What is the view Ryle dubs 'The Official Doctrine' What in your view are his most successful arguments against it - Essay Example

This paper will attempt to analyze and logically present Ryle’s critique on dualism and what he calls “the Official Doctrine.” Although Gilbert Ryle (1949, p. 23) stated that the Official Doctrine was not only based on Descartes’ Mind-Body Theory as even before Descartes came and proposed it, there have already been many views and even myths regarding it centuries before. A clear example of this is the dualism of the body and soul established by the Catholic Church (George, et al., 2005).

However, since Descartes’ text is one of the most important writings—if not the most important—regarding this subject, the author deemed it necessary to attribute the theory of dualism to him (Ryle, 1949, p.11). So what really is the Official Doctrine or the Mind-Body Theory all about? It is the explanation that proposes that the nature and place of the mind and body that every human being possesses, with the obvious exceptions of infants and the mentally challenged, are different and separate from each other (Ryle, 1949, p. 11). While the former is private and internal, the latter is of public domain and is external (Ryle, 1949, p. 11). This is explained by the theory that the body occupies space and is observable by the senses just like other external entities (like a chair, another person or a dog).

The mind, on the other hand, does not occupy space and cannot be ascertained by any other individual aside from the self. For instance, a person can see whether the other person next to him is wearing a jacket or not. The observations gathered by the senses are situated in space and is open for everybody else to perceive. But the mind and its processes are kept totally in secret from other people. Only the owner of the mind knows what it is thinking. For example, a person may smile when in his mind he is thinking of all the problems in his life.

However, it is through the physical that another human being can indirectly affect and communicate