| Phi 109 Spring 2016 |
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For Tues.: §§I–II (pp. 27–37)
For Thurs.: §§III–IV (pp. 37–51)
Daniel Dennett (1942–) is an American philosopher whose earlier work focused on the philosophy of psychology; he later turned his attention to the philosophy of biology, but it a sample of his earlier work that we will be discussing.
The issue he addresses in this article is how much reality can be ascribed to the commonsense psychological concepts (e.g., belief, desire, etc.) that we use to describe, explain, and predict the behavior of other people. He will locate his own view in the middle of a range of positions whose extremes are occupied by the philosophers Jerry Fodor (1935–) and Paul Churchland (1942–). Fodor’s views are associated with an approach to psychology (especially to the psychology of cognition) that developed in the 1950s and 1960s and focuses on giving scientific precision to concepts much like the ordinary ones while Churchland’s interests center on approaches to cognition that emphasizing neurophysiology that began to attract attention in the 1980s. These latter approaches do not provide an obvious place for concepts like that of belief and thus raise the question whether such concepts capture anything real (i.e., the question what if any place they should have in one’s catalog of what sorts of things exist—in one’s “ontology,” to use the turn of phrase Dennett will often employ).
This issue is of interest to us for two reasons. The “rock-bottom” explanations aimed at by methodological individualism are usually in terms of the concepts of folk-psychology, so the dispute addressed by Dennett raises the question of how rock-solid this bottom is. Perhaps more importantly, the dispute is analogous to the dispute regarding sociology in that both concern the role and value of concepts at different levels, and Dennett’s discussion of what is at issue in the psychological dispute is framed in sufficiently general terms that much of what he says could be adapted to the sociological dispute.
• §I (27–31). Dennett will eventually refer to this range of positions regarding the reality of belief as one running from realism to “instrumentalism” (a term applied to the claim that something—a center of gravity, for example—is merely a “useful fiction”), and much of the first section is devoted to giving you a sense of the dimension along which these views vary. Don’t worry about references to people you haven’t heard of (though most are well enough known that it should be easy to search for information about them if you are curious).
• §II (31–37). This section is devoted to a careful look at patterns, initially visual ones but eventually a broader range.
• §III (37–42). This has more on patterns, this time patterns in motion that Dennett begins to describe in terms reflecting some of the “stances” mentioned above. Much of the discussion uses Conway’s “Game of Life” as an example. (Dennett tells you all you need to know about this; but, if you are interested in seeing it live, a web search will lead you to implementations that run in a browser.)
• §IV (42–51). The last section is the real heart of Dennett’s argument. In it, he sets out his reasons for occupying the position he does on the continuum of views from Fodor to Churchland.
Dennett’s repeated use of term ‘intentional’ may suggest the idea of intending to do something, but it is much broader in scope. In one of his uses of the term, it applies to things like beliefs, desires, and intentions (in the usual sense) that have a content that need not be a real object (e.g., people can believe things that are false and desire things that don’t exist). The philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917) used the idea of intentionality in this sense to characterize the scope of psychology.
The “intentional stance” you will see referred to often is a related idea of Dennett’s, and you will see occasional references to two other “stances.” Here is the way he characterized the three in an earlier article:
Physical stance. “From this stance our predictions are based on the actual physical state of the particular object, and are worked out by applying whatever knowledge we have of the laws of nature” (p. 88).
Design stance. “We make predictions solely from knowledge or assumptions about the system’s functional design, irrespective of the physical constitution or condition of the innards of the particular object” (p. 88).
Intentional stance. “One predicts behavior … by ascribing to the system the possession of certain information and by supposing it to be directed by certain goals, and then by working out the most reasonable or appropriate action on the basis of these ascriptions and suppositions. It is a small step to calling the information possessed the [system]’s beliefs, its goals and subgoals its desires” (p. 90).
The references here and below are to Dennett’s “Intentional Systems,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 68 (1971), pp. 87-106. (On JSTOR at 2025382.)
As an example of the design stance, he noted how it would apply to a chess-playing computer: “If one knows exactly how the computer is designed (including the impermanent part of its design: its program), one can predict its designed response to any move one makes by following the computation instructions of the program” (pp. 87f). But he suggested the motivation for the intentional stance by adding, “The best chess-playing computers these days are practically inaccessible to prediction from either the design stance or the physical stance; they have become too complex for even their own designers to view from the design stance. A man’s best hope of defeating such a machine in a chess match is to predict its responses by figuring out as best he can what the best or most rational move would be, given the rules and goals of chess. That is, one assumes not only (1) that the machine will function as designed, but (2) that the design is optimal as well, that the computer will ‘choose’ the most rational move” (p. 89).