The Concept of Intelligence

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The Concept of Intelligence

ABSTRACT: Gilbert Ryle’s dispositional analysis of the concept of intelligence makes the error of assimilating intelligence to the category of dispositional or semi-dispositional concepts. Far from being a dispositional concept, intelligence is an episodic concept that refers neither to dispositions nor to ‘knowing how,’ but to a fashion or style of proceeding whose significance is adverbial. Being derivative from the function of the adverb ‘intelligently,’ the concept of intelligence does not have essential reference to specific verbs but rather to the manner or style of proceeding of nearly any verb that is descriptive of the proceedings of an agent. Intelligence- words are expressive of a manner of doing things that may be narrated in one of two ways. The first takes the form of a series of contrasts which, when put together as a list of disjuncts, may be called the contrast-criteria of intelligence. The second may take the form of the characteristic activities which comprise the criteria of intelligence.

This subject is but a small part of the larger issue that is waged between dualists and materialists: whether the words used to ascribe mental qualities have a physical or "psychological" reference. Much of the literature concerned with this broader topic takes on the character of a general broadside against either the materialist or dualist position. When specific qualities of our mental life are discussed, it is discussed either in passing, or to make certain that they be assimiable to the general thesis being propounded. When Gilbert Ryle wrote of intelligence,(1) he was interested in making it out to be a dispositional concept (his technique for refuting dualism). Ryle's fear seemed to ...

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...ire, (1949-1950, 242).

(4) Ibid., 247

(5) Ibid.

(6) If such limits of application exist, they would constitute a basis for the rejection of Ryle's claim that the dispositional concept of intelligence is determinable rather than determinate.

(7) "Not merely do adverbial expressions pick out classes of action, they also pick out the internal details of the machinery of doing actions, or the departments into which the business of doing actions is organized."Austin, (1970, 193).

(8) It is because of a failure to set limits (as in Ryle's description of "intelligent" as a determinable disposition) that the concept of intelligence becomes so easily confused with such concepts as learning and "know-how" in the minds of some philosophers (and I may add, psychologists) to the extent that they fail to see some rather obvious differences that exist between them.

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