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My daughter asked where her mind is kept. Is Ryle’s ‘category mistake’ the answer?

Thamarai Selvi Raman Contributor
· 4 replies · 194 views
ConsciousnessAnalyticIndianOrdinary language philosophyGilbert RyleRené DescartesThomas Nagel#category-mistake#dualism#ghost-in-the-machine#philosophy-for-children
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My daughter is seven. Last week, while I was plaiting her hair, she asked me where her mind is kept. "Is it in my head, like my brain? Or is it behind my eyes?" I said it was in her brain, and she said "but my brain is a thing, and my mind is me", and I had nothing to say.

I left accountancy to raise my children and I read philosophy in the evenings. Someone on another forum told me to look up Gilbert Ryle and "the ghost in the machine", which he apparently called a "category mistake". I found the phrase but not a clear explanation.

So, could someone explain:

  1. What is a category mistake, with an example a seven-year-old (or her mother) could follow?
  2. Why did Ryle think asking where the mind is might be one?
  3. Is his answer generally accepted, or does it have problems?

I should say that I read Śaiva Siddhānta, which treats the soul as real and distinct, so I am not sure I want Ryle to be right. But I would like to understand him before disagreeing.

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4 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Rowena Abellana

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    1. A category mistake is treating something as belonging to the wrong kind of thing. Ryle's example in The Concept of Mind (1949): a visitor shown the colleges, libraries and laboratories asks, "But where is the University?" He thinks it is one more building. It isn't; it is how all of them are organised. Or a cricket spectator asks which player supplies the team spirit.

    2. Applied to the mind: Ryle thought Descartes's picture, a body plus a hidden inner thinker, makes the visitor's mistake. The mind is not an extra object inside, a ghost in the machine. To have a mind is to be able to think, plan, joke, notice and choose. Asking where it is kept is like asking where the University is kept.

    3. Problems: Ryle explains minds largely through behaviour and dispositions; critics say this leaves out experience from the inside. Thomas Nagel's essay on what it is like to be a bat is the classic statement. Most philosophers now think Ryle was right that the mind is no little extra object, and wrong that behaviour is all there is.

    For your daughter: her mind isn't kept somewhere, like her shoes. It's what she is doing when she wonders, including when she asks you this.

Other answers

  1. Pieter de Jong

    Fellow

    From machine learning: people ask where the "knowledge" is in a neural network, and the honest answer is "nowhere in particular". It's in the pattern of millions of weights and what they make the network do. That's a Rylean answer, and it's also why I'm not fully satisfied with it: for the network I'm fairly sure there is nothing it is like to be it, and for your daughter I'm sure there is.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Martín Roldán

    Fellow

    Psychoanalysts have an interesting quarrel with Ryle. We agree the mind is not a ghost in a box, but we think there is far more "inside" than he allowed: wishes, fears and memories that shape behaviour without showing up in it directly. So "where is the mind?" is a bad question, but "is there more to the mind than what it does?" is a very good one. Your daughter asked the first and meant the second.

    Helpful · 2
  3. Thamarai Selvi Raman

    Contributor

    Thank you, Rowena. The University is perfect, and the cricket team will do for my son. Martín, I think you're right about what she meant. In Śaiva Siddhānta the soul is real, bound and capable of release, but even there it isn't "kept" anywhere. So perhaps Ryle and my tradition agree that "where" is the wrong word, and only disagree about what comes next.

    Helpful · 3