Dispositional Atrophy

Dispositional atrophy is the degradation of a competence through disuse, named in the framework of Gilbert Ryle’s philosophy of mind. Ryle analyzed intelligence not as a ghost inside the body but as a complex cluster of dispositions—tendencies to respond flexibly, purposefully, and self-correctively to the demands of specific situations. Dispositions, unlike facts, are not possessed once and held forever; they are real properties of a system, but they require ongoing exercise to remain sharp. The surgeon who stops operating loses surgical judgment. The programmer who stops debugging loses architectural intuition. The student who stops formulating her own arguments loses the capacity for genuine inquiry. When AI systems take over the conditions in which dispositions were exercised, those dispositions do not merely become unnecessary. They begin to weaken. This is dispositional atrophy—the silent erosion of the knowing how that constitutes genuine competence, produced not by lack of talent but by lack of practice. Gloria Mark’s empirical research on attentional degradation and cognitive debt documents