Name: The intentional stance
ISBN: 9780262040938

The intentional stance

How are we able to understand and anticipate each other in everyday life, in our daily interactions? Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, asserts Daniel Dennett in this first full-scale presentation of a theory of intentionality that he has been developing for almost twenty years. We adopt a stance, he argues, a predictive strategy of interpretation that presupposes the rationality of the people - or other entities - we are hoping to understand and predict.These principles of radical interpretation have far-reaching implications for the metaphysical and scientific status of the processes referred to by the everday terms of folk psychology and their corresponding terms in cognitive science.While Dennett's philosophical stance has been steadfast over the years, his views have undergone successive enrichments, refinements, and extensions. The Intentional Stance brings together both previously published and original material: four of the book's ten chapters - its first and the final three - appear here for the first time and push the theory into surprising new territory. The remaining six were published earlier in the 1980s but were not easily accessible; each is followed by a reflection - an essay reconsidering and extending the claims of the earlier work. These reflections and the new chapters represent the vanguard of Dennett's thought.

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gumbyApr 2024

You might enjoy Dennett’s “The Intentional Stance” for some enlightening exploration of this metaphor, e.g. “The thermostat tries to keep the temperature between 67 and 69” not only makes sense but is a useful way to think of it even when we don’t believe the thermostat has agency.

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1atticeMar 2023

Fsck. I hadn't thought of it that way. Thank you, great point.

This era has me hankering to reread Daniel Dennett's _The Intentional Stance_. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance

We've developed folk psychology into a user interface and that really does mean that we should continue to use folk psychology to predict the behaviour of the apparatus. Whether it has inner states is sort of beside the point.

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gumbyDec 2022

> Plenty of popsci journos write as if nature is intelligent and driven by some purpose.

You might want to read “The intentional stance” by the famous philosopher Daniel Dennett. This is a pretty useful analytic approach for many problems (e.g. we commonly say things like “the thermostat tries to keep the temperature within three degrees of its set point”).

I agree it is distressing that many people interpret such metaphors literally.

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gumbyJul 2022

You might want to read “The Intentional Stance” by Daniel Dennett, a philosophical treatise basically on how we usefully ascribe desire or intention to inanimate objects and phenomena as a mental model (for example, saying that “The thermostat tries to keep the temperature between 20 and 30”).

(This is not a comment on the precession video itself, which haven’t clicked on)

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PaulDavisThe1stFeb 2022

> And I'd say you're just telling yourself a retroactively edited story that there is a singular subjective experience in order to make sense of our own thoughts and behaviours

So look, "The Intentional Stance" is for me one of the most important books I've ever read in this general area, and I totally buy all the stuff Dennett and others have built up around the idea that what we are conscious of is an edited, self-created, intention-injected model of our own selves (to whatever extent there is a unitary self to be a model of).

But I don't think that any of that addresses "how can we be conscious of anything at all".

In the quote I included above, who is the "you" that is telling and who is the "yourself" that is being told? But more importantly, what does "being told" mean? How does one have an experience (whether it is being told, or being cold, or being old)? It's not enough to say "we're not conscious, we just think we are" - the conundrum of consciousness is not about how humans think, but the fact that we have subjective experience (which may includes lies told to ourselves by ourselves).

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gumbySep 2020

For the discussion of your category 3 you might enjoy Dennett’s influential book, The Intentional Stance, which discusses how people reason from models like “the thermostat tries to keep the temperature between X and Y”).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance

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