Gilbert Ryle’s view that to speak of an immaterial in a similar way to that of another substance is to make a ‘category mistake’ was in response to Descartes Dualism. Ryle describes the Dualism theory as the ‘dogma of the ghost in the machine’. The term ‘category mistake’ was explained by Ryle with the use of examples in his book The Concept of Mind (1949). Ryle asked the reader to imagine a foreigner on a visit to Oxford or Cambridge. The Individual is shown ‘colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices’ and then asks his guide “but where is the University?” They explain that they have been shown where the students and various employees live and work but not the place where the students and lecturers work, the place known as the university. The mistake the foreigner has made is that they believe that the university is a place in the same way that the research labs, libraries and café’s are places within the system of further education. So a category mistake is simply a mistake of categorising something in the same way as you can categorise something else. Another example given was that of an individual witnessing the marching of soldiers and asking where the ‘military division’ was. They had witnessed soldiers marching in groups such as the battalions and squadrons but they had not seen the group of soldiers known as the military division. The individual in this situation has made a category mistake by believing that the military division is a group of soldiers in the same way as the battalions and squadrons are groups of soldiers when in actual fact the division is the collective term used to name a group of soldiers as a whole instead of naming each smaller group. That is, a division consists of battalions, squadrons etc in the same way a university consists of libraries, café’s, offices etc.
A slightly different example given involves the ‘average tax payer’, someone frequently talked about in the media....