The Story of the Ghost in the Machine

Abstract

In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle famously called Cartesianism “the dogma of the ghost in the machine”. According to Ryle, Cartesianism is a “philosopher’s myth”: it is a category mistake that philosophers have imposed upon ordinary talk about the mind. This chapter suggests an alternative view. Our picture of the mind as an inner world is not a myth, but a story: it is a story that we tell in order to make sense of people and the way they behave. To develop this idea, this chapter draws on Kendall Walton’s hugely influential work on fiction and make-believe. The result is a new approach to the nature of the mind and folk psychology, known as mental fictionalism.