Study On Ryle’s Behaviorist Philosophy Of Mind

In the middle of the20th century, as the logical positivism went down, the ordinary language analysis has gradually replaced the formal language research. After the death of Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin and other philosophers of Oxford School are the leaders of the modern philosophy of language. This paper intends to study on Ryle’s behaviorist philosophy of mind. Ryle not only had made great achievements in the field of philosophy of language, but he also introduced the method of ordinary language analysis in the study of mind, which had great influence on the development of subsequent philosophy of mind.Ryle’s philosophy had continued Wittgenstein’s work. He argued that the task of philosophy of language is to eliminate the issues which caused by misusing of language, in particular, is to eliminate the issues which caused by mixing the grammatical forms and the logic forms. Ryle introduced this approach to the field of the philosophy of mind, which means to clarify the concepts that are used to discuss the mental states, in order to banish the affects of traditional dualism in the philosophy of mind. Thus, he established the behaviorist philosophy of mind.This paper consists of five parts. The preface outlines the philosophical view of the Oxford school, which takes the ordinary language analysis as the basic ideas and introduces some basic ideas to the behaviorist philosophy of mind. The first chapter systematically discusses the background of Ryle’s behaviorist philosophy of Mind. We first briefly review the body-mind dualism that has been occupied the philosophy of mind. On this basis, Ryle completed his challenge and criticism on the traditional dualism. The second chapter summarizes and outlines Ryle’s basic behaviorist characteristics of the philosophy of mind, which includes the analysis of the ordinary language as the basic research method, the challenge of the traditional dualism and the theory of meaning. The third chapter summarizes the analysis of Ryle’s behaviorist effects and characteristics of the traditional behavioral paradigm that started from Ryle. The final part takes a brief review of the paper, and makes a whole summarization and review of Ryle’s behaviorist philosophy of mind by referring to the current progress of cognitive science and philosophy of mind.