Since the publication of Gilbert Ryle's book, The Concept of Mind, the distinction between dispositions and occurrences has loomed large in the philosophy of mind. In that enormously influential book Ryle set out to show that much of what passes as mental is best construed as dispositional in character rather than, as traditionally supposed, being made up of private “ghostly” occurrences, ‘happenings, or “episodes.” Many philosophers, including some of Ryle's ablest critics, have accepted the terms of Ryle's contentions. They have either agreed, with respect to certain kinds of mental states, that they are not occurrent because dispositional, or have undertaken to vindicate their occurrent status by showing Ryle's dispositional account to be inadequate. Thus U. T. Place in his essay, “The Concept of Heed,” while agreeing with Ryle's dispositional account of belief; memory, intention, and desire, rejects a similar account of heeding, attention, and consciousness, and defends the traditional account according to which they are construed as distinctive sorts of internal activity. And Terence Penelhum, in “The Logic of Pleasure,” defends an “episode-view” of pleasure as against Ryle's dispositional account.

Beliefs are freely attributed to God nowadays in Anglo–American philosophical theology. This practice undoubtedly reflects the twentieth–century popularity of the view that knowledge consists of true justified belief (perhaps with some needed fourth component). (After all no one supposes that God has beliefs in addition to, or instead of knowledge.) The connection is frequently made explicit. If knowledge is true justified belief then whatever God knows He believes. It would seem that much recent talk of divine beliefs stems from Nelson Pike's widely discussed article, ‘Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action’. In this essay Pike develops a version of the classic argument for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and free will in terms of divine forebelief. He introduces this shift by premising that ‘A knows X’ entails ‘A believes X’. As a result of all this, philosophers have increasingly been using the concept of belief in defining ‘omniscience’.

On the critical side it is argued that, contrary to a widespread view, the explanation of particular facts does not play a central role in pure science and hence that philosophers of science are misguided in supposing that the understanding of such explanations is one of the central tasks of the philosophy of science. It is suggested that the view being attacked may stem in part from an impression that the establishing of a general law is tantamount to the explanation of particular facts that “fall under” the law. This suggestion effects a bridge to the more positive part of the paper, which consists of an exploration of the complexities exhibited by the relation between the two activities. More specifically, I point out a number of disabilities, any one of which could prevent us from being able to explain particular facts that fall under a given law even after having established the law. Some of these have to do with the form of the law, and some have to do with our powers of detection vis-à-vis the particular facts in question. The former sort have to do with the ways in which laws may deviate from the strict-necessary-and-sufficient-condition ideal. The latter include the following points. (1) The individual explanatory factors may lie beyond our present powers of detection. (2) The complexity of such factors may be too great for us to be able to interrelate them. (3) We may be unable to apply concepts used in the law to facts in this area (although they are in fact applicable).

The sense-datum theory of perception has been under heavy attack in the last two decades. Recently, by way of counterattack, some of its defenders have accused what they take to be its chief rival, the “theory of appearing”, of various deficiencies. In particular, they have claimed that there are some perceptual, or pseudo-perceptual, situations, such as hallucinations and dreams, of which the theory of appearing can give no adequate account. For in these cases, they argue, the question, “What is it that is appearing?”, can be given no satisfactory answer. The conclusion is then drawn that only a language containing sense-datum terms is generally adequate to our perceptual experience. Moreover this line of argument has been taken seriously by at least one partisan of the theory of appearing, Professor Virgil C. Aldrich, who has been driven to the expedient of suggesting that in these cases it is an image which appears.