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Dispositions and Occurrences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

William P. Alston
William P. Alston*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
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Extract

Since the publication of Gilbert Ryle's book, The Concept of Mind, the distinction between dispositions and occurrences has loomed large in the philosophy of mind. In that enormously influential book Ryle set out to show that much of what passes as mental is best construed as dispositional in character rather than, as traditionally supposed, being made up of private “ghostly” occurrences, ‘happenings, or “episodes.” Many philosophers, including some of Ryle's ablest critics, have accepted the terms of Ryle's contentions. They have either agreed, with respect to certain kinds of mental states, that they are not occurrent because dispositional, or have undertaken to vindicate their occurrent status by showing Ryle's dispositional account to be inadequate. Thus U. T. Place in his essay, “The Concept of Heed,” while agreeing with Ryle's dispositional account of belief; memory, intention, and desire, rejects a similar account of heeding, attention, and consciousness, and defends the traditional account according to which they are construed as distinctive sorts of internal activity. And Terence Penelhum, in “The Logic of Pleasure,” defends an “episode-view” of pleasure as against Ryle's dispositional account.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , December 1971 , pp. 125 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1971

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References

1 London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1949.

2 The British Journal of Psychology, Vol. XLV, no. 4,1954.

3 Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. XVII. 1956-57. This article, as well as the above mentioned article by Place, is reprinted in Gustafson, D. F. ed., Essays in Philosophical Psychology, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1964.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Page references to both articles will be to this volume.

4 It has often been pointed out that general pronouncements like this, which range over all mental predicates, are quite misleading as regards Ryle's own position. As things work out, he does not claim that all mental terms can be given dispositional analyses, feeling- and sensation-terms being the most obvious exceptions. For present purposes we can ignore this issue, since our concern is with the relation between dispositional and “episodic” accounts in those cases where a dispositional account is put forward.

5 To relate this distinction to the Rylean distinction between single-track and multi-track dispositions, note that a predicate can be purely dispositional in the above sense though it is as multi-tracked as you like. It is just that its analysis will, in that case, involve a large number of subjunctive conditionals. The predicate could even be such as to be insusceptible of analysis into any finite list of conditionals and still be purely dispositional, provided it were the case that nothing would appear in partial analyses except subjunctive conditionals.

6 It is not completely clear that Ryle is prepared to stick by this restriction. More specifically, it is not clear that he is prepared to deny that being in a sulky mood involves dispositions to certain kinds of feelings, where feelings count as distinctively private occurrences. However. if his account of such things as moods and varieties of heeding is to have the distinctive thrust he intends it to have, it must be interpreted as in the above.

7 To be sure, as we have seen, Ryle does not really carry through his rejection of all inner private occurrences. However that is not crucial for our concerns in this paper. We are simply interested in his position vis-a-vis those stretches of the mind where he does oppose a dispositional to an innerprivate-occurrence interpretation.

8 For an effective riposte see Place, p. 209.

9 There are also many formulations in terms of reference, especially in Place's article, formulations which as I shall argue below, are ontological if literally interpreted.

10 See, e.g., D. Davidson, “The Individuation of Events”, and Kim, J. “Events and Their Descriptions: Some Considerations”, both in Rescher, N. et al., eds., Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel, Dordrecht: Reidel. 1969.Google Scholar

11 We might make an exception for those pairs of non-synonymous predicates that uncontroversially connote the same property, e.g., ‘blue’ and ‘the color of a cloudless sky'. Such an exception would not affect any of the issues with which we are concerned here.

12 We speak in terms of brain features being the basis for psychological dispositions, for that seems to be overwhelmingly the most plausible hypothesis. However the contentions of this paper by no means require that assumption. All we need assume is that (some) psychological dispositions have some basis in the actual structure of the person, whether this be the structure of the nervous system, of a Cartesian immaterial substance, or whatever. This is, we only need assume that psychological dispositions, or some of them, are not ultimate irreducible features of a person, but are rather possessed because of certain features of the structure of the person. This assumption would seem to be amply warranted for the dispositions of any entity that has an internal structure.

This would be an appropriate juncture at which to relate the contentions of the present section, and of this paper more generally, to Armstrong's, D. M. not dissimilar criticism of a “phenomenalist” account of dispositions in his book, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968, Ch. 6, sec. 6)Google Scholar. There Armstrong is also objecting to the Rylean supposition that if a certain mental state is dispositional it cannot also be, e.g., a neuro-physiological state of the brain. However he bases his attack on the “realist” account of dispositions, according to which, “to speak of an object's having a dispositional property entails that the object is in some non-dispositional state or that it has some property (there exists a ‘categorical basis’) which is responsible for the object manifesting certain behavior in certain circumstances, manifestations whose nature makes the dispositional property the particular dispositional property it is. It is true that we may not know anything of the nature of the non-dispositional state. But, the Realist view asserts, in asserting that a certain piece of glass is brittle, for instance, we are ipso facto asserting that it is in a certain non-dispositional state which disposes it to shatter and fly apart in a wide variety of circumstances”. (p. 86) I cannot go into the matter properly in this paper, but, briefly, I have two objections to this. First, we cannot claim that a dispositional attribution entails the existence of a basis; it is not necessary that every disposition have a basis. In particular, if there are atomic substances with no internal structure (and this would seem to be at least logically possible), they will undoubtedly have dispositions, for they will undoubtedly react in characteristic ways to certain conditions. But since they lack any internal structure, there can be no question of various features of their structure servirig as the basis for various dispositions. Their dispositions will be ultimate properties. Second, since this is so it opens up the possibility that the basis for some dispositions of complex entities may be at least in part the ultimate dispositions of their elementary constituents. Thus if gas molecules were atomic particles, then at least part of the basis of the disposition of a gas to increase in temperature when compressed would be the ultimate dispositions of its constituent molecules to move in a certain way on impact. It is the first objection that is crucial for relating my position to Armstrong's. Armstrong directly opposes Ryle on the conceptual level. Where Ryle holds that it is logically impossible for a disposition to be an “actual” state, Armstrong maintains that such an identity is logically necessary. They both think that the issue can be settled by reference to generic features of dispositional concepts. But since I reject Armstrong's entailment claim, as well as Ryle's position, I do not think that the identity issue can be settled on any such basis. I am contending, rather, that dispositional concepts are such as to leave open the possibility of such an identification. Whether this possibility is actualized in any particular case, or any given class of particular cases, will have to be decided on other grounds, such as those I have just been presenting.

13 In the next section we will introduce certain qualifications on this conclusion, and will formulate a new principle (3), which is more adequate than (2) since it takes account of those qualifications. In the present section we are concerned to show that even if the unqualified principle (2) be accepted, there is still a sense in which a disposition can be an occurrence.

14 Presumably this would require a tennis stroke to go on for a long time, and that may be impossible; but that does not have to do with the concept of attention. We could, instead, have chosen an example of attending to something that can go on for a long time, e.g., the rise and fall of the waves.

15 I am, of course, not claiming that these concepts, or any others, are in fact purely dispositional. In fact I believe that virtually none of the psychological concepts treated by Ryle have this status, but I am not going into those matters in this paper.

16 This principle is often justified. Quite often when philosophers ask about the nature of causality, knowledge, or truth, what they are after can best be provided by developing sound views as to how words like ‘cause', ‘know', and ‘true’ are, might be, or should be used. However it is not everywhere justified. In particular, philosophical questions about the nature of the mind or stretches thereof, are not identical with questions about the meaning, use, or “correct analysis” of mental or psychological terms.

17 Thus it is often uncritically assumed that behaviorism is a form of materialism. A notable exception is the discussion by Fodor, J. A. in his book, Psychological Explanation (New York: Random House, 1968).Google Scholar There he clearly brings out that logical behaviorism is logically compatible with Cartesian dualism.

18 Another body of discussion where this issue is both crucial and neglected is the controversy over the “identity theory”. Clearly the way in which we individuate states is going to powerfully influence our decision as to whether a thought or sensation can be the same state as a certain neuro-physiological occurrence in the brain, especially if we have agreed that the mentalistic and the neuro-physiological concepts are distinct.