Philosophy

Philosophy Study Guide

©2018 of 126 4.8 Ryle: The Self is How You Behave Gilbert Ryle was an important figure in the world known as linguistic analysis. Linguistic analysis focused on the solving of philosophical puzzles through an analysis of language. This supports the behaviorist theory of the mind in which the self is defined in terms of the behavior that is presented to the world. Ryle wrote The Concept of Mind , which had a dramatic impact on Western thought. His approach was thought of as logical behaviorism focusing on creating conceptual clarity, not on developing techniques to condition and manipulate human behavior. Although the majority of people assume mind/body dualism as a general theory on a practical level, we act and speak in a much different fashion (ghost in the machine dualism in which the self is thought to be a spiritual, immaterial ghost rattling around inside the physical body) this conflicts with the everyday experience revealing itself to be conceptually flawed and confused notion that needs to revised. Ryle believed that the mind is a concept that expresses the entire system of thoughts, emotions, actions, and so on that make up the human self. The mistake happens when we think of the self as existing apart from observable behaviors, a purely mental entity existing in time, but not space. According to Ryle, this self does not really exist anymore than the university or team sprit exist in some special non-physical universe. Ryle focuses his attention on human behavior and purports that the self is best understood as a pattern or behavior, the tendency or disposition for a person to behave in a certain way in certain circumstances. Ryle ends up being his own most incisive critic because his logical behaviorism attempts to define and translate the self and the complex mental/emotional richness of life of the mind into a listing of behaviors and potential behaviors that conflicts with the whole body of what we know about minds when we are not speculating about them. 4.9 Physicalism: The Self is the Brain Physicalism is the philosophical view that all aspects of the universe are composed of matter and energy and can fully be explained by physical laws. Physicalism believes that mental states are identical with, reducible to, or explainable terms of physical brain states. There is no immaterial self that exists independently from the brain or the body. Several theoretical perspectives under the general category of physicalism included are functionalism and eliminative materialism. Functionalism contends that the mind can be explained in terms of patterns of sensory inputs and behaviors mediated by functionally defined mental stated. Eliminative materialism believes the mind is the brain and that over time a mature neuroscience vocabulary will replace the folk psychology that we currently use to think about ourselves and/or minds. 4.10 Functionalism Ryle’s logical behaviorism is a form of physicalism since the theory holds that there is no immaterial self that exists independently of one’s body or visible behavior. With the invention of computers, many philosophers felt that using computers as a model of human functioning was developed. A model for the connection for the human mind was the connection between sensory stimulation and observable behavior. Functionalism acknowledged that there were mental states that served to connect the sensory stimulation and observable behavior. For functionalism, what makes something Achieve Page 47