Victoria McGeer (ANU/Princeton): Intelligent Capacities
In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle argued that a more sophisticated understanding of the dispositional nature of “intelligent capacities” could help us resist an unfortunate philosophical temptation to view the mind as consisting in a range of metaphysically mysterious causal powers and properties. This temptation is particularly powerful in the context of defending a robust notion of responsible agency – explaining what makes agents responsible for what they do in such a way as to deserve praise, blame and other reactive attitudes. Incompatibilists indulge the temptation; compatibilists resist it, using a variety of clever strategies. One recent strategy follows Ryle in aiming to resist this temptation by exploiting a more sophisticated account of the dispositional properties of responsible human beings. Unfortunately, this ‘new dispositionalist’ approach founders against a ‘hard problem’ of responsibility. This talk traces the root cause of this failure, not to the overall strategy, but to an inadequate account of the distinctive dispositional nature of ‘intelligent capacities’. It thus aims to remedy the failure by developing an alternative ‘Rylean’ account of such capacities.
Location
Coombs Seminar Room A