The Concept of Mind

A sustained attack on what Ryle calls the official doctrine about the mind, inherited from Descartes: that each person is a body plus a private, non-physical mind that causes its actions. Ryle mocks this as 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine' and argues it rests on a category mistake. His example is a visitor who is shown the colleges, library and laboratories of a university and then asks where the university is, as if it were one more building. Talk of minds, he argues, is not talk of a hidden inner theatre but of how people behave and are disposed to behave. Intelligence shows in how we act, not in prior acts of private thinking, which leads to his distinction between knowing how and knowing that. Further chapters analyse will, emotion, self-knowledge, sensation, imagination and intellect in the same spirit. Critics read the book as a form of behaviourism, a label Ryle accepted only in part.

It is the classic case against Cartesian dualism, written with wit, and the ideas of category mistakes and knowing how remain in wide use.