Gilbert Ryle, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Mental terms — intelligent, vain, patient, angry, knowing, believing, wanting, feeling — do not name inner episodes in a private theater.1 They specify conditional dispositions: how the person would behave under specified circumstances. To say that someone is vain is to say something about how she would respond to flattery, how she carries herself in conversation, what she does and does not notice, how she reacts to slights; it is not to ascribe an inner item called "vanity" that causes her behavior.2
The analysis is conceptual-grammatical, not reductive-empirical. Mental life is real and includes covert dispositions: the disposition to engage in silent rehearsals, to imagine, to follow an argument internally, to feel what is happening as it happens. The position is not behaviourism. The behaviourist reduces mental terms to overt behavior or stimulus-response patterns; the dispositional analysis covers a much wider range of conditional capacities including covert and silent ones, and treats the analysis as a matter of mapping how mental terms function rather than as a reductive program.
The Cartesian temptation to treat mental terms as names of inner items reappears in contemporary functionalism's commitment to mental states realized in the brain; the dispositional analysis applies to the new dress as it did to the old, because mental terms still are not names of items, whether the items are located "in the soul," "in the brain," or "in the functional architecture."3
If you dispute my characterisation of someone as believing or wanting something, I will point to what he says and does in defending my particular attribution (as well as to features of the circumstances). But our practice of giving reasons of this kind to defend or to challenge ascriptions of mental predicates would be put under substantial pressure if the official doctrine were correct.The Concept of Mind, pp. 30–31
So, it will be argued, for a man to be a vain or indolent man there must be particular exercises of vanity and indolence occurring at particular moments, and these will be actual emotions or feelings. This argument certainly establishes something, but it does not establish > CHAPTER IV: EMOTION the point desired.The Concept of Mind, pp. 134–135
Motives and moods are not the sorts of things which could be among the direct intimations of consciousness, or among the objects of introspection, as these factitious forms of Privileged Access are ordinarily described. They are not 'experiences', any more than habits or maladies are 'experiences'.The Concept of Mind, pp. 163–164
The dispositional analysis is the central thesis of The Concept of Mind and one of the most influential and most misunderstood Ryle positions. The behaviourist misreading dogged the book from the start despite Ryle's explicit refusals throughout. The functionalist tradition (Putnam, Fodor) preserved the structural assumption that mental terms name causally- efficacious states while shifting the location from soul to brain; Tanney's contemporary reading argues this is the modern Cartesian incarnation. The qualia tradition (Block, Chalmers) insists on irreducible phenomenal inner episodes the dispositional analysis cannot capture, generating the modern "hard problem" debate. The dispositional analysis remains a live position in philosophy of mind, especially in neo-Wittgensteinian and neo-Rylean defenses (Tanney, Hyman, Travis).