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

Selection of efficient institutions or policies in politics requires constituents to estimate the net benefits of political reforms. Political competition fails to inform constituents of the costs of forgone political alternatives. Ignorance of ‘political opportunity costs’ prevents the adoption of welfare enhancing reforms of public institutions and policies. The empirical record supports this contention.

The use of knowledge about society

Much research in the last two decades has demon- strated that human responses deviate from the performance deemed normative according to various models of decision mak- ing and rational judgment (e.g., the basic axioms of utility theory). This gap between the normative and the descriptive can be inter- preted as indicating systematic irrationalities in human cognition. However, four alternative interpretations preserve the assumption that human behavior and cognition is largely rational. These posit that the gap is due to (1) performance errors, (2) computational limitations, (3) the wrong norm being applied by the experi- menter, and (4) a different construal of the task by the subject. In the debates about the viability of these alternative explanations, attention has been focused too narrowly on the modal response. In a series of experiments involving most of the classic tasks in the heuristics and biases literature, we have examined the implica- tions of individual differences in performance for each of the four explanations of the normative/descriptive gap. Performance er- rors are a minor factor in the gap; computational limitations un- derlie non-normative responding on several tasks, particularly those that involve some type of cognitive decontextualization. Un- expected patterns of covariance can suggest when the wrong norm is being applied to a task or when an alternative construal of the task should be considered appropriate.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0140525X00003435

Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate?

Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

Reasons and Persons

Aesthetics. Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism by Monroe C. Beardsley

Heidegger and Nazism.

Foreword - Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis Introduction Part I: From Youth to the Rectorship (1889-1933) 1. Messkirch, Origins, and the Religious Problem 2. The Jesuit Novitiate and the Seminary at Freiburg 3. Abraham a Sancta Clara and Martin Heidegger's First Written Work 4. Heidegger's Contribution to the Akademiker 5. From Freiburg to Marburg Studies at the University of Freiburg * World War I * Martin Heidegger, Teacher of Catholic Philosophy: The Crisis of Modernism and the Break with the Church * Husserl at Freiburg 6. Marburg, Being and Time, and the Various Appointments 7. The Return to Freiburg and the Berlin Temptation Part II: The Rectorate (1933-1934) 8. Heidegger, Rector at Freiburg The German Student Movement and its Avant-Garde Role * The Seizure of Power in the Region of Baden: Freiburg * The Homage to Albert Leo Schlageter 9. The Rector's Address: Its Assumptions and Its Effects 10. Martin Heidegger's Activities as Rector A Case of Political Denunciation * Students and Workers * Lessons on "The Fundamental Question of Philosophy" during the Summer Semester, 1933 11. Heidegger and University Politics in the Third Reich Speeches at Heidelberg and Kiel: Heidegger and the Corporate Associations of University Professors * Heidegger's Speech on the University and the National Socialist State * Heidegger and the Association of German Universities * Heidegger, Krieck, and the Creation of the KADH 12. Support for Hitler and Conflicts with Krieck The Demonstration of German Science of Adolf Hitler * Heidegger is Called to the Universities of Berlin and Munich * Attacks from Ernst Krieck and His Faction 13. The City and the Country: The Return to the Fatherland as a Political Theme 14. The End of the Rectorate Part III: After the Rectorate: From 1934 to the Posthumously Published Interview 15. The Academy and the Professors of the Reich The Declaration of August 1934 * Heidegger and the Academy of Professors of the Reich * Heidegger and the Academy of German Law * Heidegger and the Advanced School for German Politics * Heidegger as Informer 16. Heidegger and the State Ideological Apparatus The Chair at Gottingen * The "Introduction to Metaphysics" Lectures (1935) * An Article by Elfride Heidegger-Petri * The Attitude of the Regime toward Heidegger around 1936 * Writings: "Origin of the Work of Art" and "Ways to Language" * The Philosophical Congresses at Prague (1934) and at Paris * The Lectures on Nietzsche's Philosophy 17. Heidegger and the State Ideological Apparatus (Continued): Rome and Berlin Heidegger at Prague (1940) and at Munich (1941) * Heidegger and Il Duce * Holderlin * Parmenides and Heraclitus (1943-1944) * The End of the War and the Beginning of Polemos * Echoes 18. Return to Abram a Sancta Clara The Spiegel Interview Notes Index

Joseph Margolis

Papers

Reasons and Persons

Aesthetics. Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism by Monroe C. Beardsley

Heidegger and Nazism.

Heidegger and nazism

The Concept of Disease