A category mistake, as the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900 to 1976) used the term, is the error of treating something as if it belonged to a kind of thing it does not belong to, like a visitor who tours every college and library in Oxford and then asks where the university is. In The Concept of Mind (1949) Ryle held that the picture of the mind as a hidden inner thing driving the body, which he mocked as ‘the ghost in the machine’, rests on a category mistake of this sort. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his refusal to split a person into a ghost and a machine, but on very different grounds, since in this teaching everything, the body included, is made of Spirit and is conscious.
Who was Gilbert Ryle? #
An English philosopher who spent almost his whole career at the University of Oxford. He was born in Brighton in 1900, taught at Oxford from 1924 until he retired in 1968, apart from war service in the army, held the Waynflete Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy from 1945, and edited the leading philosophy journal Mind from 1947 to 1971. He died in Whitby in 1976, after a day’s walking on the moors.1
He was one of the central figures of what came to be called ordinary language philosophy, which holds that many philosophical puzzles come from misusing the words we already know how to use well in everyday life. His best-known book, The Concept of Mind, looks at words such as knowing, learning, wanting and imagining, and asks what we are really doing when we use them.1
What is a category mistake? #
Putting something into the wrong logical kind, so that a question which makes sense for one kind of thing gets asked of another where it makes none. Ryle’s most famous example is a visitor shown round Oxford, a university with no single campus. The visitor sees the colleges, the libraries, the laboratories and the playing fields, and then asks, “But where is the university?” The answer is that the university is all of these, organised in a certain way; it is not one more building standing somewhere beside them.2
The visitor is not short of facts. They know how to use the word ‘university’ perfectly well in ordinary conversation. What has gone wrong is that they have taken the university to be the same kind of thing as a college, and so expect to find it in the same kind of place. Ryle’s point is that clever people make this sort of mistake all the time, and that some of the deepest puzzles in philosophy come from it. He also used a sentence from Dickens, “Miss Bolo came home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair.” The sentence is funny because it joins two words of quite different kinds as if they were the same kind.2
What did he mean by the ghost in the machine? #
The picture of a person that Ryle set out to dismantle, which he called the ‘official doctrine’ and traced to the philosopher René Descartes. On this picture a human being is two things joined together, a body that is a machine working by physical laws, and a mind that is a private, invisible thing inside it, where thinking, feeling and willing go on out of sight. Ryle called it “the dogma of the Ghost in the machine”.3
He held that the whole picture rests on a category mistake. Words such as ‘intelligent’, ‘careful’ or ‘knows French’ do not report hidden events in an inner theatre. They describe the way a person does things, what they are able and inclined to do, and how they would act in all sorts of situations. To ask where the mind is, over and above all of this, is to ask the visitor’s question about the university. So the mind is not a second, ghostly thing standing beside the body; talking about minds and talking about bodies are two different kinds of talk, and the mistake is to treat them as two descriptions of the same kind of object.4
What is the difference between knowing how and knowing that? #
Ryle drew a line between knowing that something is the case, which can be put into words as a fact, and knowing how to do something, which shows itself in the doing. He called the opposite view, that every intelligent action must first be planned by some inner theorising, the ‘intellectualist legend’. If every skilled act needed an act of theorising before it, that act of theorising would need another before it, and so on for ever. So some intelligence has to live in the doing itself. Rules, on his account, are written down from skills that already exist; a person can swim, cook or play a game well long before anyone puts the rules into words, and often without ever being able to.5
How does Ryle’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In three places. The first is the refusal to treat a person as a ghost inside a machine. In Therapeutic Shamanism there is no one, single ‘I’ sitting inside a body. The ‘I’ is itself made of different parts, each with its own needs and drives.6 The physical body is one of those parts, and it is not just a vehicle for the soul or a thing we inhabit; it has its own consciousness, intelligence, wisdom, needs and drives.7 See What are the different parts of the self in Therapeutic Shamanism?
The second is knowing how. Shamanic knowledge is largely of the doing kind. Journeys are about right-brain, largely non-verbal knowledge, gained by experience, whilst the verbal, left-brained knowledge that a teacher passes on in words has its own essential place beside it.8 Ryle’s knowing how and knowing that are close to this pairing, though he drew his line from the study of ordinary skills and not from journeying. See What are grokking, dieting and research in working with the Peoples?
The third is the category mistake itself. In Therapeutic Shamanism, mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this and logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this are two different kinds of truth, and much confusion comes from treating one as the other, either taking a metaphorical truth as literal fact or throwing out a metaphorical truth because it is not literal fact.9 Asking whether a shamanic journey is objectively true is a question of this mixed-up sort. Journeys are “mythos, not logos”, closer to great paintings, music or poems than to a report of facts.10 Ryle never wrote about mythos and logos, and the comparison is not his; but his visitor, looking for the university among the colleges, makes the same kind of slip as someone looking for literal facts in a journey. See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On what is left once the ghost has gone. Ryle removed the ghost by showing that talk of minds is talk about how living people act, and he set aside the picture of hidden inner episodes in a private theatre, though he allowed that private things such as dreams and imaginings do happen.11 Therapeutic Shamanism gets rid of the split from the other end. Everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious, stones, rivers and made things included; most people simply struggle to recognise consciousness in things very different from themselves.12 So the body is not a machine waiting for a ghost, and neither is anything else.
The two also start from different places. Ryle worked by looking closely at how words are used. Therapeutic Shamanism starts from direct experience, in journeys and in everyday life, and the question is met by trying the practices and noticing what happens, not by argument. See What does it mean to say the world is alive and full of persons?
Was Ryle a behaviourist? #
This is still disputed. Many readers have taken The Concept of Mind as a ‘soft’ behaviourism, the view that mental words are really about behaviour and dispositions to behave, and Ryle himself accepted that his approach was, in a sense, “behavioristic”. Philosophers such as U. T. Place, David Armstrong, Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor went on to hold that he had misunderstood how the mind is connected to behaviour, and that inner states and their causes could not be talked away.13
On the other side, Ryle criticised behaviourism himself, as too mechanical and as taking too narrow a view of what counts as behaviour and as observable, and he never denied that people have private thoughts, dreams and sensations. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on him reads him as attacking Descartes’ picture, not as replacing it with behaviourism.14
