Another potential challenge to Ryle that I think might go further than the challenge that comes from the case of locked-in syndrome, however is as follows; David Armstrong, the Australian philosopher, in the 1960's formulated an objection that goes like this. Armstrong said, "I don't deny that mentality is crucially bound up with dispositions to intelligent behavior, but that can't be all there is to the story, there must be something deeper than that." Think of it this way, a shaker of salt contains stuff that's soluble. It's disposed to behave in a certain way, namely, dissolve once it's put into an unsaturated liquid. But the progress of science requires that whenever possible, we take those dispositional attributions and explain why they hold, explain why they're true, explained in virtue of what salt behaves the way that it does. Physical chemistry offers precisely that explanation as to why it is that salt behaves the way that it does when put in a fluid that's not saturated, why gasoline tends to combust, why glass tends to shatter and so on. So, Armstrong suggests, shouldn't we also expect that there is a non-dispositional, what he calls a categorical basis for the behavior of human beings and other minded creatures when they behave intelligently. Shouldn't we expect that as science progresses, we're going to find something non-dispositional that explains why it is that angry people tend to behave one way, sad people tend to behave another, someone expecting rain tends to behave in one way, someone looking forward to an event they're excited about tends to behave in another. Armstrong sums this up and he writes. "When I think, but my thoughts don't issue in any action, it still seems obvious that there's something actually going on in me which constitutes my thought. It's not just that I would speak or act if some conditions that are unfulfilled were to be fulfilled." I think this quotation contains in a way sort of hovering between two different thoughts, both of which are worth our attention. One of which is, what philosophy has now referred to as the qualitative nature of experience? Suppose we replace the example of thinking with an example of an experience. Suppose that I'm experiencing some pain. Perhaps my left ankle is aching again because of the change in the weather or something. Now it's true that by virtue of that pain, I might tend to behave in a certain way. Perhaps favor it when I walk or rub it or something. But it seems like there's more to the pain than that. The way in which pain feels, the qualitative nature of pain, Doesn�t seem like it's captured by the fact that I tend to behave in a certain way. Or think about the difference between a sensory experience like smell, there's a difference, a definite difference between, for example, the smell of sulphur, that rotten egg smell and the smell, for example, of cinnamon. Those smell different ways. Do they have to be bound up with dispositions towards different behavior? It's not so clear. It's unclear to me that we can account for their difference in terms of a dispositions to behave in different ways in the face of sulphur on the one hand, Cinnamon on the other. Sulphur on the one hand and burning rubber on the other. Sulphur and burning rubber are aversive, am I trying to get away from them, but I don't think my behavioral responses of the two of them can track how it is they feel differently to me. Sets one disambiguation of Armstrong's objection and I think Raul, I want to suggest that Ryle's view does not have the resources to account for what philosophers now refer to as the qualitative nature of experience. Another one is that forgetting about the qualitative nature experience just the fact that I might be thinking something right now, it's true that I can be thinking something right now even if I'm not, expressing that thought, that mental event in terms of behavior. While Ryle himself tends to be dismissive of scientific psychology and probably also would have been dismissive of neuroscience had he been asked about it, I don't think we have to be. We can accept some of the insights from Ryle and say, in some cases, as for example progress in the sciences goes forward as we get a deeper understanding of for example the neuroscience of emotion, we'll talk about that in a future lecture by the way, as we get to the deeper understanding of the neuroscience of emotion, we can begin to understand why it is that different emotions have different behavioral implications, on an non dispositional basis. For example, we now know that under conditions of extreme anger, there's an increase in blood flow to the arms, whereas under conditions of extreme fear, there's an increase in blood flow to the legs. That's something you might expect given the kinds of emotions, anger and fear are. But those are non dispositional categorical bases that might explain, might be part of an explanation at least of how it is that fear and anger produce different behavioral signatures as it were. A lot of work in contemporary, affective science which includes both neuroscience and experimental psychology, is going to I think shed light on why it is these dispositions to behavior that come with, for example, emotions have the shape that they do. But that requires taking some part of Ryle and setting it aside. For the reason that, Ryle as we saw it tends to be dismissive of the entire mind-body problem. If you asked him, are you a materialist or a dualist, he would say that's a silly question because that question presupposes that the mind is a kind of substance or thing and I doubt that. A lot of the point of the book was to challenge that idea. Nevertheless, if we say let's give that up. Talk about mentality as dispositions to intelligent behavior, we can still say a neuroscientific examination of mentality might still shed light on things, not just phenomena such as locked-in syndrome, but also the neurological basis of for example emotions. If we take that approach, we might still want to suppose, for example, that a materialist view of mentality has something going for it and that respect to part ways with Ryle. While still hold on to the view that mentality is crucially bound up with behavior and many cases even behavior that's there, observable in the public eye or potentially open to public view, as opposed to part of a private ghostly realm. That�s something that we can all with good reason now find ourselves with reason to reject.
