12. Ryle’s Soft Behaviourism

• Ryle’s version of philosophical behaviourism claims that our talk of the mind is talk of how someone does or would behave under certain conditions
• Ryle’s behaviourism claims that behavioural dispositions are not reducible to a finite set of statements about how someone would behave, nor to a set of statements containing no mental concepts
• Category mistake = to treat a concept as belonging to a different logical category from the one to which it actually belongs
• An example of a category mistake is asking where the University of Cambridge is while at one of the Cambridge colleges
• Ryle believes that substance dualism makes a category mistake about the mental by thinking of mental states as belonging to broadly the same kind of category as physical states - as states that have causes and effects
• Behavioural dispositions are tendencies to behave in certain ways given certain conditions
• Ryle focuses not only on actual behaviour but also behavioural dispositions
• A single-track disposition is a disposition which is actualised in only one way
• An example of a single-track disposition is solubility, which is the disposition to dissolve when placed in water - it can be described with a hypothetical ‘if-then’ statement
• A multi-track disposition is a disposition which can be actualised in multiple ways
• Ryle thinks that mental concepts refer to complex, multi-track dispositions which are ‘indefinitely heterogenous’
• It seems counterintuitive to only think of mental states as actual behaviour as we can often control our behaviour - it is not plausible that whenever one is in pain, there will be some discernible actual pain behaviour
• It is advantageous to think of mental states as behavioural dispositions rather than actual behaviour as many mental states are not time-specific occurrences - they are ‘standing states’ which continue through time e.g. believing, knowing or hoping
• Both hard and soft behaviourism are physicalist theories
• To think of behaviourism as a physicalist theory, we must think of physicalism as a negative thesis - there is no mental reality distinct from physical reality
• Ryle says that mental states are dispositions, not things like substances or properties
• Mental states fall under the category of ‘dispositions’, not the category of ‘things’
• Ryle does not base his view on the verification principle
• Ryle calls substance dualism ’the Dogma of the Ghost in the Machine’
• Ryle believes that substance dualism makes the category mistake of thinking that the mind is like the body - that they operate in the same way
• In contrast to Hempel’s hard behaviourism, Ryle believes that mental concepts can be analysed in terms of hypothetical statements, but we can never give a complete translation of statements involving mental concepts