A key element of this suggestion was Ryle’s analysis of the...

A key element of this suggestion was Ryle’s analysis of the terms ordinarily taken to refer to perceptions or sensations as having a “dispositional” logic. That is, rather than referring to special items or object immediately present to consciousness, Ryle suggested that they could be taken simply to attribute various kinds of tendencies, liabilities, and abilities to behave in ordinary perceptual situations.

In this way analysis could bring the crucial recognition of the public and intersubjective character of language to bear against the subjectivist theories of mind that treated perception as grounded in the presence of immediately “given” mental objects such as sense-data. These theories could then cede to one that placed the possibility of attributing dispositions and capacities to perceive at the center of ordinary linguistic practice.

When Sellars took up his own analysis of the language of “inner episodes” in what would become his most famous work, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, he inherited some of the most significant methodological components of Ryle’s inferentialist analysis. Familiarly, Sellars’ largest aim was to dispel what he called the “Myth of the Given,” the myth of unconceptualized and non-linguistic deliverances of experience at the basis of our knowledge of the world.

The myth, Sellars thought, had been a central component of empiricist theories of perception and knowledge, both in their classical forms and, more recently, in the early explanatory projects of the analytic tradition. His criticism of it involved both a decisive appeal to the publicity of language as well as, I shall argue, a determinative critical appreciation of the problems to which the attempt to describe first-person experience can lead.

But although he shared Ryle’s anti-phenomenalist and anti-subjectivist motivations, Sellars nevertheless saw reason to criticize, in detail, Ryle’s dispositionalist account of sensation and perception.

Understanding the reasons for this criticism, I shall argue, helps us to see the broader critical implications of a reflection on language for the specific problems of subjectivity and experience, problems it must encounter in taking up a more general inquiry into the significance of language for the form of a human life. I Readers of The Concept of Mind have long been familiar with Ryle’s anti-Cartesian dispositionalism about the meaning of many terms of mentalistic description.