Susan Stebbing's Intellectualism

Abstract

This paper reconstructs Susan Stebbing’s account of intelligentdealing with a problem and defends this account against chargesthat it relies on a “censurable kind” of intellectualism. This chargewas made in Stebbing’s own time by Laird and Wittgenstein. MichaelKremer has recently made the case that Stebbing is also a proximatetarget of Gilbert Ryle’s attack on intellectualism. This paper arguesthat Stebbing should indeed be counted as an intellectualist since sheholds that intelligent dealing with a problem requires propositionalthought. Yet, for Stebbing, thinking is an activity of a whole personand is enabled and constrained by their dispositions. This complexpicture of a thinker enables Stebbing’s account to resist argumentstargeting certain forms of intellectualism such as Ryle’s regressargument. It also helps her to respond to the charge that sheoveremphasizes the importance of intellectual failures. On the picturethat emerges, Stebbing offers a strikingly modern epistemology thatincorporates the social features of a person as well as their purelyintellectual features.