PDF Intentional Stance

Week 8: Daniel Dennett and the Intentional Stance
Andrea Polonioli
University of Edinburgh
a.polonioli@sms.ed.ac.uk
November 6-7, 2014
Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Plan of Lectures
Today
Present Dennetts attempt to rescue commonsense propositional
attitude psychology
Tomorrow
Discuss some problems this proposal seems to face
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Todays lecture
Dennett
Folk psychology and the Intentional Stance
The case for mild realism
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Todays lecture
Dennett
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Dennett
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Dennett
One of the most influential living analytic philosophers

Best known for his work on intentionality
He wrote also on consciousness, free will, evolution and ethics
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Todays lecture
Dennett
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Introducing the Intentional Stance
Recall Churchlands case against folk psychology:

1. Folk psychology is a theory
2. If the theory is false the ontology of folk psychology is undermined
3. The theory is false
4. Therefore the ontology of folk psychology is undermined
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Introducing the Intentional Stance
Against eliminativism
E.g., My thesis will be that [...] belief is a perfectly objective
phenomenon (1981,58)
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Folk psychology (FP) as a craft
FP is not a theory
Paul Churchland now wants to say that folk psychology is a theory; but
theories do not have to be formulated the way they are formulated in
books. I think that is a good reason for not calling it a theory, since it
does not consist of any explicit theorems or laws (1991, 135)
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Attributing mental states is more like riding a bike

You dont need a theory for that!
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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FP as a craft that allows us to predict behavior

FP contains few psychological generalizations
FP employed in an unthinking and automatic fashion
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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FP as an instance of the Intentional Stance

Physical Stance
Determine its physical constitution, the nature of any physical
impingements upon it, and then use to laws of physics to predict what will
happen
Design Stance
Ignore the actual details of an object, and, on the assumption that it has a
certain design, predict that it will behave as it was designed to behave
under various circumstances
Intentional Stance
Treat the object as a rational agent, figure out what beliefs it ought to
have, given its place in the world and purpose, and what desires it ought
to have. Then predict that it will act to further its desires in the light of
its beliefs
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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FP explanations are reason-giving explanations, which make an

ineliminable allusion to the rationality of the agent folk psychology
might best be viewed as a rationalistic calculus of interpretation and
prediction - an idealizing, abstract, instrumentalistic interpretation
method that has evolved because it works and works because we have
evolved. (TK 48)
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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People seem to adopt such stance quite naturally

Consider Heider and Simmels (1944) experiment
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Predictions based on FP are successful
Churchland: FP is held to suffer explanatory failures at an epic scale

(1981, 76)
According to Dennett, we treat each other as if we were rational
agents, and this myth - for surely we are not all that rational - works
very well because we are pretty rational (TK 44)
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Todays lecture
Dennett
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Tertium Datur? The case for mild realism
So, Dennett disagrees with eliminativists on the nature and prospects of

FP
Here are propositional attitudes real ?
Dennett tries to build a road halfway between eliminativism and realism
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Tertium Datur? The case for mild realism
Realists (e.g. Fodor)

Propositional attitudes cause behavior by virtue of being instantiated in
the mind
Eliminativists (e.g. Churchland)

propositional attitudes do not map into entities posited by neuroscience,
and therefore the ontology of FP should be replaced
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Against realism
The (alleged) success of FP might seem to speak in favor of realism

But Dennett offers two main reasons for rejecting realism
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Against realism (1)
We are happy to attribute identical beliefs without regard to whether the

underlying states are identical:
The predictive pattern could exist without anything else in
common(e.g. murder in Trafalgar Square)
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Against realism (1)
Against the reification of beliefs

The evidence is quite strong that our ordinary notion of belief has next to
nothing of the concrete in it (TK 54)
Jacques, Sherlock, Tom, and Boris have had remarkably different
experiences But they all believe that a Frenchman has committed murder
in Trafalgar Square.
Postulating a similarly structured object in each head is a gratuitous bit of
misplaced concreteness, a regrettable lapse in ideology (TK 54)
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Against realism (2)
There is no reason to think that it is always determinate what beliefs

someone has:
Do I believe there is milk in the fridge? could fail to have a
determinate answer, yes or no
Is the belief that 3 is bigger than 2 the same as the belief that 2 is
smaller than 3?
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Dennetts view often presented as a kind of instrumentalism

According to instrumentalism, a theory is simply an instrument for
making predictions about what we would observe in various
circumstances
But instrumentalism is first and foremost an antirealist view, whilst
Dennett takes beliefs desires to track real patterns in cognitive behaviour
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Reichenbach distinguished between two sorts of referents for theoretical

terms (for unobservables)
Illata (posited theoretical entities, e.g. electron)
Abstracta (calculation-bound entities or logical constructs, e.g.

centre of gravity)
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Folk psychology is abstract in that the beliefs and desires it attributes are
not intervening distinguishable states of an internal behavior-causing
system
Beliefs and desires are abstracta: calculation-bound entities
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Dennetts mild realism
Dennett seeks to rescue folk psychology from the jaws of eliminativists

But he still accepts some of their arguments against the reification of
beliefs and desires
Tomorrow we will consider some replies to Dennetts account
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Second Lecture
Dennetts account might look like a promising non-reductionist alternative

to eliminative materialism
But it seems to face several problems (both empirical and conceptual)
Today well focus on some of them
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Second Lecture
Is FP an instance of Intentional Stance?
Are folk psychological predictions as accurate as Dennett suggests?
Is mild realism a viable option?
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Second lecture
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Is FP an instance of intentional stance?
Intentional stance has some popularity in philosophical debates

Yet offering an account of how people go about attributing mental states
seems a job for cognitive science
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
31 / 51
Is the Intentional Stance empirically under-tested?

Intentional stance has not attracted much empirical research with the
exception of the work of Csibra, Gergely and their colleagues (Csibra
et al 1999, Gergely et al 1995)
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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There is an open empirical debate on how people go about attributing

mental states
Two main hypotheses are discussed:
Theory theory
Simulation theory
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Theory theory (TT)

Folk psychology implemented by body of knowledge about causal
relationships between mental states, environment, and behavior
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November 6-7, 2014
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According to TT, FP comprises generalizations such as:

If someone wants x, and believes that y is a means to x then, other
things being equal, they will do y
If someone believes p and if p then q then, other things being equal,

they will believe q
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Simulation theory (ST)

We represent the mental states and processes of others by mentally
simulating them, or generating similar states and processes in ourselves
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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According to ST, FP can be explained as a kind of mental simulation that

requires little or no information about how minds work
STs central idea foreshadowed by philosophers such as Smith, Hume,
Kant, Nietzsche
They discussed in one form or another the use of imagination or
projection in mindreading
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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It is still an open empirical debate

But it seems that Intentional Stance is not in the running
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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It is also unclear whether the intentional stance is a complete alternative
to TT or ST
Dennetts account does not seem to provide a proper account of FP:
The rational thing to do or think does not simply present itself when
we mindread; rather, it takes a lot of cognitive work to figure out
what it is. Working out the rational thing to do/think must either
rely on a theory of what is rational (so rationality theory becomes
theory theory) or on simulating what I would do and calling that
rational (so rationality theory becomes simulation theory) (Goldman
and Mason 2007, 272)
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Second lecture
Are folk psychological predictions as accurate as Dennett

suggests?
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Are predictions based on FP successful?
According to Dennett, we are pretty rational

But plenty of research in social and cognitive psychology suggests
otherwise
People seem to be quite bad not only at deductive and inductive
inferences, but also at attributing beliefs and desires
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Evidence of influence of environmental and contextual factors

(situationism) on peoples thinking, feeling and behaving
Here Ill focus on the mis-attribution of desires
Attributing desires correctly seems crucial to understand what people
want and predict their behavior
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Consider Milgrams (1963) study on the willingness to obey authority

3 participants (teacher, learner and experimenter)
Teacher subject instructed to administer electric shocks to learner

subject if the latter failed to remember correct pairs of words
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Most participants administered all of the the shocks

Several lessons could be drawn from this study
But what matters here is that the fact that people find these findings
surprising suggests that the processes they use to attribute desires are not
that accurate
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Second lecture
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Is Dennetts mild realism a viable option?
Dennett: folk psychological predicates track patterns in behavior just like

centers of gravity track patterns in the movement of objects
But there is a strong intuition that causal efficacy is the hallmark of the
reality of mental states
Shoemaker (1980) argued that the identity conditions of properties are to
be spelled out in terms of their causal powers, but similar ideas are widely
held.
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Fodor on causal efficacy

Someone is a Realist about propositional attitudes iff (a) he holds
that there are mental states whose occurrences and interactions
cause behaviour and do so, moreover, in ways that respect (at least to an
approximation) the generalizations of common-sense belief/desire
psychology; and (b) he holds that these same causally efficacious mental
states are also semantically evaluable (Fodor 1985, p. 78).
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Here well focus on one objection based on this view:

Peacocke offered a thought experiment (the Martian marionette) to
show that Dennetts criterion of behavioral prediction is not sufficient
for the ascription of propositional attitudes
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Peacockes Body is just like a normal human body except it has no brain
Its afferent and efferent nerves are connected by radio to a computer on
Mars
The behaviour of the Body is reliably predictable via the Intentional
Strategy
So,the Body fulfills the condition of behavioral prediction
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
49 / 51
Would we attribute propositional attitudes to the Body ?

No, we have a strong intuition that the Body does not have propositional
attitudes at all:
its just a Martian marionette!
Unlike Dennetts Intentional Stance, our folk psychological explanations
seem to be causal explanations
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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The End
Dennett
November 6-7, 2014
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Week 8: Daniel Dennett and the Intentional Stance

November 6-7, 2014

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

Folk psychology and the Intentional Stance

The case for mild realism

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

Folk psychology and the Intentional Stance

The case for mild realism

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

One of the most influential living analytic philosophers

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

Folk psychology and the Intentional Stance

The case for mild realism

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

Introducing the Intentional Stance

Recall Churchlands case against folk psychology:

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

Introducing the Intentional Stance

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

Folk psychology (FP) as a craft

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

Folk psychology (FP) as a craft

Attributing mental states is more like riding a bike

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

Folk psychology (FP) as a craft

FP as a craft that allows us to predict behavior

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

FP as an instance of the Intentional Stance

November 6-7, 2014

FP as an instance of the Intentional Stance

FP explanations are reason-giving explanations, which make an

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

FP as an instance of the Intentional Stance

People seem to adopt such stance quite naturally

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

Predictions based on FP are successful

Churchland: FP is held to suffer explanatory failures at an epic scale

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

Folk psychology and the Intentional Stance

The case for mild realism

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014

Tertium Datur? The case for mild realism

So, Dennett disagrees with eliminativists on the nature and prospects of

Andrea Polonioli (University of Edinburgh)

November 6-7, 2014