Dispositions, Occurrences, and Ontology

Abstract

Since the publication of Gilbert Ryle’s book, The Concept of Mind,1 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,’2 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,’3 defends an ‘episode-view’ of pleasure as against Ryle’s dispositional account. These writers share the assumption that the dispositional and the ‘occurrent’ (‘episodic’) interpretations are incompatible, so that, e.g., to defend the view that attending involves something ‘private’ going on, one must dispose of the dispositional account. In this essay I shall give reasons for rejecting that assumption.