Abstract

The idiom of description for instances of intelligent action that Gilbert Ryle proposes in The Concept of Mind--the grammar of pedagogy--is the same as that employed in descriptions and judgments of education. Thus, that part of philosophy of education that addresses cognition and its description is an exercise in philosophy of mind and an extension of Ryle's project of mapping the logical geography of mental life. ;Ryle's philosophy of mind is based on his work in the theory of meaning. He applies Frege's theme of conceptual analysis and Russell's theories of description and types to questions of meaning that arise in natural language. His position is that many philosophical problems are results of misconstrued grammatical form: systematically misleading expressions or category-mistakes that encourage unnecessary reification of abstract terms. The task for analysis is to reformulate these statements in such a way that the correct logical form and category of description are revealed. ;Ryle's theory of types is applied in The Concept of Mind. This study concerns the traditional, Cartesian problem of mind, which treats mind as an immaterial yet causally efficacious entity that interacts with the body, to which contrary attributes have been accorded. Ryle's critical point is that this model of cognition is a category-mistake that improperly subsumes the mental under the category of substance and a grammar of mechanics. His constructive thesis is that intelligence is correctly described in terms of predominantly public behavior or interpretations of that behavior. Concepts of mental life are seen to be hypotheses about a person's ability: dispositions, heedings, achievements, and so forth. ;This dispositional idiom replicates the logic of attribution of educational discourse, for the judgments of intelligence and ability that occupy the educator are the same as those that describe mind, as defined by Ryle. By expanding this grammar of pedagogy and noting the conditional hypotheses that underlie educational descriptions, the contingency of intelligence is revealed. This recognition enables the educator to address the relation of conditions of cognitive development and educational opportunity in a coherent manner