So, Ryle would take the Forrest Gump doctrine that stupid is as stupid does, smart is as smart does, and qualify them a little bit. He'd I think I want to say, stupid is as stupid does or tends to do, smart is as smart does or tends to do. What does that mean? Well, Ryle is going to make a lot of use of notion of a disposition, and to understand that, let's think about various dispositional notions. What does it mean to be a careful driver? Well again, you can be fast asleep and still be a careful driver. What it means to be a careful driver is to be disposed to do a number of things: make sure that your side and rearview mirrors are in view, appropriately adjusted and to use them a lot. It means to keep an adequate distance behind people in front of you on a road, it means to be disposed to check your blind spot when you're changing lanes and probably hundreds of other things. Those are things that don't require you reciting any general rules to yourself in order to be a careful driver, they're just rather in the habits that you've built and your competencies that you've developed over perhaps many years of driving. So, more generally, a disposition is a special kind of what we call, what we've already referred to as a modal property. Remember we talked about modal properties and assessing art and Descartes's argument for the distinctness of mind and body. A disposition is a feature of an object that can only be explained in terms of a proposition of the form, if X were to happen, then Y would happen. Dispositions can only be analyzed in those what are known as counter-factual terms. Now Ryle is going to say that minds should be understood in a similar way as well. I think you'll always be uncomfortable talking about minds per se, but if you have to talk about the mind, then he's going to say that the mind is nothing but a huge collection of dispositions to behavior, what we'll call multi-track dispositions to behavior, of various kinds, such as being forgetful, or defensive chess player, or having a dry sense of humor, a rotten speller, a crafty arguer, an inept dresser, an awesome bird spotter, a good listener, somebody's impatient about rules, and so on. For Ryle, that collection of huge numbers of dispositions that characterize your more or less intelligent behaviour, is simply what it is to have a mind, what it is to be a minded individual. If you know enough of these dispositional features of a person, he'll say, there's no further question to ask about whether that person has a mind. To ask that question would be to commit a category mistake. So, for Ryle, once you know how a person is disposed to behave under various conditions, will they act and react empathetically to somebody suffering? Will they ask questions to better understand a perhaps puzzling point of view? Will they be aggressive in conversation? Will they dress in a certain way? Will they be good at distinguishing one kind of bird from another? Are they likely to play chess in a certain aggressive or more passive manner? Those are all characteristics of more or less intelligent behavior and once you know all of those, Ryle will say, there's nothing else to know. I think he can provide some intuitive support for that idea, by pointing out that when you meet somebody new, a lot of what your radar is focused on what you're thinking about as you're trying to figure out that person is to determine those dispositions. Are they sensitive? That means, do they tend to behave in certain ways? Are they assiduous? Are they careful? Are they perceptive? Are they short-tempered? Are they easily offended? Are they forgetful? Are they overly anxious about things? Those are all dispositional notions. And Ryle will say, that's what it is to characterize somebody's mind, how they as it were measured up on all those different kinds of dispositional characteristics, and there's nothing else to know once you know all of those. So, let's be clear about how precisely that turns into an objection to Descartes. Remember, Descartes had assumed that it's in principle possible to exist disembodied. I asked you, well, before we talked about Descartes explicitly, to consider the question whether that was in principle possible, and I'm guessing that most students taking this class probably said "Yeah well, I guess it's in principle possible." Even if I'm not theist, I'm not sure I want to buy into the theistic views that that's often associated with, still, you might have said it's in principle possible. Ryle is going to say, "If you think that, then I suspect you've committed a category mistake." Because he'll say that an alleged disembodied mind, to put it provocatively first, may still be dumb as a bag of hammers, so to speak. More precisely, we have no clear idea what it would be for a purely disembodied entity to act intelligently. We have no clear idea of what it is for an entity that's purely disembodied to behave intelligently or for that matter unintelligently. There's no notion of behavior that we can make sense of, that would apply to something that's purely non-physical. You can see this a little bit of evidence for this way when you think about the many movies, stories you've probably heard of various kinds that represent a supernatural being of some sort interacting with the physical beings. Think for example of the famous movie The Seventh Seal, taking us back to 1950s. We've got a case in which a knight has come back from the Crusades and he perhaps has contracted the plague that is afflicted the rest of his countrymen after he's returned home and death is coming for him. This knight challenges death to a game of chess and says, "Okay, death, if I can beat you in chess, will you let me off the hook, will you let me go? And death says, "Sure. It's a deal." So, they undertake a game of chess. Notice that, death can't play chess with the knight unless he takes some kind of physical form. It doesn't make any sense to suppose, or at least it's very obscure what it would be for a purely nonphysical thing to play chess with a physical individual. By the same token, even in a purely nonphysical realm, suppose you've got two alleged angels or other disembodied spirits, how could they do anything? Play chess or for that matter anything else. Nonphysical chess? Do you know what that means? So, Ryle's objection is going to be the following. Well, perhaps he can't prove conclusively that the idea of a non-physical entity behaving in some way is absurd in the way that I think I can prove conclusively that the idea of a largest integer is absurd. As Ryle will say, the idea of a purely nonphysical thing behaving in one way or another, intelligent or not intelligent, at least is one that we don't have any idea what it means. We have no idea what it means to behave in one way or another, we can't form any clear idea as to what that would come to. So, Ryle will say, putting this together and sort of a nutshell, to have a mind, you have to either behave or be disposed to behave intelligently. Habits are low-level case of mindedness. There are intelligent things that we can do out of habit, for example, people in the military are required to make drill after drill every day over thousands of hours, required to drill forms of behavior in response to, for example, being under attack. So, that when they're actually under attack in a genuine combat situation, they don't panic but they behave reasonably intelligently. A higher level notion of intelligent behavior is what you might think of as a skill. It's higher level because unlike a habit, it's probably going to be more sensitive to different kinds of events that could have happened in the environment. As the environment changes, the skilled person, for example, a pilot knows how to respond. We wouldn't want the pilot of an airplane that we�re on acting purely out of habit, that would make us feel less confident that if a crisis were to arise, then the pilot would be ready to respond to it. Perhaps even in a higher level of intelligent behavior and dispositions thereto, is what we see in the level of expertise. So, an expert pilot is the one who knows how to land in an emergency situation that's perhaps been unprecedented, such as landing into a river and saving the lives of all the people on the plane. So, habit on one level, skill on another level, expertise on the highest perhaps, are all going to be cases of intelligent behavior. We get more and more intelligent as we get more prepared to respond to unprecedented and challenging situations. Still, the expertise is right there in the behavior itself. The skill is right there in the behavior itself, and so is the habit. So, the premise that Descartes relies on crucially, that it's possible to exist in a purely disembodied way, I think we could justifiably say, "I'm not sure that it is possible, I'm skeptical of that first premise in your argument." If that's right, then we have what I take to be the first genuine challenge to the cogency of Descartes' argument, which says in effect, "One of the premises is questionable. The premise that it's possible to exist purely disembodied is one that we can in good conscience call to question and thereby suggests that even if the argument is valid, that is even if the premises were all true, then the conclusion must be." Still I say, I'm not sure that one of those premises is true, and as a result, stand firm in the face that argument for dualism and beyond convinced of its conclusion.
