The Intentional Stance

The Intentional Stance is a good summary of how philosophy saw the human brain working around 1980. Special attention is given to the importance of understanding others intentions. There is also a fair amount of discussion on AI, in particular if a computer can ever become indistinguishable from a human, organic brain.

Reading this book takes attention so it requires a lot of time. Be prepared to spend a couple of weeks to get through the 400 pages. It is well worth the time if you are interested in how the human brain works. Other than the time needed the only downside to this book is the computer sections have become a bit dated as the book was about 30 years old when I read it.

I got a little bit out of this, but it certainly wasn't worth the 8hrs I spent on it. All the important ideas have been republished in Dennett's more recent work.

It has been a while since I have read Dennett, and rereading the Intentional Stance in the context of philosophy of science (one of the areas I'm working more on lately) was incredibly thought provoking. In the course of the discussion, Dennett unpacks a pragmatic strategy for talking about different sorts of systems and individuals; the defense is incredibly striking as a lot of philosophers are work more and more as discussing science as a pragmatic enterprise, and Dennett seems clearly to have been ahead of the ball on this.

His defense of folk psychology as a successful approach to understanding behavior, one that is sufficiently strong to undercut the behaviorists that he is responding to implicitly, is somewhat tenuous in places; this shouldn't be surprising because the defense was pretty new. Many of the angles in the defense are expanded much more in his later work, and the work of many of his peers. There are still good reasons to be skeptical of his defense of folk psychology, of "the intentional strategy" or the eponymous stance, but Dennett is willing to give up a lot of ground in acknowledging that what he is advocating is a strategy that has a number of deep points of value.

When I first read the book, it was in dialectic with the much more deflationary realism of Paul Churchland. (Whose two books that had the relevant ideas I have reviewed here and here.) In retrospect, this dialectic is not totally right. While he does interact with Churchland actively in a few passages, it is largely to agree with Churchland's point that strictly speaking folk psychology and intentional state ascription is likely false, but (contra Churchland) that it still plays an important role in both our ordinary and scientific lives. In a sense, he and Churchland are in agreement that the behaviorism of the previous generation is totally explanatorily inadequate, and differ somewhat in what has to happen next in order to build a better set of neurological and psychological sciences. For Dennett, that includes the intentional stance.

Many of the most important passages of Dennett, his discussion of the intentional states of thermostats, for example, are really valuable to read in context; it only occurs to me after rereading this book how deep and rich Dennett's cases are, and how often they are really read and used superficially, even in otherwise good critiques of Dennett. I strongly, strongly recommend the book to people who are interested in what happened to behaviorism, and why philosophers and scientists shoved off from it in favor of different and richer approaches, including the intentional stance.

supplanted by Consciousness Explained

The first few chapters/articles expose, in an overall clear formulation, many of Dennett's better ideas. The accompaniment of each article with a "commentary" chapter (which critically reviews it and expands on it) is an extraordinarily efficient and stimulating format.

These first chapters seem to make clear progress, smooth sailing on a clear sea, far above the depths of complexity of the ideas he leaves behind. But the second half, starting with Beyond Belief, struggle in stormy waters and, despite considerable efforts, make relatively little headway. The concepts are confusing, confused; not much about this is fruitful, and indeed many of the "results" are negative. This however probably says more about Anglo-American philosophy of mind than about Dennett himself: the whole field is stuck trying to do rigorous work using bogus components, with the analytical mindset acting as a barrier in the way of re-imagining these components radically.

The way out of this conundrum is to look outside philosophy itself; to gather impressions, intuitions, food for thought, outside the sphere of endlessly self-referential philosophical discourse. Some places to look for such ideas would be the latter Wittgenstein, or also information theory (which would helpfully inform many of Dennett's ideas, if only he bothered to acquire an in-depth understanding of them).

Despite these frustrating parts, the work is worth careful study, because Dennett is one of relatively few in philosophy of mind who dares to look attentively outside the field, and to interpret what he finds generously; as a result he brings much fresh, stimulating material, pre-processed in an easily digestible format for students of the mind who are not prepared to go hunting themselves (or who are hunting on other grounds).

Having been a huge fan of Dennett for a couple of years, through his talks, interviews, debates, articles and papers (all of those mostly on the topic of religion but some on philosophy), I'm actually a loss to explain why this is the first time I've read one of his books, especially since I've been aware for a while now, since reading "Quining Qualia" and "True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works", that he's such a brilliant and entertaining (while always on topic, rational and extremely analytical) writer. Both n  Breaking The Spelln (the only one of the canonical four "new atheist" books by the four horsemen that I have yet to read) and n  Consciousness Explainedn have stood in the bookshelf for a while now, and I recently purchased two more works from the Dennettian literary outpourings for use in writing my bachelor's thesis in philosophy, which brings us to the current work (the other one was n  Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousnessn, a book I chose not to read at the moment after realizing it was not central to my thesis).

I had, as mentioned previously, already read Dennett's paper "True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works" and used this for a previous essay in which I turned Dennett's seemingly instrumentalistic, yet inescapably (at least in the broadest sense of the word) Realistic (philosophical Realism that is, a qualification I tried to convey by capitalizing the word, but nevertheless felt the need to clarify) understanding of Intentionality against John Searle's more simplistically (or at least, directly) Realistic version to see what this made of Searle's argument, in his "Minds, brains, and programs", against the possibility of what he dubs "strong AI". This paper, "True Believers", is included among several other of Dennett's papers in the present volume. Also present are shorter chapters with reflections after each chapter containing a previously published paper, as well as two concluding chapters with (for this book, though not for us at the present moment as this book is now quite old) new material. All in all, this gives the reader a comprehensive understanding of Intentionality a la Dennett, how we, according to Dennett, use the hypothesis of other beings having Intentional states by way of the Intentional strategy, what the successful use of this strategy tells us, and how we are to understand some of the nitty-gritty details of the whole subject including the ontological status of Intentional states and the connections with evolutionary processes.

As one works ones way through the book, one finds a clear progression of thoughts leading to greater and greater maturity in insight into particular potential problems and details that needs clarification. In "True Believers" Dennett somewhat superficially proclaims that the strategy does work and works precisely for those artifacts (Intentional systems, humans being the prime example) where Intentionality is a pattern otherwise missed as opposed to those artifacts where the strategy could be utilized without thereby revealing a pattern otherwise missed, without really clarifying the difference between the two; but further on in the book, in discussing the Intentional strategy as a proposal for ethologists observing the social behavior of vervet monkeys (in chapter 7: 'Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethology: The "Panglossian Paradigm" Defended'), he lays out some suggestions for actually evaluating the success of the strategy in ways that are supposed to show what "level" of Intentionality the artifact under investigation actually has which could be used as a way of distinguishing between "true" cases of Intentionality as opposed to "false" ones. The distinction seems a bit fluid or even ill-founded at times, seeing as how Dennett denies the existence (in chapter 8: "Evolution, Error, and Intentionality") of the kind of Intentionality championed by other philosophers: what he calls intrinsic intentionality, which seems to cause problems: is intentionality a real, "intrinsic", phenomenon or is it not? Dennett's view seems to be that while it is a perfectly objective fact that the Intentional strategy works for describing and predicting the behavior of certain artifacts (Intentional systems), Intentionality is not found "intrinsically" inside these artifacts but rather in the patterns exhibited by their behavior, and yet, he's no simple behaviorist! His position is at times rather hard to pin down, but I still suspect his treatment of the phenomenon of Intentionality is the most sensible one (at least among the ones I've so far encountered): Intentionality seems to be something perfectly "real", which seems to follow simply from the "no miracles" argument applicable to any instrumentalistically successful strategy, but since there seems to be little reason to think that "beliefs" or any other "meanings" are intrinsic properties of minds (here Dennett seems to argue for a more general thesis that what is "really there" at the bottom is merely syntactic whereas any semantic properties belong in the exhibited behavior of the phenomenon in question, perhaps I'm reading too much into Dennett here but he certainly seems to be arguing along these lines when, in chapter 9: "Fast Thinking", he argues against Searle's previously mentioned views on strong AI) we need to view the Reality of Intentionality as a pattern exhibited by Intentional systems.

Dennett's arguments are subtle and fascinating, and always supported by lots of references to empirical research. One of the most refreshing things about Dennett is that he shows a deep understanding of the need for relating philosophical speculation and analysis to scientific findings, which is more than can be said, at least most of the time, for John Searle, a critique I will definitely touch upon again when reviewing Searle's n  Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mindn (which I'm currently reading) as soon as I'm finished with it.

This collection of articles presents Dennett's theory of intentionality, the philosophical study of belief, desire, and rational behavior. Dennett also compares his view to that of related philosophers. I always enjoy reading Dennett -- his style is crisp and punchy.

Dennett's position as developed by the late 80s, with issues about instrumentalism and realism in focus, and less about the architectural questions that turned up in earlier books. The final chapter is a good survey of how analytic philosophy of mind/language had developed since Wittgenstein.