Topic:  Dennett’s “Setting Off on the Right Foot”, “True Believers” and “Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology”
 

In “Setting Off on the Right Foot”, Dennett makes explicit some of the basic assumptions that drive his theory of intentionality:

Assumption 1:  Mentalism
Dennett takes folk psychology seriously, but/and acknowledges that it is falsifiable (just like folk physics).

Folk psychology:  “the perspective that invokes the family of “mentalistic” concepts, such as belief, desire, knowledge, fear, pain, expectation, intention, understanding, dreaming, imagination, self-consciousness, and so on.” (p. 7)

In the end, Dennett thinks that the mentalistic concepts of folk psychology are vindicated.  In this regard, he differs from the Behaviorists (e.g., B.F. Skinner) and Eliminativists (e.g., the Churchlands) who have both argued that the sciences should rid themselves of such mentalistic talk.

Assumption 2:  Naturalism
“My sense that philosophy is allied with, and indeed continuous with, the physical sciences grounds both my modesty about philosophical method and my optimism about philosophical progress.” (p. 5)
    --Compare to Quine

Assumption 3:  Scientific Methodology
“I declare my starting point to be the objective, materialistic, third-person world of the physical sciences.” (p. 5)
    --This methodology is largely based on the track-record of its successes.
 

“True Believers”

Q:  Is it even possible, in the broadest sense, that one could believe that rabbits are birds? (p.  14)  If so, then what about that 3 is more than 4?
    --We will focus on the limits of rationality in next week’s seminar.
 

Two opposing views regarding belief attribution are commonly distinguished:

Realism:  Whether a person believes a certain proposition is a purely objective matter with a definite answer settled by the internal facts about that person’s nervous system.

Interpretationism:  There is no objective fact of the matter regarding belief attributions.  Rather, the correctness of such attributions depends on our interests and other context-sensitive facts.

Dennett claims his position is some combination of these two.  Belief is an objective phenomenon, but it can be investigated and discovered only from the intentional stance. (p. 15)

Intentional stance:  “first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent out to have, given its place in the world and its purpose.  Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs.  A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in many—but not all—instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do.” (p. 17)

A believer is just any system “whose behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy.” (p. 15)
 

We can contrast the intentional stance with the physical stance and the design stance:

Physical stance:  “if you want to predict the behavior of a system, determine its physical constitution (perhaps all the way down to the microphysical level) and the physical nature of the impingements upon it, and use your knowledge of the laws of physics to predict the outcome for any input.” (p. 16)

    Laplace’s demon:  a mythical creature that computes all future outcomes by considering the complete, current microphysical
    state of affairs of the world and then generating predictions via applications of the laws of physics.

Design stance:  “where one ignores the actual (possibly messy) details of the physical constitution of an object, and, on the assumption that it has a certain design, predicts that it will behave as it is designed to behave under various circumstances.” (pp. 16-17)
 

*Do note that mostly true beliefs are attributed to intentional systems, and there must be a special story (about forgetfulness, cognitive malfunction, deception, etc.) for the presence of false beliefs.  There is a large literature on the limits of human rationality, and the connection between being a believer and being rational. (see footnote 1, p. 19)

*Reflect on the role that language has in overspecifying belief and desire attributions (as discussed on pp. 20-21).  Maybe beliefs and desires aren’t so much like sentences after all (contra Fodor).

*Also note how the intentional stance can be applied to many other animals, artifacts, and even plants and inanimate phenomena. (p. 22)
 

On Dennett’s view there is no distinction between “real” intentionality and “as if” intentionality.
    --This contrasts, for example, with the view of John Searle, and others who advocate for “intrinsic intentionality”.
 

Nozick’s Martians:  These are creatures that have Laplacean demon-like abilities to predict our behavior purely from the physical stance.  (pp. 25-28)

    Dennett denies that we fail to be intentional systems from the point of view of Nozick’s Martians.  Instead, these Martians are
    missing an objectively existing real pattern—being an intentional system is not relative to an interpreter.

    These real patterns are comparable to the real patterns that emerge in Conway’s Game of Life.  (pp. 37-39)
    Here’s a link to a good simulation of the game: http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/

*While Dennett holds that beliefs and desires are objective phenomena, he stresses that there could still be cases in which it is indeterminate what beliefs and desires someone possesses.  This indeterminacy is itself an objective fact.
    --The indeterminacy in beliefs/desires is similar to Quinean indeterminacy of (language) translation. (see pp. 40-42)

*The number and nature of an intentional system’s inputs/outputs determine the degree to which the content of its intentional states should be specified.  This is the lesson of the thermostat example on pp. 29-31.

*Thermostats are “real” intentional systems, because when more inputs/outputs are added there is no point at which it “magically” turns into an intentional system (though it is clearly an intentional system once many inputs/outputs are added). (p. 32)
    --Is this really how Dennett is arguing here?  Is this a bad “Sorites-style” argument?

Q:  Why does the intentional stance work so well?

A:  Evolution has designed us to be rational.  But, we do not know the details about how our biological mechanisms underlie our intentional states. (p. 33)
    --One proposal regarding how our biological mechanisms underlie our intentional states is Fodor’s Language of Thought
    Hypothesis.

    Language of Thought Hypothesis:  “The inferences we attribute to rational creatures will be mirrored by the physical, causal
    processes in the hardware; the logical form of the propositions believed will be copied in the structural form of the states in
    correspondence with them.  This is the hypothesis that there is a language of thought coded in our brains, and our brains will
    eventually be understood as symbol manipulating systems in at least rough analogy with computers.” (p. 34)

    *Dennett denies that a language of thought is necessary to vindicate intentional states (though there still might be a language of
    thought).
 

“Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology”

Separate conceptual and causal questions:

    Form of conceptual questions:  What do all x’s have in common?
    Conceptual questions are searching for definitions.

    Form of causal questions:  How do the x’s fulfill their common function?
    Causal questions are searching for theories.

The answers to the conceptual questions can reduce to the answers to the causal questions.  For example, what magnets have in common is their ability to attract iron (conceptual).  They attract iron in virtue of microphysical conditions Y (causal).  So, the ability to attract iron reduces to microphysical conditions Y.  (This example is from p. 43.)

We can ask if a similar reduction is possible for folk-psychological predicates, like believing and desiring.  That is, can folk-psychology be seen as an approximately true theory that can be reduced to a more rigorous science?
 

On rationality:

*Evolution would not give us perfect rationality.  Instead, it would bestow us with cognitive skills that were simply good enough for our ancestors to get by.  And sometimes cognitive short-cuts and “true enough” beliefs were good enough. (p. 51)

*Dennett gives little weight to the empirical evidence by cognitive psychologists, such as Kahneman and Tversky, that purportedly shows our irrationality.  Dennett doesn’t doubt the data, he simply considers these to be exceptional cases. (p. 52)

*Folk psychology is a normative theory that attributes beliefs and desires, and predicts behavior, based upon the beliefs, desires, and intentions that one ought to have.
 

Dennett’s instrumentalism:

“people really do have beliefs and desires, on my version of folk psychology, just the way they really have centers of gravity and the earth has an Equator.  Reichenbach distinguished between two sorts of referents for theoretical terms:  illata--posited theoretical entities--and abstracta--calculation-bound entities or logical constructs.  Beliefs and desires of folk psychology (but not all mental events and states) are abstracta.” (p. 53)

(For more of his discussion of instrumentalism, see pp. 71-81.)

Distinguish:  implicitly and explicitly stored beliefs (pp. 55-56).

Q:  How can abstracta cause “not only actions, but blushes, verbal slips, heart attacks, and the like”? (p. 57)

    --Dennett disparages “abstracta-causation”, in particular intentional attitude causation:
    “One can call this a causal explanation because it talks about causes, but it is surely as unspecific and unhelpful as a causal
    explanation can get.” (p. 57)

Dennett proposes that we separate our more abstract concept of belief from the more concrete, realization-based, concept.  Originally, we have folk-psychology (the first kind of intentional psychology, to make use of Dennett’s title).  But once we separate these concepts of folk-belief, we can then generate two new kinds of psychological theories:

2.  Intentional System Theory

This kind of psychology treats the agent as a “black box” and wholly ignores realization details.  Instead, normative principles of rationality guide belief/desire attributions and action-prediction.  For this reason, we can think of this kind of psychology as a branch of philosophy (compare with Donald Davidson’s paper “Psychology as Philosophy”).  The realization-neutrality allows for generalizations that hold across species, etc.

3.  Sub-personal Cognitive Psychology

This is the investigation into how our brains implement the intentional system theory.  But, this kind of psychologist, in order to truly be doing psychology, must keep in mind that he/she is dealing with a system possessing semantic properties.  “Narrow psychology” (methodological solipsism) is not psychology (p. 64).