Types of Consciousness

One of the apparent difficulties with behaviourism is that it treats the mind in a dispositional way, while not everything in the mind is dispositional. In particular, mental occurrences are not states at all and so cannot be dispositions to behave. For example, having a thought, noticing something, having a pang of regret, calculating a sum in one's head, silently reciting a poem can none of them be dispositions to behave.

Descartes' conception of the mind starts with occurrent processes of thought like the process of thinking that one is thinking or the process of doubting whether one is thinking. It is with such thoughts and processes of thought that the strongest temptation arises to use spatial metaphors about the mind. These thoughts ‘pass through’ one's mind. They occur ‘within’ one's mind. And so on. Such metaphors cannot be taken literally, since there is no space in which these thoughts do actually move around. But, according to what Ryle (1949: Chapter 1) ridicules as the Cartesian myth of the ghost in the machine, they move around in something other than space – a mental realm. This is a sort of quasi-space – a world within.

These non-spatial motions are described disparagingly by Ryle (1949: 19) as ‘para-mechanical’. His approach, as we have seen, is to recast our talk of the mind in a dispositional idiom, thus avoiding the temptation to use spatial metaphors. But the very phenomenon that gives rise to this temptation most strongly – namely occurrent thought – is something that Ryle himself never felt he dealt with adequately in The Concept of Mind.