Intentional Systems Theory, Mental Causation and Empathie Resonance

In the first section of this paper I argue that the main reason why Daniel Dennett's Intentional Systems Theory (1ST) has been perceived as behaviourist or antirealist is its inability to account for the causal efficacy of the mental. The rest of the paper is devoted to the claim that by emending the theory with a phenomenon called 'empathie resonance' (ER), it can account for the various explananda in the mental causation debate. Thus, 1ST + ER is a much more viable option than 1ST, even though IST + ER assigns a crucial role to the phenomenology of agency, a role that is incompatible with Dennett's writings on consciousness. The most fundamental thesis of Daniel Dennett's intentional systems theory (1ST; Dennett 1978, 1987) is that the ontology of mental states cannot be considered in abstraction from the epistemology of mental state ascription. From this thesis, a number of attractive features follow. 1ST respects the distinction between the sub personal and the personal level of description (the distinction is Dennett's (1969) own). It resists the reification of beliefs and desires like no other theory that aspires to a form of realism about the mental. It does not imply theses about the nature of the brain that may or do contradict the findings of neuroscience, nor does it need to postulate theses about the brain that are immune to empirical investigation. But 1ST has never been an overly popular position. This is due mainly to its perceived behaviourist, instrumentalist character?its failure to secure mental realism, despite its aspirations. One way to understand this opposition against 1ST, as I shall explain in the next section, is to construe it as a worry about the inability of 1ST to accommodate the phenomenon of mental causation. Indeed, Dennett does not even attempt to make room for mental causation within 1ST. M. V. P. Slors (El) Department of Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9103, Nijmegen 6500 HD, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]