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Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance” theory is a leading specimen of the rationality theory, though Dennett vacillates in offering stronger and weaker variants. In the strong formulations, the theory is quite implausible; in its weak formulations, its content is too thin to have predictive implications. It also suffers from an inability to handle attributions over the entire range of mental states, including sensations like thirst, hunger, or itchiness. Finally, it offers no satisfactory story of how mental concepts are understood. An ostensibly related theory, the “teleological stance” theory, doesn’t really claim to explain mental state attribution.

This chapter explores the ramifications that the attribution to Berkeley of a use theory of meaning has for the interpretation of the divine language thesis, the relationship between individual spirits, the nature of spirits themselves. It is shown that the basic relations between spirits are normative in nature. For the purposes of elucidation, Berkeley's approach is compared and contrasted with that of Daniel Dennett's “intentional stance”.

This chapter discusses the rise of ‘scientific philosophy’, which would expose the logical and conceptual bases of natural sciences. The author traces it back to the 19th-century philosopher Auguste Comte, who led the movement called Logical Positivism, the doctrine that states that the only genuine method of gaining knowledge is by scientific method through observation and experiment. It argues that the fullest and clearest version of an instrumentalist account of intentionality is that of Daniel Dennett's Content and Consciousness. It also chronicles W. V. O. Quine and the intentional vocabulary of psychology, Daniel Dennett and the intentional stance, realism, anti-realism, pragmatism, and reductivism.

This chapter considers animal agency. Using the work of developmental psychologists, it is argued that agency is a highly robust and distinctive concept that ought to be accorded a central role in our basic categorization of entities—a role which has not generally been properly recognized for what it is. The concept of agency is an outgrowth, it is suggested, of the concept of animacy—and it is argued that the concept applies unproblematically to many animals. The absence of the concept of an agent from most accounts of folk psychology is discussed and criticized, and Nichols’ work on the idea that the concept of agent causation might be part of our basic cognitive endowment is considered. The difficult question of how it is to be decided which animals are to be accounted agents, and why, is tackled, making use of some aspects of Dennett’s work on the intentional stance

Developing a philosophical account of experiential intentionality requires answering the following question: For any item x and property F, what would make it the case that F figures in the non-experiential-intentional content of x? This chapter considers four possible answers to this question, defending and developing the fourth among them, which is an interpretivist account. According to the proposed account, a property F figures in the non-experiential-intentional content of a state x just in case an ideal interpreter would, under ideal conditions, interpret x as having F in its intentional content. The chapter first discusses a ‘potentialist’ approach developed by Searle (Section 4.1), then an ‘inferentialist’ approach developed by Loar (Section 4.2) and an ‘eliminativist’ approach defended by Strawson (Section 4.3), and finally the ‘interpretivist’ approach it defends as superior (Section 4.4).

Since the seventies, it has been customary to assume that intentionality is independent of consciousness. Recently, a number of philosophers have rejected this assumption, claiming that intentionality is closely tied to consciousness, inasmuch as non‐conscious intentionality in some sense depends upon conscious intentionality. Within this alternative framework, the question arises of how to account for unconscious intentionality, and different authors have offered different accounts. A central goal of this paper is to argue for a broadly Dennettian, interpretivist account of unconscious intentionality. A second goal is to argue that an upshot of interpretivism is that all unconscious intentionality is ultimately grounded in a specific kind of cognitive phenomenology, namely, the phenomenology of conscious interpretive acts.

This chapter argues that Dennettian stances, including the intentional stance, should be understood as collections of embodied strategies for coping with objects and coordinating with others. A stance is a way of readying your body for action and worldly engagement. The entities that show up from within a stance are loci of norm-governed behavior, resistance, and explanatory power. But there is no separate question to be asked as to whether these entities are literally real. The notion of the literally real only gets a grip from within a specific stance—one that I dub the “interpretive stance.” Outside the interpretive stance, questions about the reality of intrastance entities generally deflate to practical questions about the success of various coping strategies. By these standards, beliefs and desires and intentional systems are straightforwardly real. But there is no extrastance perspective from which to assess the correctness of a stance.

This chapter glosses the terms ‘naturalism’, ‘physicalism’, ‘intentionality’, ‘aboutness’, ‘mental’, ‘content’, ‘mental content’, ‘representational content’, and so on, in ways that may seem unorthodox but should not. It points out that dispositions like belief dispositions cannot — metaphysically cannot — be (mentally) contentful entities. It argues dutifully for the existence of things that obviously exist, not only conscious experience, but also, more specifically, cognitive conscious experience as opposed to sensory experience. The chapter presents the case for saying that (1) the only truly intentional entities are conscious experiential episodes. It argues that although one can (with Humpty Dumpty) use words like ‘mental’ and ‘intentional’ as one likes, there is in the end no tenable ground between (1) and (2) full-blown Dennettian behaviourism/instrumentalism/antirealism about the mind; as Dennett himself agrees. To accept (2), however, is to have completely lost touch with reality.

There is a crucial difference between explaining actions on the basis of the agent's actual or possible practical deliberation (the deliberative model) and explaining them on the basis of some motivating desire (the direct desire model). The former applies the model of one's own rational deliberation to others in roughly the way Dennett's ‘intentional stance’ model suggests. It views the agent as genuinely rational and requires ascribing evaluations to the agent whose actions are being explained. It also entails that action explanations are themselves irreducibly normative.

Dennett’s account of consciousness starts from third-person considerations. I argue this is wise, since beginning with first-person access precludes accommodating the third-person access we have to others’ mental states. But Dennett’s first-person operationalism, which seeks to save the first person in third-person, operationalist terms, denies the occurrence of folk-psychological states that one doesn’t believe oneself to be in, and so the occurrence of folk-psychological states that aren’t conscious. This conflicts with Dennett’s intentional-stance approach to the mental, on which we discern others’ mental states independently of those states’ being conscious. We can avoid this conflict with a higher-order theory of consciousness, which saves the spirit of Dennett’s approach, but enables us to distinguish conscious folk-psychological states from nonconscious ones. The intentional stance by itself can’t do this, since it can’t discern a higher-order awareness of a psychological state. But we can supplement the intentional stance with the higher-order theoretical apparatus.

This chapter introduces the conditions a system must meet to count as an agent. At a basic level, a system is an agent if it acts so as to satisfy its desires in accordance with its beliefs, where these are attitudes that have propositions as contents. Such a system is rational if its attitudes and actions meet certain desiderata of consistency and effectiveness. It is capable of reasoning if it can raise questions about the relations among propositions, and between propositions and evidence; form beliefs about those relations; and is disposed to let these beliefs serve as checks on its own rationality. The chapter argues that there is no reason why a group of people might not constitute a system that counts as an agent. A group might do so non-intentionally but the focus of the book is on intentionally formed group agents.

Dennett’s has recently attempted to break the “spell” that prevents people from submitting their religious beliefs and practices to scientific investigation. But what spell is being broken? Religion is not a unified phenomenon. By supposing that it is, Dennett is led to adopt an implausible mimetic theory of religious belief, and to mistakenly assume that the presence of a Hyperactive Agency Detection Device would impugn religious belief. More troublingly, although religious beliefs and practices should be studied scientifically, it would be a mistake to treat science as the exclusive arbiter of reality. Dennett makes human beings (persons) seem like aggregates of parts. Such a view seems to have no room for human dignity, except as artifacts of an intentional stance. A plausible theory of human dignity would take people to be ontologically significant unities, who, on my view, have first-person perspectives essentially.

This chapter discusses two cases where the informational architecture of a distributed system yields robust patterns of collective behavior, but where we have no good reason to posit a unified cognitive system: the architecture of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the organization of termite colonies. In light of these cases, it is argued that the intentional stance offers an entry point into questions about collective mentality, but that a plausible defence of collective mentality must address difficult questions about the implementation of mentality.

The chapter discusses the assumptions behind the notion of ‘design’ in greater detail. It draws on arguments around intentionality, manuscript genetics, and the extended mind. Design is understood as the author’s engagement with the materials of pen and paper, but also the language and the characters that emerge in the creative process. The conceptualisation of design, then, unfolds between improvisation and planning, between intentions and the resistance that comes from the materials. The chapter concludes by developing a distinction between reading for intentionality and reading for design, which relates to recent discussions in cognitive narratology and literary studies.

This chapter discusses the organizational and architectural constraints on collective mentality. It is argued that collective mentality is unlikely to be realized by an organizational structure that simply aggregates individual beliefs and desires; and that we should commit to the taxonomy of folk psychology at the level of cognitive systems, and deny that a naturalistic theory should appeal to representational states and processes that are readily mapped onto categories like belief and desire. A componential account of mental representation is sketched, and it is argued that many types of system-level representations are realized by competitive or quasi-competitive algorithms.

While it is clear that implicit attitudes are malleable, there is much to learn about the most effective techniques for changing them. This chapter examines three general approaches that increasingly appear to be well supported in both lab-based and field studies. The chapter considers the importance of rote practice, pre-commitment, and context regulation. Each represents a different element of adopting the “habit stance,” a way of cultivating more ethical implicit attitudes—and hence better spontaneous decisions and actions—by treating them as if they were habits. The chapter concludes by considering two kinds of objections. The first is empirical, focusing on the broadness and durability of implicit attitude change interventions. The second is not empirical. It is about the nature of praise, in particular whether the reshaping of one’s attitudes and behavior in the ways the chapter describes counts as a genuine form of ethical self-improvement.

Chapter 7 completes the discussion of alternatives to Literalism. It presents the view that the terms are used literally in the unexpected domains, but with distinct reference. The view has two main variants. The Technical-Behaviorist variant holds that they refer to patterns of behavior in the new domains. Dennett’s Intentional Stance is pressed into service as a familiar way to articulate this variant. The Exsanguinated Property variant holds that they refer to quasi-cognitive properties of some sort. Homuncular functionalism is a familiar way of articulating this variant. It argues that both variants fail to justify the distinction in reference that they propose between uses for humans and for nonhumans. It summarizes the benefits of Literalism and its strength relative to the three alternative views discussed in Chapters 5–7.

Can the intentional stance play all of the roles Dennett claims that it must play? There is reason for skepticism about the suitability of the intentional stance as an analysis of mature, person-level, intentional concepts. In part this is because of the dynamic and socially situated structure of our interpersonal practices. In part this is because folk-ascriptions of mentality are often guided by regulative concerns with impression management and identity construction. But scientific practice often relies on intentional states that are characterized in terms of their predictive and explanatory roles; and most humans employ tacit cognitive resources with a similar character when they make quick and efficient behavioral anticipations. In light of these considerations, it is unlikely a single set of explanatory norms will be operative in practices of quotidian interpretation, scientific explanation, and philosophical naturalization.

Despite Dennett’s vast scholarship, he seemed to only have directly addressed the topic of memory in a relatively unknown coauthored article published in a somewhat obscure volume. The current chapter attempts to reconstruct the ideas from this old article, and argues that it offers a viable and coherent view of episodic memory with substantial empirical support. Specifically, the chapter uncovers three empirically supported theses. A functional thesis, according to which our memory system not only processes information about past events but also uses this information to construct useful anticipations of possible future events. A computational thesis, according to which statistical regularities, along with individual limitations and goals, probabilistically constrain the search space examined during memory retrieval. And a metaphysical thesis, according to which memories do not exist as subpersonal-level brain structures encoding particular intentional contents but rather as personal-level psychological phenomena only accessible from the intentional stance.