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

Microblogging is a new form of communication in which users can describe their current status in short posts distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, email or the Web. Twitter, a popular microblogging tool has seen a lot of growth since it launched in October, 2006. In this paper, we present our observations of the microblogging phenomena by studying the topological and geographical properties of Twitter's social network. We find that people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. Finally, we analyze the user intentions associated at a community level and show how users with similar intentions connect with each other.

https://ebiquity.umbc.edu/_file_directory_/papers/369.pdf

Why we twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities

One of the major developments of the second year of human life is the emergence of the ability to pretend. A child's knowledge of a real situation is apparently contradicted and distorted by pretense. If, as generally assumed, the child is just beginning to construct a system for internally representing such knowledge, why is this system of representation not undermined by its use in both comprehending and producing pretense? In this article I present a theoretical analysis of the representational mechanism underlying this ability. This mechanism extends the power of the infant's existing capacity for (primary) representation, creating a capacity for metarepresentation. It is this, developing toward the end of infancy, that underlies the child's new abilities to pretend and to understand pretense in others. There is a striking isomorphism between the three fundamental forms of pretend play and three crucial logical properties of mental state expressions in language. This isomorphism points to a common underlying form of internal representation that is here called metarepresentation. A performance model, the decoupler, is outlined embodying ideas about how an infant might compute the complex function postulated to underlie pretend play. This model also reveals pretense as an early manifestation of the ability to understand mental states. Aspects of later preschool development, both normal and abnormal, are discussed in the light of the new model. This theory begins the task of characterizing the specific innate basis of our commonsense "theory of mind."

/pdf/pretense-and-representation-the-origins-of-theory-of-mind-456tcv8eet.pdf

Pretense and representation: The origins of "theory of mind."

In this paper we explore a new theory of discourse structure that stresses the role of purpose and processing in discourse. In this theory, discourse structure is composed of three separate but interrelated components: the structure of the sequence of utterances (called the linguistic structure), a structure of purposes (called the intentional structure), and the state of focus of attention (called the attentional state). The linguistic structure consists of segments of the discourse into which the utterances naturally aggregate. The intentional structure captures the discourse-relevant purposes, expressed in each of the linguistic segments as well as relationships among them. The attentional state is an abstraction of the focus of attention of the participants as the discourse unfolds. The attentional state, being dynamic, records the objects, properties, and relations that are salient at each point of the discourse. The distinction among these components is essential to provide an adequate explanation of such discourse phenomena as cue phrases, referring expressions, and interruptions.The theory of attention, intention, and aggregation of utterances is illustrated in the paper with a number of example discourses. Various properties of discourse are described, and explanations for the behavior of cue phrases, referring expressions, and interruptions are explored.This theory provides a framework for describing the processing of utterances in a discourse. Discourse processing requires recognizing how the utterances of the discourse aggregate into segments, recognizing the intentions expressed in the discourse and the relationships among intentions, and tracking the discourse through the operation of the mechanisms associated with attentional state. This processing description specifies in these recognition tasks the role of information from the discourse and from the participants' knowledge of the domain.

Attention, intention, and the structure of discourse

/pdf/attention-intentions-and-the-structure-of-discourse-sat0ew257g.pdf

Attention, intentions, and the structure of discourse

(la) It would be approximately true to say that S means (has as one of its meanings) "If I shall then be assisting the kind of thing of which lawns are composed to mature, I shall have no time for reading." It would also perhaps be approximately true to say that S means (has as another of its meanings, in at least one version of English) "If I shall then be assisting the marijuana to mature, I shall have no time for reading." Such meaning-specification I shall call the specifications of the timeless meaning(s) of a "complete" utterance-type (which may be a sentence or may be a "sentencelike" nonlinguistic utterance-type, such as a hand-signal). (I b) It would be true to say that the word "grass" means (loosely speaking) "lawn-material," and also true to say that the word "grass" means "marijuana." Such meaning-specifications I shall call the specifications of the timeless meaning(s) of an "incomplete" utterance-type (which may be a nonsentential word or phrase, or may be a nonlinguistic utterance-type which is analogous to a word or phrase).

/pdf/utterer-s-meaning-and-intentions-3g99fmgdfc.pdf

Utterer's meaning and intentions

The Causal Theory of Perception

My aim in this paper is to throw light on the connection between (a) a notion of meaning which I want to regard as basic, viz. that notion which is involved in saying of someone that by (when) doing such-and-such he meant that so-and-so (in what I have called a non-natural sense of the word ‘meant’), and (b) the notions of meaning involved in saying (i) that a given sentence means ‘so-and-so’ (ii) that a given word or phrase means ‘so-and-so’. What I have to say on these topics should be looked upon as an attempt to provide a sketch of what might, I hope, prove to be a viable theory, rather than as an attempt to provide any part of a finally acceptable theory. The account which I shall offer of the (for me) basic notion of meaning is one which I shall not today seek to defend; I should like its approximate correctness to be assumed, so that attention may be focused on its utility, if correct, in the explication of other and (I hope) derivative notions of meaning. This enterprise forms part of a wider programme which I shall in a moment delineate, though its later stages lie beyond the limits which I have set for this paper.

Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning

TN HIS article "Two Dogmas of Empiricism,"' Professor [Quine advances a number of criticisms of the supposed distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, and of other associated notions. It is, he says, a distinction which he rejects.2 We wish to show that his criticisms of the distinction do not justify his rejection of it. There are many ways in which a distinction can be criticized, and more than one in which it can be rejected. It can be criticized for not being a sharp distinction (for admitting of cases which do not fall clearly on either side of it); or on the ground that the terms in which it is customarily drawn are ambiguous (have more than one meaning); or on the ground that it is confused (the different meanings being habitually conflated). Such criticisms alone would scarcely amount to a rejection of the distinction. They would, rather, be a prelude to clarification. It is not this sort of criticism which Quine makes. Again, a distinction can be criticized on the ground that it is not useful. It can be said to be useless for certain purposes, or useless altogether, and, perhaps, pedantic. One who criticizes in this way may indeed be said to reject a distinction, but in a sense which also requires him to acknowledge its existence. He simply declares he can get on without it. But Quine's rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction appears to be more radical than this. He would certainly say he could get on without the distinction, but not in a sense which would commit him to acknowledging its existence. Or again, one could criticize the way or ways in which a distinction is customarily expounded or explained on the ground that these explanations did not make it really clear. And Quine certainly makes such criticisms in the case of the analyticsynthetic distinction.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2182828.pdf

H. P. Grice

Papers

Utterer's meaning and intentions

The Causal Theory of Perception

Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning

In defense of a dogma

In Defense of a Dogma