Ryle objects to Descartes’s theory of substance dualism which he terms an official theory. He argues that the main principles of the theory are full of conflicts and unsound. According to him, the theory that believes that every human being possesses a mind and a body is false because the same cannot be said of infants and idiots. He believes that the human body is subject to mechanical laws which are observable and subject to public matters. However, the mind is not subject to such mechanical laws.
It is impossible to know what goes on inside a person’s mind because those thoughts are wholly controlled by the person who possesses them. He says that Descartes divides an individual’s life into external and internal categories where all physical things are external, and the processes of the mind are internal. Ryle feels that such thinking is an antithesis of the inner and outer world that is a metaphor because one cannot deny the spatial existence of the mind because one cannot speak of the mind as being spatially inside something. He, therefore, objects to the idea of solipsism, which states that only one’s mind is certain to exist and that knowledge that is outside its realm is doubtful.
Ryle criticizes Descartes’s theory by stating that it has committed a category mistake and that the whole theory is wrong in principle. According to Ryles, the theory suffers from one big mistake that is special. It is a kind of mistake committed by persons who are competent in employing concepts but who still use their abstract thinking to allocate these ideas to some logical types that are not applicable. Therefore, the mistakes are a result of the theory of the mind when it is presumed to belong to one category when it is of a different category.
The thinking, feeling, and purposeful doing by a person cannot be described in a different manner. It is because the human mind, just like the human body, is a complex unit, but both differ in structure and stuff. He believes that the human body is similar to any other form of matter that is subject to causes and effects, like the mind. However, the mind is subjected to different types of causes and effects which are not mechanical.
Ryle believes that behaviorism can mitigate these difficulties because it is in a position of explaining one’s state of mind. Behaviorism is firmly grounded on psychological principles and has the means of understanding human psychology by studying patterns in their behaviors. Ryle believed that one could describe an individual’s state of mind by inferring their behaviors. He also believed that psychological behaviorism was an interpretation of behavior that had the means of accessing the mind.
Behaviorism, therefore, mitigates the concept of solipsism and category mistakes by offering solutions on how one can understand the functioning of the mind. It shows that it is possible to understand what one thinks by inferring their behaviors. It also deals with the problem of category mistakes by giving the right foundations on which the right principles can be used in understanding the human mind.