rather the idea is that, its intelligence right there objectively available for everyone to see, if they just look carefully enough.
