Abstract

This dissertation is an attempt to resurrect Ryle's account of the mind. Most contemporary philosophers of mind are committed to a strict dichotomy: either beliefs, desires and intentions are identical with scientifically respectable entities or else attributions of such attitudes are all false. In this dissertation, I argue that Ryle provides cogent reasons for abandoning this dichotomy and provides a plausible alternative position. ;Ryle's major work, The Concept of Mind, has been largely discarded as a behaviorist critique of ontological dualism. In Part I, I argue that a more accurate interpretation of Ryle, I suggest, would view him as a warranted assertabilist, who attempts to demonstrate that both dualism and materialism lead to absurdities by virtue of presupposing a denotational theory of meaning for mental-conduct terms. ;In Parts II through IV, I apply the Rylean position, as outlined in Part I, to a variety of contemporary materialist views. In Part II, I examine the view that ascriptions of mental-conduct are true in virtue of denoting mental states which are type-identical to neural states, as embodied in D.M. Armstrong's A Materialist Theory of Mind. In Part III, I inspect the theory that attributions of propositional attitudes have their truth-conditions in virtue of denoting mental states which are token-identical to neural states and type-identical to representational states, as defended by Jerry Foder in Representations. Finally, in Part IV, I turn my attention to the Eliminative Materialist's conjecture, as argued for by Steven Stich in From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science, that all of our mental-conduct attributions may be false, insofar as mental-conduct terms are unlikely to denote either types or tokens of material states. ;The form of argument employed in these chapters is to demonstrate that various philosophical paradoxes which were engendered by Cartesian dualism are likewise engendered by the materialist positions examined and, moreover, that in each case the difficulties can be traced back to the presumption that mental-conduct terms are used to denote. I conclude that we should, as Ryle suggests, abandon this assumption in the philosophy of mind.