Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976), philosopher, was a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein's insights into language, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine ". He referred to some of his ideas as "behaviourism" (not to be confused with the psychological behaviourism of B. F. Skinner and John B. Watson).

He was born in Brighton in 1900. A capable linguist, he was recruited to intelligence work during World War II, after which he became Wayneflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, and published his principal work, "The Concept of Mind" in 1949.

The Concept of Mind

In The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle admits to having been taken in by the body-mind dualism which permeates Western philosophy, and claims that the idea of Mind as an independent entity, inhabiting and governing the body, should be rejected as redundant piece of literalism carried over from the era before the biological sciences became established. The proper function of Mind-body language, he suggests, is to describe how higher organisms such as humans demonstrate resourcefulness, strategy, the ability to abstract and hypothesize and so on from the evidences of their behaviour.

He attacks the fallacy of 17th and 18th century thinkers (such as Descartes and De La Mettrie) that nature is a complex machine, and that human nature is a smaller machine with a "ghost" in it to account for intelligence, spontaneity and other such human qualities. It is not that there is no ghost — the language of mind, Ryle asserts, is very important in describing the things we do and why we do them — it is that humans are not analogous to machines in the first place and do not need a "hidden" principal to explain their supra-mechanical capacities.

Novelists, historians and journalists, Ryle points out, have no trouble in ascribing motives, moral values and individuality to people's actions. It is only when philosophers try to attribute these qualities to a separate realm of mind or soul that the problem arises. Ryle also created the classic argument against cognitivist theories of explanation, Ryle's Regress.

Legacy and influence

The book was recognized on its appearance as an important contribution to philosophical psychology, and an important work in the ordinary language philosophy movement. However, in the 1960s and 1970s the rising influence of the cognitivist theories of Noam Chomsky, Herbert Simon Jerry Fodor and others in the neo-Cartesian school became predominant. Chomsky even wrote a book entitled Cartesian Linguistics . In philosophy the two major post-war schools in the philosophy of mind, the representationalism of Jerry Fodor and the functionalism of Wilfrid Sellars posited precisely the 'internal' cognitive states that Ryle had argued against. However as Daniel Dennett has pointed out, recent trends in psychology such as embodied cognition, discursive psychology, situated cognition and others in the post-cognitivist tradition have provoked a renewal in interest in Ryle's work. Ryle remains a significant defender of the possibility of lucid and meaningful interpretation of higher-level human activities without recourse to an abstracted soul.

Other writings

His other books are Plato's Progress (1966) and Dilemmas (1954), a collection of shorter pieces. He was also editor of the philosophical journal Mind in 1947–1971.