ABSTRACT
The term philosophy of mind came into currency in the English-speaking world in the 1950's, largely as a description of the debates initiated by Gilbert Ryle's pioneering book The Concept of Mind, published in 1949. Ryle's book was a polemic against the Cartesian idea that mental states are states of an immaterial substance. This polemic, and the ensuing discussion, turned on the question of the reducibility of mental events to behavioral dispositions. Ryle's central argument was that we had misconceived the “logic” of such words as “belief,” “sensation,” “conscious,” etc. He thought that the traditional, Cartesian theory of mind, had “misconstrued the type-distinction between disposition and exercise into its mythical bifurcation of unwitnessable mental causes and their witnessable physical effects.” 1 Ryle's attempt to do philosophy of mind as “conceptual analysis” was founded on the pre-Quinean idea that philosophical puzzles arose out of “misunderstandings of the logic of our language.”
