The Intentional Stance.

By Daniel C. Dennett. 1987

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.

Subfields: Philosophy

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Citations in the corpus

Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences (2017, methodology): “. Heider [66] denes social attribution as person perception. Intentions and intentionality is key to the work of Heider [66], and much of the recent work that has followed his | for example, Dennett [35], Malle [112], McClure [122], Boonzaier et al. [10], Kashima et al. [84]. An intention is a menta”
The Hanabi Challenge: A New Frontier for AI Research (2019, methodology): “html [3] D.”
PowerTransformer: Unsupervised Controllable Revision for Biased Language Correction (2020, methodology): “In this work, we use the positive, neutral, and negative agency dimensions, where agency is defined as the capacity to intentionally make changes or act upon one’s environment (Dennett, 1989).”
The Concept of Mental Disorder (2003, unknown): “Cf. also Dennett 1987, chapter 1.”
Heuristics and Biases: Individual Differences in Reasoning: Implications for the Rationality Debate? (2002, unknown): “At this level, we are concerned with the goals of the system, beliefs relevant to those goals, and the choice of action that is rational given the system’s goals and beliefs (Anderson 1990; Bratman et al. 1991; Dennett 1987; Newell 1982; 1990; Pollock 1995).”
The Biological Basis of Economic Behavior (2001, background): “Individuals with damage to the “ventromedial prefrontal cortex,” on the other hand, showed no such skin conductance response and continued to choose from the second pair even after becoming 13 On psychological grounds, Daniel Kahneman, Peter Wakker, and Rakesh Sarin (1997) also advocate a return to ”
Psychological and Sociomoral Reasoning in Infancy (2014, background): “As adults, our expectations about others’ actions are guided by a principle of rationality: All other things being equal, we expect agents to act rationally—indeed, this is what makes it possible for us to interpret and predict their actions (e.g., Dennett, 1987; Fodor, 1987).”
Bayesian Perceptual Psychology (2015, background): “Dennett (1987) advocates a broadly instrumentalist position intermediate between intentional realism and eliminativism.”
Robots should be slaves (2010, background): “For example, Dennett (1987) argues that we should allocate the rights of agency to anything that appears to be best reasoned about as acting in an intentional manner.”