The core of Ryle’s suggestion is that concepts like those of knowing...

The core of Ryle’s suggestion is that concepts like those of knowing, believing, intending, and perceiving, can be analyzed in terms of verbal and nonverbal behaviors and capacities, tendencies, and abilities to behave in particular ways. This provides an alternative to the Cartesian assumption that they must as refer to occurent states, processes and events in an inner, mental realm.

A good example is the notion of “intelligence.” On the traditional Cartesian picture, Ryle suggests, intelligence seems to be a property of inner acts of thinking or conceiving.

Thus, for instance, the Cartesian analyst understands someone’s intelligently playing chess as involving two essentially different kinds of actions: first, an inner, mental act of calculation or intellection (the act properly described as “intelligent,”), and second, a separate physical act of carrying out its result.[^173] Ryle’s suggestion is that the intelligent playing ought to be analyzed, instead, simply as an instance of playing by somebody possessing the familiar background of skills and abilities (dispositions) that make for what we call intelligence in chess-playing.

We can investigate the origin of these general skills, and even investigate their physical or neurophysiological basis in the brain. But there is no need to describe the performance as involving a separable mental act which itself has the property or feature of “intelligence.” Ryle supported his dispositionalism about mentalistic terms with a sophisticated semantic account of the logic and grammar of disposition-ascriptions in intersubjective discursive practice.

Here as well, Ryle’s grammatical account steadfastly aims to avoid invoking the existence of esoteric private or inner mental events, items, or structures, even those that can be understood purely physicalistically and neurophysiologically. It can be no part, Ryle reasons, of the ascription of an ability to play chess intelligently or speak French competently that reference is made to any underlying mental or neurophysiological structure.

For we need have no knowledge of such structures in order to ascribe these dispositions as we do in ordinary intersubjective practice.[^174] Indeed, in a chapter of The Concept of Mind devoted to the nature of dispositionalist analysis, Ryle clarifies that it is no part of his style of dispositionalism to require the ascription of any sort of facts at all (behavioral, neurophysiological, or otherwise).