Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

210 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
concessions to theistic authority. To a very large degree, philosophers have
been converted by the scientists to the materialist way of thinking. The
turning point that led to the present dominance of philosophic materialism
may have been the publication, in 1949, of Gilbert Ryle’s Concept of Mind.
Nearly all contemporary defenses of materialism bear at least traces of
ideas first elaborated by Ryle (1900–1976).
Ryle endeavors to exorcise what he calls the “Ghost in the Machine.”
That is what our “concept of mind” really is, he says. The discussions about
minds and matter have been contaminated by what he calls a “category
mistake.” A category mistake can best be understood as the substitution of
one level of abstraction for another. The first and most famous example he
gives is of a visitor to a university who is shown buildings, offices, fields,
and laboratories and then asks, “But where is the University?” The belief
that minds are something distinct from bodies, he says, is a category mistake
of that sort. Or rather it is a “family of radical category-mistakes”
similar to that one (18). Ryle is not as specific as one might wish, but the
tenor of his arguments is that while it is sensible to talk about minds just as
it is sensible to talk about bodies, “minds” are concepts at a higher level of
abstraction than bodies. Minds are not “objects”; they are dispositions,
tendencies, and behaviors. When we talk about minds, we are really talking
about certain things that bodies do.
The mechanists, who want to describe the world entirely in mechanical
terms, find this idea eminently sensible. Others are distressed that it eliminates
entirely the notion that there is such a thing as an “inner life.” For
there is, maintains Ryle, no such thing as a “private” life. “The sorts of
things that I can find out about myself are the same as the sorts of things
that I can find out about other people, and the methods of finding them out
are much the same” (155). Everything we call the mind is only a matter of
tendencies, dispositions, and behaviors. I observe these things in me just
the same as I observe them in you.
There is a curious if superficial similarity in these ideas to Shaw’s own
rejection of “idealism.” If the ideal of “justice” is illusory to Shaw as long
as it means something other than certain persons wanting good things to
happen to some people and bad things to happen to others, the notion of
“mind” is to Ryle nothing but behaviors and dispositions to behaviors that
we can observe in others. For Ryle and his followers, the mind is just an
abstraction of certain aspects of the things people do. Contemporary materialists
would say that “the mind is merely what the brain does” in the way