The Intentional Stance

by Daniel C. Dennett

How are we able to understand each other in our daily interactions? Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, Daniel Dennett asserts in this first full-scale presentation of a theory of intentionality that he has been developing for almost twenty years. We adopt a stance, a predictive strategy of interpretation that presupposes the rationality of the people - or other entities - we are hoping to understand and predict.

The 10 essays included here represent the vanguard of Dennett's thought, push his theories into surprising new territory, and reveal fresh lines of inquiry into fundamental issues in psychology, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary theory as well as traditional issues in the philosophy of mind.

"Dennett's essays are vivid, witty and admirably provocative-"
- P. N. Johnson-Laird, The London Review of Books

"This is Dennett in action: reflecting, joking, clarifying, criticizing - and always stimulating... Anyone interested in the philosophy of mind will find both interest and excitement in these essays."
- Margaret Boden, Sussex University

Daniel C. Dennett is Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at Tufts University and the author of Brainstorms and Elbow Room.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Nonfiction, Research, Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence

388 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 1987

About the author

Daniel Clement Dennett III was a prominent philosopher whose research centered on philosophy of mind, science, and biology, particularly as they relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Dennett was a noted atheist, avid sailor, and advocate of the Brights movement.

Dennett received his B.A. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1963, where he was a student of W.V.O. Quine. In 1965, he received his D.Phil. from Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied under the ordinary language philosopher Gilbert Ryle.

Dennett gave the John Locke lectures at the University of Oxford in 1983, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide, Australia, in 1985, and the Tanner Lecture at Michigan in 1986, among many others. In 2001 he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize, giving the Jean Nicod Lectures in Paris. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Science. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1987. He was the co-founder (1985) and co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts University, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston. He was a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Reviews

[Geordie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hello favorite book in the entire world - how are you? Really? No, I already had breakfast, but thanks...Oh, you want to sit down and be read again for the 300th time? Okay, that is so nice of you, sure favorite book in the entire world, I would love to read you again since you are brilliant and thoughtful and funny and lyrical and perfectly researched and everything else a book needs to be all at the same time. Do you mind if I eat a Ho-Ho while I read you over here on this couch and then tab a whole bunch of your pages to remember to go back to those parts? Great, its a perfect day after all!

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well written but way too technical. So technical I couldn't finish it. More for professional philosophers than for rank amateurs like me. I enjoyed Dennett's other books which were challenging but this one kicked my ass.

[Joshua Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Leo Horovitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 Breaking The Spell (the only one of the canonical four "new atheist" books by the four horsemen that I have yet to read) and Consciousness Explained 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 Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness , 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 Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (which I'm currently reading) as soon as I'm finished with it.

[Tomq · Rating 3 out of 5]

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).

[Jon Norimann · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Gavin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dennett at his absolute best. Everything following will never match this kind of rigor and quality. From proper philosophy... to mass published pop-science. Oh how the might have fallen.

[Draco3seven Crawdady · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is the precursor to Sweet Dreams and Consciousness Explained. Roughly the “Intentional stance” is a predictive tool or position, where one makes the assumption (or gives ascription to) of rationality to an entity outside of ones consciousness, for the purpose of predictive behavior of that exterior entity (i.e. computers, aliens, humans, mice, and maybe bats). This position makes the assumption that the exterior system is in fact an intentional system and attributes to it beliefs, desires, ‘hopes, fears, intentions, and hunches’. This ascription is given in cases were it is warranted by predictive profitability (or in cases were it is the best means to predict an entities behavior), the entity did not really have those quality’s that are ascribed to it, but if by ascribing them it increases the chances of predicting behavior then the intentional stance is justified tool. In cases where there need no intentionality ascribed to an entity for predictability one might take a different stance explaining and predicting a given outcome. One might either take “design stance” or the “physical stance” in aiding explanation. Roughly the design stance is adopted when dealing with “simple” (not always so simple) mechanical entities, where the function of its physical infrastructure can be accounted for and its behavior is therefore mechanistically predictable because of its design. Examples of where or when this stance might be useful are like when ones car breaks down, “typewriter runs out of ink”, or the elevator jams (a simple computer maybe in principle). Then there is the physical stance which seems to apply more to nature and natural physical circumstances, where one uses application of natural “laws” and understanding for prediction. Cases where this stance would apply are like when ‘a branch has too much snow on it to the point where the branch can no longer hold the weight and then one predicts that it will break if the load becomes heavier’. Another example would be, if one eats, then they will defecate, or if you seed receives the right amount of sunlight and water it will grow a plant… and so. All in all, these different stances are different strategies for explaining and predicting outcome and behavior. (Personally I think his distinction between physical and design stance is arbitrary, this distinction makes me suspicious of his motives it seems as though he is trying to get us to accept some underlying parameters in order to make some other claim about the nature of reality.)

[Thomas Wortmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dennett's take on the Philosophy of Mind, covering discussions in the USA, including Quine, Behaviourism, and the resulting backlash as embodied by Fodor's "Language of Thought". Especially the second half is very interesting.

For Dennett, minds don't exist as such, but only as a consequence of taking a certain perspective of looking at the things - i.e., the Intentional Stance. If this sounds like it doesn't make any sense, this book is for you, as it points out the problems arising from alternative positions.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Dave Peticolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[DJ]

supplanted by Consciousness Explained

[Bria]

Somewhere in this book, something very important and interesting and insightful is said. Can you find it?

[Chris Westbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book (along with Dennett's 'Explaining Consciousness') completely and permanently changed the way I think about the mind. I wish more psychologists would read it.

[Alexi Parizeau · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Groot · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree with what he says, I love the subject. I deplore his writing style. Turgid, verbose, prolix, logorhea.