Minding Concepts Available to Purchase

Even people who aren’t familiar with the work of the philosopher Gilbert Ryle have likely encountered his most famous phrase, “the ghost in the machine.” Traveling beyond its original context in Ryle’s 1949 book The Concept of Mind to a 1967 book by Arthur Koestler and a 1981 album by the Police, the phrase has come to suggest the existence of the ineffable. But this is the opposite of what Ryle meant. His foundational argument was that you can’t infer a ghost from the machine—the Cartesian “official doctrine” is wrong—because you can’t infer from the visible back to something invisible when you’re talking about people’s minds. In The Concept of Mind the machine is our bodies, and our observable actions are all anyone can know. Ryle argues that it’s impossible to infer from the skillful things we do (which he calls know-how) whatever intelligence we have (know-that)....