By Niall Ferguson (original source The Times)
In the panic of the pandemic, we are making a lot of category errors. A category error, or mistake, is a term coined by the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle. In The Concept of Mind (1949), he gives a very English example. “A foreigner watching his first game of cricket learns what are the functions of the bowlers, the batsmen, the fielders, the umpires and the scorers. He then says, ‘But there is no one left on the field to contribute the famous element of team-spirit.’ ” Ryle went on to make his most famous point, that René Descartes was wrong to represent the human mind as a “ghost in the machine” — something distinct from the body. We no more have separate minds than a cricket team has a 12th player with the job of boosting the others’ morale.
Still, if the ghost of Ryle will forgive me, our minds today seem to be in a state of great confusion about what may befall our bodies. We are suddenly fearful of the invisible yet seemingly ubiquitous coronavirus. Yet we struggle to think clearly and to act consistently.
When I first warned readers of this column in January to “brace yourself for a coronavirus pandemic”, I was widely seen as an eccentric. Now, according to a CNN poll published last week, a “majority of Americans (55%) say it is at least somewhat likely that someone in their local community will be infected with novel coronavirus in the next few weeks”.
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