The Intentional Stance and the Imitation Game

1 The intentional stance and intentional systems In Brainstorms Dennett (1981) proposes the following six conditions, each of which is necessary, of`personhood'. Although Dennett is concerned with`moral personhood', rather than personhood as such, he believes that metaphysical personhood is a necessary condition of moral personhood. The six conditions are: rationality, intentionality, stance, reciprocity, verbal communication, and consciousness. The rst three (rationality, intentionality and stance) are used for deening intentional system: An intentional system is a system whose behavior can be. . .explained and predicted by relying on ascriptions to the system of beliefs and desires (and other intentionally characterized features | what I call intentions here, meaning to include hopes, fears, intentions, perceptions, expectations, etc.).. . .We ascribe beliefs and desires to dogs and sh and thereby predict their behavior, and we can even use the procedure to predict the behavior of some machines.. . .By assuming the chess-playing] computer has certain beliefs (or information) and desires (or preference functions) dealing with the chess game in progress, I can calculate | under auspicious circumstances | the computer's most likely next move, provided I assume that the computer deals rationally with these beliefs and desires. The computer is an intentional system in these instances not because it has any particular intrinsic features, and not because it really and truly has beliefs and desires (whatever that would be), but just because it succumbs to a certain stance adopted towards it, namely the intentional stance, the stance that proceeds by ascribing intentional predicates under the usual constraints to the computer, the stance that proceeds by considering the computer as a rational practical reasoner. (Dennett, 1981, p. 271, stress supplied in all cases) The second condition of the rst three, interdependent conditions is that of intentionality, i.e. the ascription to the system of beliefs and desires. Although Dennett does not state explicitly how such ascription is possible, he clearly depends on the sort of ascription mechanism formulated by Strawson in his book, Individuals (Strawson, 1959). For instance, when outlining the six conditions, or`themes' as he calls them, Dennett writes: The second theme is that persons are beings to which states of consciousness are attributed, or to which psychological or mental or intentional predicates, are ascribed. Thus Strawson identiies the concept of a person as`the concept of a type of entity such that both predicates ascribing states of consciousness and predicates ascribing 1