Gilbert Ryle, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The Official Doctrine — the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine, the Cartesian view that the mind is a private inner theater of mental events causally connected to but ontologically distinct from the body — rests on a category mistake.12 The visiting foreigner who is shown the colleges, libraries, laboratories, and playing fields of Oxford and asks "but where is the University?" has misunderstood the categorial relation between the colleges and the University; the University is not a further entity alongside the colleges but the way the colleges are organized.
So with mind and body: mental terms (intelligent, vain, patient, angry, knowing) do not name inner episodes in a private theater alongside the body's behavior; they specify dispositional patterns of conduct and capacity.3 The mistake is grammatical, not empirical. No further observation could settle the question of where mental events are located, because the question of their location rests on a misunderstanding of how mental terms function.
The dogma pretends to be a substantive theory; it is in fact a piece of conceptual confusion, and the philosophical task is to dissolve the confusion rather than to refute the theory by offering a competing one.45
I shall often speak of it, with deliberate abusiveness, as 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine'. I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a > CHAPTER I: DESCARTES' MYTH mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category-mistake.The Concept of Mind, pp. 68–69
It would be just as good or bad a joke to say that there exist prime numbers and Wednesdays and public opinions and navies; or that there exist both minds and bodies. In the succeeding chapters I try to prove that the official theory does rest on a batch of category-mistakes by showing that logically absurd corollaries follow from it.The Concept of Mind, pp. 75–77
He cannot do better than make problematic inferences from the observed behaviour of the other person's body to the states of mind which, by analogy from his own conduct, he supposes to be signalised by that behaviour. Direct access to the workings of a mind is the privilege of that mind itself; in default of such privileged access, the workings of one mind are inevitably occult to everyone else.The Concept of Mind, pp. 67–68
The mental could not be just a variety of the mechanical. He and subsequent philosophers naturally but erroneously availed themselves of the following escape-route.The Concept of Mind, pp. 71–72
He would be shown his mistake by being told that in watching the battalions, batteries and squadrons marching past he had been watching the division marching past. The march-past was not a parade of battalions, batteries, squadrons and a division; it was a parade of the battalions, batteries and squadrons of a division. One more illustration.The Concept of Mind, pp. 69–70
The Concept of Mind (1949) is one of the central anti-Cartesian texts of twentieth-century philosophy. The diagnosis was enormously influential through the 1950s and 1960s; the subsequent functionalist tradition (Putnam, Fodor) replaced Cartesian dualism with mental states "realized" in the brain while preserving the structural assumption that mental terms name inner items, an assumption Tanney's contemporary reading identifies as the modern Cartesian incarnation. The category- mistake diagnosis remains live; whether it has been answered by the move to functionalism or whether functionalism reproduces the same error in a more sophisticated form is itself the question.