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.
Interpretation
Myths are complex representations of reality and should not be confused with simple fairy tales.
Gilbert Ryle's quote emphasizes that myths are not mere fictional stories; they represent facts framed in a way that belongs to a different context. By 'exploding' a myth, one is not necessarily rejecting the underlying facts but rather recognizing that these facts belong to a different category and need to be understood through a different lens.
In practice
In a lecture about the role of myths in culture, this quote can illustrate the distinction between myth and reality.
Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.
Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.
The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine ... maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements.
Let me go to the house of the Father.
She was the most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from one story to another was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea.
If companies can refuse to provide coverage for women, what other objections to the Affordable Care Act will we see based on 'religious grounds'? For that matter, will 'religious freedom' be used as an excuse to discriminate against other minorities and disenfranchised groups across the board? Where will it end?
The celebrity syndrome. When people forget who they are and start to believe what other people say about them.
No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone.
Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.
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