How radical is the central thesis of Ryle's The Concept of Mind? Would it be true to say that it denied the very existence of minds, insofar as their existence is understood to imply that there are "inner" states or processes, or objects or events? There is, indeed, a great deal of evidence in the book that this is what Ryle intends. "It is being maintained," he says, "throughout this book that when we characterise people by mental predicates, we are not making untestable inferences to any ghostly processes occurring in streams of consciousness which we are debarred from visiting: we are describing the ways in which these people conduct parts of their predominantly public behaviour."¹ Or again: "The radical objection to the theory that minds must know what they are about, because mental happenings are by definition conscious, or metaphorically self-luminous, is that there are no such happenings: there are no occurrences taking place in a second-status world, since there is no such status and no such world and consequently no need for special modes of acquainting ourselves with the denizens of such a world."² Or again: "It has been argued from a number of directions that when we speak of a person's mind, we are not speaking of a second theatre of special-status incidents, but of certain ways in which some of the incidents of his one life are ordered.