# Quote — Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind

> A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.

- Author: [Gilbert Ryle](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gilbert-ryle.md)
- Book: [The Concept of Mind](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gilbert-ryle/the-concept-of-mind.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gilbert_Ryle#The_Concept_of_Mind_(1949)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/gilbert-ryle/the-concept-of-mind/a-myth-is-of-course

## More from this book

> Such in outline is the official theory. 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 mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category mistake. It represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type or category (or range of types or categories), when they actually belong to another. The dogma is therefore a philosopher’s myth.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gilbert-ryle/the-concept-of-mind/such-in-outline.md)

> Contemporary philosophers have exercised themselves with the problem of our knowledge of other minds. Enmeshed in the dogma of the ghost in the machine, they have found it impossible to discover any logically satisfactory evidence warranting one person in believing that there exist minds other than his own. I can witness what your body does, but I cannot witness what your mind does, and my pretensions to infer from what your body does to what your mind does all collapse, since the premises for such inferences are either inadequate or unknowable.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gilbert-ryle/the-concept-of-mind/contemporary-philosophers-have.md)

> Myths often do a lot of theoretical good, while they are still new.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/gilbert-ryle/the-concept-of-mind/myths-often-do-a-lot.md)