Categorical Mistakes and Useful Fiction

In his book, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “An entire mythology is stored within our language.”

This is true. An entire worldview is subtly buried in our common language, with many hidden assumptions that have not been verified. This is one reason why Zen(or Chan) is a spiritual tradition that is highly skeptical of human language. Not only do we often confuse the map with the territory, the grammar of our language often misleads us about the nature of reality. In ordinary conversations, we say “my heart,” “my brain.” The implicit assumption here is that there is a “self” or “I” that is neither the heart nor the brain. This self is supposed to be the owner of various body organs and thoughts. But where is this self to be found?

Much of our confusion about the existence of the “self” or the “soul” has to do with our mainstream mode of thinking, which is based on cartesian dualism (also called “mind-body dualism”). Cartesian dualism assumes that the mind and the body are distinct and separate. This is a very common, but unjustified, assumption.

One of the best books written on the Philosophy of Mind is written by Gilbert Ryle. He wrote The Concept of Mind, in which he argued that it was a mistake to treat the mind as an object made of an immaterial substance. He coined the term “categorical…