Following, in italics, is the complete section of Ryle’s first chapter that defines by illustration what he means by category mistake. (My emphasis.)
I must first indicate what is meant by the phrase 'Category-mistake.' This I do in a series of illustrations.
A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks `But where is the University? I have seen where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the members of your University.' It has then to be explained to him that the University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their coordination is understood, the University has been seen. His mistake lay in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the University, to speak, that is, as if `the University' stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members. He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other institutions belong. The same mistake would be made by a child witnessing the march-past of a division, who, having had pointed out to him such and such battalions, batteries, squadrons, etc., asked when the division was going to appear. He would be supposing that a division was a counterpart to the units already seen, partly similar to them and partly unlike them. He would be shown his mistake by being told that in watching the battalions, batteries and squadrons marching past he had been watching the division marching past. The march-past was not a parade of battalions, batteries, squadrons and a division; it was a parade of the battalions, batteries and squadrons of a division. One more illustration. A foreigner watching his first game of cricket learns what are the functions of the bowlers, the batsmen, the fielders, the umpires and the scorers. He then says 'But there is no one left on the field to contribute the famous element of team-spirit. I see who does the bowling, the batting and the wicketkeeping; but I do not see whose role it is to exercise esprit de corps.' Once more, it would have to be explained that he was looking for the wrong type of thing. Team-spirit is not another cricketing-operation supplementary to all of the other special tasks. It is, roughly, the keenness with which each of the special tasks is performed, and performing a task keenly is not performing two tasks. Certainly exhibiting teamspirit is not the same thing as bowling or catching, but nor is it a third thing such that we can say that the bowler first bowls and then exhibits team-spirit or that a fielder is at a given moment either catching or displaying esprit de corps. These illustrations of category-mistakes have a common feature which must be noticed. The mistakes were made by people who did not know how to wield the concepts University, division and team-spirit. Their puzzles arose from inability to use certain items in the English vocabulary.
The theoretically interesting category mistakes are those made by people who are perfectly competent to apply concepts, at least in the situations with which they are familiar, but are still liable in their abstract thinking to allocate those concepts to logical types to which they do not belong. An instance of a mistake of this sort would be the following story. A student of politics has learned the main differences between the British, the French and the American Constitutions, and has learned also the differences and connections between the Cabinet, Parliament, the various Ministries, the Judicature and the Church of England. But he still becomes embarrassed when asked questions about the connections between the Church of England, the Home Office and the British Constitution. For while the Church and the Home Office are institutions, the British Constitution is not another institution in the same sense of that noun. So inter-institutional relations which can be asserted or denied to hold between the Church and the Home Office cannot be asserted or denied to hold between either of them and the British Constitution. `The British Constitution' is not a term of the same logical type as `the Home Office' and `the Church of England.' In a partially similar way, John Doe may be a relative, a friend, an enemy or a stranger to Richard Roe; but he cannot be any of these things to the Average Taxpayer. He knows how to talk sense in certain sorts of discussions about the Average Taxpayer, but he is baffled to say why he could not come across him in the street as he can come across Richard Roe.
It is pertinent to our main subject to notice that, so long as the student of politics continues to think of the British Constitution as a counterpart to the other institutions, he will tend to describe it as a mysteriously occult institution; and so long as John Doe continues to think of the Average Taxpayer as a fellow-citizen, he will tend to think of him as an elusive insubstantial man, a ghost who is everywhere yet nowhere.
My destructive purpose is to show that a family of radical category-mistakes is the source of the double-life theory. The representation of a person as a ghost mysteriously ensconced in a machine derives from this argument. Because, as is true, a person's thinking, feeling and purposive doing cannot be described solely in the idioms of physics, chemistry and physiology, therefore they must be described in counterpart idioms. As the human body is a complex organised unit, so the human mind must be another complex organised unit, though one made of a different sort of stuff and with a different sort of structure. Or, again, as the human body, like any other parcel of matter, is a field of causes and effects, so the mind must be another field of causes and effects, though not (Heaven be praised) mechanical causes and effects.
Wikipedia puts the gist of this argument this way:
Ryle's The Concept of Mind (1949) is a critique of the notion that the mind is distinct from the body, and a rejection of the theory that mental states are separable from physical states. In this book Ryle refers to the idea of a fundamental distinction between mind and matter as "the ghost in the machine"
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I believe that is the usual way the Ryle concept is taken, but it seems to me that it may be taken in a less exclusionary sense only to criticize those who would claim that mind must be structured like things that can be described in physical terms. It seems to be a different kind of entity indeed, not at all like revolving celestial bodies. As Ryle says elsewhere, it’s a something known only to the thinker, the person in the machine, and inferred to be likewise present in others by the thinker. It is known only as consciousness, too. Not directly as a problem solver for instnace. How should the thinker ever get outside of itself to know that it was subject to cause and effect in more or less the same way as celestial or smaller bodies?
Personally I wouldn’t think that believing in a ghost in the machine I must also believe it to be “another complex organised unit,” differing only as to type of stuff and structure but describable in “counterpart idioms.” William James, in Varieties of Religious Experience, describes particular minds in the sense of consciousness without imputing any mechanistic counterpart structure to the consciousness. That is, he’s just studying the minds, their experiences as related by the persons with the minds or with the experiences, with certain streams of consciousness they report.
It appears to me to be very useful to distinguish mind as agent from mind as conscious experience or stream of consciousness. When talking about an agent that is responsible for, for instance, solving problems or making possibly hurtful or helpful statements, we slip easily into supposing some sort of non-substantial cause and effect ruled entity of the sort Ryle calls the ghost in the machine. But no one actually witnesses such an entity, even in his or her own consciousness. All I ever notice in my consciousness is images, or ideas of the sort we call representations of external events.
Let’s follow along with Ryle and see how he establishes that other thinkers mistakenly suppose mind to be describable in counterpart idioms to those of physical cause and effect. In italics following, I give the continuation of the first chapter from where I broke it off above. My emphasis.
3. The Origin of the Category-Mistake
One of the chief intellectual origins of what I have yet to prove to be the Cartesian category mistake seems to be this. When Galileo showed that his methods of scientific discovery were competent to provide a mechanical theory which should cover every occupant of space, Descartes found in himself two conflicting motives. As a man of scientific genius he could not but endorse the claims of mechanics, yet as a religious and moral man he could not accept, as Hobbes accepted, the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork. The mental could not be just a variety of the mechanical.
He and subsequent philosophers naturally but erroneously availed themselves of the following escape-route. Since mental-conduct words are not to be construed as signifying the occurrence of mechanical processes, they must be construed as signifying the occurrence of nonmechanical processes; since mechanical laws explain movements in space as the effects of other movements in space, other laws must explain some of the nonspatial workings of minds as the effects of other non-spatial workings of minds. The difference between the human behaviours which we describe as intelligent and those which we describe as unintelligent must be a difference in their causation; so, while some movements of human tongues and limbs are the effects of mechanical causes, others must be the effects of non-mechanical causes, i.e. some issue from movements of particles of matter, others from workings of the mind.
The differences between the physical and the mental were thus represented as differences inside the common framework of the categories of `thing,' `stuff,' `attribute,' `state,' `process,' ,change,' `cause' and `effect'. Minds are things, but different sorts of things from bodies; mental processes are causes and effects, but different sorts of causes and effects from bodily movements. And so on. Somewhat as the foreigner expected the University to be an extra edifice, rather like a college but also considerably different, so the repudiators of mechanism represented minds as extra centres of causal processes, rather like machines but also considerably different from them. Their theory was a paramechanical hypothesis.
I must leave it to the interested reader to pursue Ryle further down this train of thinking. It appears to me that his whole argument turns critically on maintaining that the Descartes and subsequent dualist folk, whether they accept that label or not, all hold a paramechanical hypothesis. Here is a wrap-up sort of paragraph:
When two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them. Thus a purchaser may say that he bought a left-hand glove and a righthand glove, but not that he bought a left-hand glove, a right-hand glove and a pair of gloves. `She came home in a flood of tears and a sedanchair' is a well-known joke based on the absurdity of conjoining terms of different types. It would have been equally ridiculous to construct the disjunction `She came home either in a flood of tears or else in a sedan-chair.' Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements. I shall argue that these and other analogous conjunctions are absurd; but, it must be noticed, the argument will not show that either of the illegitimately conjoined propositions is absurd in itself. I am not, for example, denying that there occur mental processes. Doing long division is a mental process and so is making a joke. But I am saying that the phrase `there occur mental processes' does not mean the same sort of thing as `there occur physical processes,' and, therefore, that it makes no sense to conjoin or disjoin the two.
to give some of what Descartes has to say on this matter.