PHIL 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Category Mistake
Gilbert Ryles’ (Riles’? idk…) Criticism of Cartesian Dualism
Dualism
● Dualism: Body and mind are two distinct, ontological (claim as to what exists) things.
● Body: spatial, public, physical/material
● Mind: Non-spatial, private, immaterial
Thesis: Dualism is based on a category mistake.
● Notion of a category mistake
○ EX. A University is a different category than a museum - you can’t exactly
point to it.
○ “Where’s the university?” It is not in the category of ‘buildings’, and
therefore cannot be pointed to.
○ EX. A child in class is learning about things, such as mountain names and
locations and lakes, etc.
○ The child asks “where are the numbers?” This is not correct, as numbers
do not have a specific location.
● How the category mistake originated
Criticism
● You have notions like “thing” - “attribute”, “cause” - “effect”
● These things apply in the realm of the objective world which is governed by the laws of
mechanics
● They hold sway in the objective mechanical world
● Dualism is a matter of taking these terms and applying them to mental phenomena -
they were never supposed to be applied bc they belong to a different category
○ 1. “Peter believes A”
○ 2. “Peter knows A”
○ 3. “Peter fears A”
○ If you think about these sentences in terms of “thing” - “attribute”, “cause” -
“effect”, this is a category mistake
○ Sentences with mental conduct
○ You are led to think of Peter’s mind as a thing, but not a physical thing
○ You are led to hypothesize the mind of Peter.
○ You commit hypostatization.
○ 4. “Peter’s body exist”
○ Sure
○ 5. “Peter’s mind exists”
○ Sure
○ The misleading thing is that context of the word “exists”
○ Two different senses
○ The body physically exists, the mind does not
● Why is Dualism a category mistake?
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