Ryle’s Debt to Pragmatism and Margaret Macdonald

abstract: In this essay, I argue that Gilbert Ryle’s 1949 The Concept of Mind owes much to the little-known work of Margaret Macdonald. In 1937, Macdonald presented to Ryle her expansion of the pragmatist ideas she found in C. S. Peirce and F. P. Ramsey: (1) beliefs are dispositions; (2) there is a distinction between knowledge how and knowledge that ; and (3) laws are inference tickets or rules with which we meet the future. It is my contention that Ryle drew on, without acknowledgment, Macdonald’s presentation of these pillars of the pragmatist position. This argument will not only bring the superb analytic philosopher Margaret Macdonald back into the light where she belongs, but will also elaborate the important insights of pragmatism about generalizations, hypotheses, and causal laws, all of which remain influential.