The Intentional Stance

by Daniel C. Dennett

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B007YXQE7O
• ISBN13: 9780262540537
• Release Date: March 1989
• Publisher: MIT Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

An intro to Dennett's thought on consciousness

Anybody who wants to seriously wrestle with Dennett's thought on consciousness needs to start here, then move to "Consciousness Explained," and from there to "Freedom Evolves." (It is an update of "Elbow Room," which means that can be skipped. And, although it has some germs of Dennett's thought, "Brainstorms" can also be bypassed.) Does one have to have a philosophy course touching on intentionality before reading this book? No, not if one is well-enough read in philosophy, psychology or sociology in general to grasp the background of Dennett's ideas. I rate this a star higher than most of Dennett's later work primarily because it is more introductory, and so we see less of Dennett tripping himself up or avoiding some of the logical conclusions of his speculations. That said, Dennett is never dull or boring; agree or disagree, he will stimulate your thought.

A Classic

I believe this work should be considered a classic given the enormous influence the articles in it have had on philosophy of mind, among other areas in philosophy. Much in here is stated more clearly about the Intentional Stance than it is in later works, such as Brain Children. That isn't a criticism. I think that around the time this work was published Dennett was more into legitimizing and explaining the Intentional Stance than into polishing up his account of mind. Indeed in later works, such as "Consciousness Explained" and "Kinds of Minds", he builds off the foundation he laid here to develop his account of mind more fully. In IS, Dennett comments on just which philosophical schools he aligns himself with, for instance, interpretivism, methodological behaviorism, and functionalism. Part of the message to take home about exactly where he aligns himself is that it isn't really important to him. He lays his arguments down and lets others worry about whether that makes him an interpretivist or methodological behaviorist. A clearer statement of his position regarding categorization of his views can be found in the "Back to the Drawing Board" chapter in "Dennett and His Critics".In later works, Dennett further clarifies in what sense the entities the Intentional Stance makes use of are real, entities such as beliefs and desires. The most important of these later works is probably "Real Patterns", which appears in "Brain Children". In short, beliefs are part of compression algorithms of behavior that has been subjected to radical interpretation (See Davidson) from the Intentional Stance. A compression algorithm is (you guessed it) something that compresses some series of data. For instance, imagine you wanted to print 1000 1's and you had a computer that understood a programming language that would allow you to do so. One way to output the 1000 1's would be to specify that the computer print 1 and to repeat this command a thousand times. This doesn't compress anything however. Instead, you might tell the computer to "print 1 x 1000". This program has far fewer bits than does 1000 1's. 1000 1's has 1000 bits; the program has around log (base 2) 1000 bits. Hence, because it has fewer bits than what itd output does, that program is a compression algorithm of what it outputs. I recommend reading Gregory Chaitin for further info on Algorithmic Information Theory. In "Real Patterns" (in Brain Children), Dennett makes nice use of the mathematical definition of randomness to define compression algorithms and to set a plausible standard for what makes something a useful abstract object and thus, in a sense, just as real as are all the other useful scientific objects. Much more can be said about this, but this is enough for now. This book is an excellent starting point for future study. Dennett's writing is as always engaging, insightful, and fairly straightforward.