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. They 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.Daniel C. Dennett is Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at Tufts University and the author of "Brainstorms" and "Elbow Room." "The Intentional Stance," along with these works, is a Bradford Book.

The Intentional Stance

I. PRELIMINARIES 1. Two Concepts of Mind 2. Supervenience and Explanation II. THE IRREDUCIBILITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS 3. Can Consciousness be Reductively Explained? 4. Naturalistic Dualism 5. The Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment III. TOWARD A THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS 6. The Coherence between Consciousness and Cognition 7. Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia 8. Consciousness and Information: Some Speculation IV. APPLICATIONS 9. Strong Artificial Intelligence 10. The Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Notes Bibliography

The conscious mind: in search of a fundamental theory

This is an original, important and stimulating book, which attempts a Hegelian synthesis of Piagetian constructivism and Fodorian modularity in terms of the author's own model of ‘representational ...

Beyond Modularity: A Developmental Perspective on Cognitive Science

Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different "consciousnesses." Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an example a form of reasoning about a function of "consciousness" based on the phenomenon of blindsight. Some information about stimuli in the blind field is represented in the brains of blindsight patients, as shown by their correct "guesses," but they cannot harness this information in the service of action, and this is said to show that a function of phenomenal consciousness is somehow to enable information represented in the brain to guide action. But stimuli in the blind field are BOTH access-unconscious and phenomenally unconscious. The fallacy is: an obvious function of the machinery of access-consciousness is illicitly transferred to phenomenal consciousness.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0140525X00038188

On a confusion about a function of consciousness.

of the original article: Consciousness is a mongrel concept: there are a number of very different consciousnesses. Phenomenal consciousness is experience; the phenomenally conscious aspect of a state is what it is like to be in that state. The mark of access-consciousness, by contrast, is availability for use in reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action. These concepts are often partly or totally conflated, with bad results. This target article uses as an example a form of reasoning about a function of consciousness based on the phenomenon of blindsight. Some information about stimuli in the blind field is represented in the brains of blindsight patients, as shown by their correct guesses. They cannot harness this information in the service of action, however, and this is said to show that a function of phenomenal consciousness is somehow to enable information represented in the brain to guide action. But stimuli in the blind field are both access-unconscious and phenomenally unconscious. The fallacy is: an obvious function of the machinery of access-consciousness is illicitly transferred to phenomenal consciousness.

On a confusion about a function of consciousness. Author's response

Gareth Evans, one of the most brilliant philosophers of his generation, died in 1980 at the age of thirty-four. He had been working for many years on a book about reference, but did not complete it before his death. The work was edited for publication by John McDowell, who contributes a Preface.

The varieties of reference

The Causal Theory of Names

Some philosophers, notably Professors Quine and Geach, have stressed the analogies they see between pronouns of the vernacular and the bound variables of quantification theory. Geach, indeed, once maintained that ‘for a philosophical theory of reference, then, it is all one whether we consider bound variables or pronouns of the vernacular'. This slightly overstates Geach's positition since he recognizes that some pronouns of ordinary language do function differently from bound variables; he calls such pronouns ‘pronouns of laziness'. Geach's characterisation of pronouns of laziness has varied from time to time, but the general idea should be clear from a paradigm example: (1) A man who sometimes beats his wife has more sense than one who always gives in to her. The pronouns ‘one’ and ‘her’ go proxy for a noun or a noun phrase (here: ‘a man’ and ‘his wife’) in the sense that the pronoun is replaceable in paraphrase by simple repetition of its antecedent.

Pronouns, Quantifiers, and Relative Clauses (I)

Can there be vague objects

logical theory may be tested by its capacity for dealing with puzzles, and it is a wholesome plan, in thinking about logic, to stock the mind with as many puzzles as possible, since these serve much the same purpose as is served by experiments in physical science.'1 This paper is an attempt to follow Russell's advice by using a puzzle about the contingent a priori to test and ex plore certain theories of reference and modality. No one could claim that the puzzle is of any great philosophical importance by itself, but to understand it, one has to get clear about certain aspects of the theory of reference; and to solve it, one has to think a little more deeply than one is perhaps accustomed about what it means to say that a statement is contingent or necessary. The idea that there might be truths which are both contingent and a priori was thrown up by Kripke in the course of his celebrated discussion of the modal and epistemic categories to which the notions of the contingent and the a priori respectively belong.2 There has been some discussion of the idea since Kripke raised it, all of it based upon the assumption that the existence of a statement which is both contingent and a priori would constitute an in tolerable paradox. For example, Michael Dummett has argued that the fact that Kripke's views on reference and modality appear to lead to the recogni tion of the existence of contingent a priori truths shows that something must be wrong with those views.20 In other recent discussions, attempts are made to dissolve the puzzle by showing that, properly understood, the problematical statements are not both contingent and a priori. There seem to me to be clear logical and semantical errors in all of these attempts, but more importantly, their starting point seems incorrect. There is no paradox in the existence of statements which are both contingent and a priori, at least, not in the sense in which the problematical statements may be claimed to be con tingent. There are two quite different conceptions of what it is for a statement to be contingent; statements may be, as we might say, deeply contingent or superficially contingent. Whether a statement is deeply contingent depends upon what makes it true; whether a statement is superficially contingent depends upon how it embeds inside the scope of modal operators. While it would be intolerable for there to be a statement which is both knowable a priori and deeply contingent, I shall try to show that there is nothing par ticularly perplexing about the existence of a statement which is both

Gareth Evans

Papers

The varieties of reference

The Causal Theory of Names

Pronouns, Quantifiers, and Relative Clauses (I)

Can there be vague objects

Reference and Contingency