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

Ethologists and others studying animal behavior in a “cognitive” spirit are in need of a descriptive language and method that are neither anachronistically bound by behaviorist scruples nor prematurely committed to particular “information-processing models.” Just such an interim descriptive method can be found in intentional system theory. The use of intentional system theory is illustrated with the case of the apparently communicative behavior of vervet monkeys. A way of using the theory to generate data - including usable, testable “anecdotal” data - is sketched. The underlying assumptions of this approach can be seen to ally it directly with “adaptationist” theorizing in evolutionary biology, which has recently come under attack from Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin, who castigate it as the “Panglossian paradigm.” Their arguments, which are strongly analogous to B. F, Skinner's arguments against “mentalism,” point to certain pitfalls that attend the careless exercise of such “Panglossian” thinking (and rival varieties of thinking as well), but do not constitute a fundamental objection to either adaptationist theorizing or its cousin, intentional system theory.

Intentional systems in cognitive ethology: The 'panglossian paradigm' defended

The lack of consensus on how to characterize humans' capacity for belief reasoning has been brought into sharp focus by recent research. Children fail critical tests of belief reasoning before 3 to 4 years of age (H. Wellman, D. Cross, & J. Watson, 2001; H. Wimmer & J. Perner, 1983), yet infants apparently pass false-belief tasks at 13 or 15 months (K. H. Onishi & R. Baillargeon, 2005; L. Surian, S. Caldi, & D. Sperber, 2007). Nonhuman animals also fail critical tests of belief reasoning but can show very complex social behavior (e.g., J. Call & A Tomasello, 2005). Fluent social interaction in adult humans implies efficient processing of beliefs, yet direct tests suggest that belief reasoning is cognitively demanding, even for adults (e.g., I. A. Apperly, D. Samson, & G. W. Humphreys, 2009). The authors interpret these findings by drawing an analogy with the domain of number cognition, where similarly contrasting results have been observed. They propose that the success of infants and nonhuman animals on some belief reasoning tasks may be best explained by a cognitively efficient but inflexible capacity for tracking belief-like states. In humans, this capacity persists in parallel with a later-developing, more flexible but more cognitively demanding theory-of-mind abilities.

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Do Humans Have Two Systems to Track Beliefs and Belief-Like States?.

The development of cognitive science is one of the most remarkable and fascinating intellectual achievements of the modern era. The quest to understand the mind is as old as recorded human thought; but the progress of modern science has offered new methods and techniques which have revolutionized this enquiry. Oxford University Press now presents a masterful history of cognitive science, told by one of its most eminent practitioners. Cognitive science is the project of understanding the mind by modeling its workings. Psychology is its heart, but it draws together various adjoining fields of research, including artificial intelligence; neuroscientific study of the brain; philosophical investigation of mind, language, logic, and understanding; computational work on logic and reasoning; linguistic research on grammar, semantics, and communication; and anthropological explorations of human similarities and differences. Each discipline, in its own way, asks what the mind is, what it does, how it works, how it developed - how it is even possible. The key distinguishing characteristic of cognitive science, Boden suggests, compared with older ways of thinking about the mind, is the notion of understanding the mind as a kind of machine. She traces the origins of cognitive science back to Descartes's revolutionary ideas, and follows the story through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the pioneers of psychology and computing appear. Then she guides the reader through the complex interlinked paths along which the study of the mind developed in the twentieth century. Cognitive science, in Boden's broad conception, covers a wide range of aspects of mind: not just 'cognition' in the sense of knowledge or reasoning, but emotion, personality, social communication, and even action. In each area of investigation, Boden introduces the key ideas and the people who developed them. No one else could tell this story as Boden can: she has been an active participant in cognitive science since the 1960s, and has known many of the key figures personally. Her narrative is written in a lively, swift-moving style, enriched by the personal touch of someone who knows the story at first hand. Her history looks forward as well as back: it is her conviction that cognitive science today--and tomorrow--cannot be properly understood without a historical perspective. Mind as Machine will be a rich resource for anyone working on the mind, in any academic discipline, who wants to know how our understanding of our mental activities and capacities has developed.

Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science

The major contributions of operationism have been negative, largely because operationists failed to distinguish logical theories of reference from empirical accounts of language. Behaviorism never finished an adequate formulation of verbal reports and therefore could not convincingly embrace subjective terms. But verbal responses to private stimuli can arise as social products through the contingencies of reinforcement arranged by verbal communities.In analyzing traditional psychological terms, we need to know their stimulus conditions (“finding the referent”), and why each response is controlled by that condition. Consistent reinforcement of verbal responses in the presence of stimuli presupposes stimuli acting upon both the speaker and the reinforcing community, but subjective terms, which apparently are responses to private stimuli, lack this characteristic. Private stimuli are physical, but we cannot account for these verbal responses by pointing to controlling stimuli, and we have not shown how verbal communities can establish and maintain the necessary consistency of reinforcement contingencies.Verbal responses to private stimuli may be maintained through appropriate reinforcement based on public accompaniments, or through reinforcements accorded responses made to public stimuli, with private cases then occurring by generalization. These contingencies help us understand why private terms have never formed a stable and uniform vocabulary: It is impossible to establish rigorous vocabularies of private stimuli for public use, because differential reinforcement cannot be made contingent upon the property of privacy. The language of private events is anchored in the public practices of the verbal community, which make individuals aware only by differentially reinforcing their verbal responses with respect to their own bodies. The treatment of verbal behavior in terms of such functional relations between verbal responses and stimuli provides a radical behaviorist alternative to the operationism of methodological behaviorists.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/6AA0889CC30493311077553E7B6F0BC0/S0140525X00027187a.pdf/div-class-title-the-operational-analysis-of-psychological-terms-div.pdf

Jeremy Walker

Papers

The explanation of behaviour

The stratification of behaviour

An atheist's values

Human freedom and responsibility

Two soviet studies on frege