Turing and Grice on DISPOSITIONS -- and operations

Speranza

Jones was commenting elsewhere:

"This sounds just behavioural (which encompasses both the ins and the outs). What, if anything, distinguishes a dispositional analysis from a behavioural one?"

I should retrieve Grice's specific notes in that early essay.

Dispositional analyses are of course counterfactual.

I would think the basics would be:

Toby perceives that the sky is blue (PERCEPTUAL INPUT).

Toby says, "The sky is blue" (BEHAVIOURAL OUTPUT).

Toby THINKS that the sky is blue.

"Toby thinks that the sky is blue" is thus dispositionally linked to Toby's having seen that the sky is blue and to Toby's inclination to say that the sky is blue.

Chomsky indeed did criticize all this Griceian talk about dispositions to utter, and readiness to mean, as 'hopelessly behaviourist', which provoked Suppes to defend Grice as an 'intentionalist', rather!

What always fascinated me is Grice's uncredited reference to Witters on every thought (or psychological or mental item of vocabulary) requiring a 'behavioural manifestation'.

The conditional in Grice would be: if there would be no behaviour on the part of Toby (his utterance, "The sky is blue"), or no perceptual input, there would be NO SENSE in looking for an ascription of a psychological kind.

On this light, Grice is not proposing a 'conceptual analysis' of psychological idioms, in the way he proceeds with 'mean', and one section of the "Retrospective Epilogue" in WoW deals with this.

He is criticizing Mrs. Jack, of Oxford.

Grice says that he sees two ways of approaching things:

i. conceptual analysis (as 'mean')
ii. theoretical term introduction.

In "Method" he certainly follows (ii), and adopts the view that 'think', 'compute', 'be intelligent', and so on, are to be seen as 'theoretical terms', alla Ramsey, rather than observational ones.

Grice does this after dismissing some paradoxes he sees in what he detects as truly behaviouristic (and eliminationist and reductivist) in Ryle.