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

A computer program capable of acting intelligently in the world must have a general representation of the world in terms of which its inputs are interpreted. Designing such a program requires commitments about what knowledge is and how it is obtained. Thus, some of the major traditional problems of philosophy arise in artificial intelligence. More specifically, we want a computer program that decides what to do by inferring in a formal language that a certain strategy will achieve its assigned goal. This requires formalizing concepts of causality, ability, and knowledge. Such formalisms are also considered in philosophical logic. The first part of the paper begins with a philosophical point of view that seems to arise naturally once we take seriously the idea of actually making an intelligent machine. We go on to the notions of metaphysically and epistemo-logically adequate representations of the world and then to an explanation of can, causes, and knows in terms of a representation of the world by a system of interacting automata. A proposed resolution of the problem of freewill in a deterministic universe and of counterfactual conditional sentences is presented. The second part is mainly concerned with formalisms within which it can be proved that a strategy will achieve a goal. Concepts of situation, fluent, future operator, action, strategy, result of a strategy and knowledge are formalized. A method is given of constructing a sentence of first-order logic which will be true in all models of certain axioms if and only if a certain strategy will achieve a certain goal. The formalism of this paper represents an advance over McCarthy (1963) and Green (1969) in that it permits proof of the correctness of strategies that contain loops and strategies that involve the acquisition of knowledge; and it is also somewhat more concise. The third part discusses open problems in extending the formalism of part 2. The fourth part is a review of work in philosophical logic in relation to problems of artificial intelligence and a discussion of previous efforts to program ‘general intelligence’ from the point of view of this paper.

/pdf/some-philosophical-problems-from-the-standpoint-of-6oprg9bbyt.pdf

Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of artificial intelligence

https://ai.stanford.edu/~epacuit/classes/lori-spr09/cohenlevesque-intention-aij90.pdf

Intention is choice with commitment

This paper describes a corpus annotation project to study issues in the manual annotation of opinions, emotions, sentiments, speculations, evaluations and other private states in language. The resulting corpus annotation scheme is described, as well as examples of its use. In addition, the manual annotation process and the results of an inter-annotator agreement study on a 10,000-sentence corpus of articles drawn from the world press are presented.

/pdf/annotating-expressions-of-opinions-and-emotions-in-language-2840ogqx29.pdf

Annotating Expressions of Opinions and Emotions in Language

I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker. But I seemed unable to catch up. Finally it dawned on me. I was the shopper I was trying to catch. I believed at the outset that the shopper with a torn sack was making a mess. And I was right. But I didn't believe that I was making a mess. That seems to be something I came to believe. And when I came to believe that, I stopped following the trail around the counter, and rearranged the torn sack in my cart. My change in beliefs seems to explain my change in behavior. My aim in this paper is to make a key point about the characterization of this change, and of beliefs in general. At first characterizing the change seems easy. My beliefs changed, didn't they, in that I came to have a new one, namely, that I am making a mess? But things are not so simple. The reason they are not is the importance of the word "I" in my expression of what I came to believe. When we replace it with other designations of me, we no longer have an explanation of my behavior and so, it seems, no longer an attribution of the same belief. It seems to be an essential indexical. But without such a replacement, all we have to identify the belief is the sentence "I am making a mess". But that sentence by itself doesn't seem to identify the crucial belief, for if someone else had said it, they would have expressed a different belief, a false one. I argue that the essential indexical poses a problem for various otherwise plausible accounts of belief. I first argue that it is a problem for the view that belief is a relation between subjects and propositions conceived as bearers of truth and

The Problem of the Essential Indexical

'He': A study in the logic of self-consciousness

Thinking and Doing

Indicators and Quasi-Indicators

This paper formulates a basic system of ontology that has several interesting qualities: (1) it is suggested very strongly by the most naive and simplest consideration of certain perplexities involving psychological states; (2) the system does justice to several apparently conflicting insights that have been debated by many philosophers; (3) the system separates the a priori from the empirical elements of the world very nicely and neatly; (4) indeed, the system concentrates all the empirical elements of the world on two irreducible dyadic predicates; (5) for this reason the system seems to be a nice formulation of a conception of the world that was started by Plato, was envisioned by Leibniz, guided Frege, at least in part, and was defended by Meinong. The system appears, therefore, to have the historico-philosophical value of illuminating the long and important abstractist and rationalist tradition. I motivate its development with an initial discussion of a problem widely discussed nowadays. This is meant to honor those great metaphysicians by suggesting how contemporary their insights into the problems were, even if their solutions are not followed. Among other things, the system accomplishes the following: (i) provides an account of possible objects; (ii) provides

Hector-Neri Castañeda

Papers

'He': A study in the logic of self-consciousness

Thinking and Doing

Indicators and Quasi-Indicators

Thinking and the structure of the world

On the Logic of Attributions of Self-Knowledge to Others