Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Concept of Mind:
A person who has a good nose for arguments or jokes may have a bad head for facts.
The vain man does not think he is vain.
Minds are not bits of clockwork, they are just bits of not-clockwork. As thus represented, minds are not merely ghosts harnessed to machines, they are themselves just spectral machines. . . . Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements. I shall argue that these and other analogous conjunctions are absurd.
Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.
Overt intelligent performances are not clues to the workings of minds; they are those workings.
For making mistakes is not an exercise of competence, nor is the commission of slips an exercise of knowledge how; it is a failure to exercise knowledge how.
Knowing how to apply maxims cannot be reduced to, or derived from, the acceptance of those or any other maxims.
If you do not divulge the contents of your silent soliloquies and other imaginings, I have no other sure way of finding out what you have been saying or picturing to yourself. But the sequence of your sensations and imaginings is not the sole field in which your wits and character are shown; perhaps only for lunatics is it more than a small corner of that field. I find out most of what I want to know about your capacities, interests, likes, dislikes, methods and convictions by observing how you conduct your overt doings, of which by far the most important are your sayings and writings.
Philosophers, chiefly since Descartes, have in their theories of knowledge and conduct operated with a concept of consciousness which has relatively little affinity with any of the concepts described above. Working with the notion of the mind as a second theatre, the episodes enacted in which enjoy the supposed status of ‘the mental’ and correspondingly lack the supposed status of ‘the physical’, thinkers of many sorts have laid it down as the cardinal positive property of these episodes that, when they occur, they occur consciously.
The tangle of largely spurious problems, known as the problem of the Freedom of the Will, partly derives from this unconsciously stretched use of ‘voluntary’ and these consequential misapplications of different senses of ‘could’ and ‘could have helped’.
The author is leading and the spectator is following, but their path is the same.
But when a person has done the right thing, we cannot then say that he knew how to do the wrong thing, or that he was competent to make mistakes.
I discover that there are other minds in understanding what other people say and do.
In making sense of what you say, in appreciating your jokes, in unmasking your chess-stratagems, in following your arguments and in hearing you pick holes in my arguments, I am not inferring to the workings of your mind, I am following them. Of course, I am not merely hearing the noises that you make, or merely seeing the movements that you perform. I am understanding what I hear and see. But this understanding is not inferring to occult causes.
Certainly there are some things which I can find out about you only, or best, through being told of them by you. The oculist has to ask his client what letters he sees with his right and left eyes and how clearly he sees them; the doctor has to ask the sufferer where the pain is and what sort of a pain it is; and the psychoanalyst has to ask his patient about his dreams and daydreams.
Nor does this understanding require a prolonged grounding in the not yet established laws of psychology.
The regress is infinite. and this reduces to absurdity the theory that for an operation to be intelligent it must be steered by a prior intellectual operation.
Drill dispenses with intelligence, training develops it.
If ordinary men never report the occurrence of these acts, for all that, according to the theory, they should be encountered vastly more frequently than headaches, or feelings of boredom; if ordinary vocabulary has no non-academic names for them; if we do not know how to settle simple questions about their frequency, duration or strength, then it is fair to conclude that their existence is not asserted on empirical grounds.
Nor does this understanding require a prolonged grounding in the not yet established laws of psychology. Following the moves made by a chess-player is not doing anything remotely resembling problematic psychological diagnosis.
The competent critic of prose-style, experimental technique, or embroidery, must at least know how to write, experiment or sew. Whether or not he has also learned some psychology matters about as much as whether he has learned any chemistry, neurology or economics.
Of course, to execute an operation intelligently is not exactly the same thing as to follow its execution intelligently. The agent is originating, the spectator is only contemplating.
For the reason, or maxim, is inevitably a proposition of some generality. It cannot embody specifications to fit every detail of the particular state of affairs.
Roughly, execution and understanding are merely different exercises of knowledge of the tricks of the same trade.
Intelligent' cannot be defined in terms of 'intellectual' or 'knowing how’ in terms of 'knowing that’; 'thinking what I am doing' does not connote 'both thinking what to do and doing it'. When I do something intelligently, i.e. thinking what I am doing, I am doing one thing and not two. My performance has a special procedure or manner, not special antecedents.
For this theory is just another unsuccessful attempt to wriggle out of a perfectly mythical dilemma.
To do something thinking what one is doing is, according to this legend, always to do two things; namely, to consider certain appropriate propositions, or prescriptions, and to put into practice what these propositions or prescriptions enjoin.
Minds are things, but different sorts of things from bodies;
It is, however, one thing to know how to apply such concepts, quite another to know how to correlate them with one another and with concepts of other sorts. Many people can talk sense with concepts but cannot talk sense about them; they know by practice how to operate with concepts, anyhow inside familiar fields, but they cannot state the logical regulations governing their use. They are like people who know their way about their own parish, but cannot construct or read a map of it, much less a map of the region or continent in which their parish lies.
In consciousness, self-consciousness and introspection he is directly and authentically apprised of the present states and operations of his mind. He may have great or small uncertainties about concurrent and adjacent episodes in the physical world, but he can have none about at least part of what is momentarily occupying his mind. It is customary to express this bifurcation of his two lives and of his two worlds by saying that the things and events which belong to the physical world, including his own body, are external, while the workings of his own mind are internal. This antithesis of outer and inner is of course meant to be construed as a metaphor, since minds, not being in space, could not be described as being spatially inside anything else, or as having things going on spatially inside themselves.
