recis of The Intentional Stance
نویسنده
چکیده
The intentional stance is the strategy of prediction and explanation that attributes beliefs, desires, and other "intentional" states to systems living and nonliving and predicts future behavior from what it would be rational for an agent to do, given those beliefs and desires. Any system whose performance can be thus predicted and explained is an intentional system, whatever its innards . The strategy of treating parts of the world as intentional systems is the foundation of "folk psychology," but is also exploited (and is virtually unavoidable) in artificial intelligence and cognitive science more generally, as well as in evolutionary theory. An analysis of the role of the intentional stance and its presuppositions supports a naturalistic theory of mental states and events, their content or intentionality, and the relation between "mentalistic" levels of explanation and neurophysiological or mechanistic levels of explanation. As such, the analysis of the intentional stance grounds a theory of the mind and its relation to the body.
منابع مشابه
The Intentional Stance and Cultural Learning: a Developmental Feedback Loop
In this paper, I propose a developmental explanation of the reliability of the intentional stance as an interpretive strategy, and by doing so counter an objection to Dennett’s intentional stance theory (i.e. the ‘If it isn’t true, why does it work?’ objection). Specifically, young children’s use of the intentional stance enables them to learn from and thereby to become more similar to the adul...
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The "intentional stance" is the disposition to treat an entity as a rational agent, possessing particular beliefs, desires, and intentions, in order to interpret and predict it's behavior. The intentional stance is a component of a broader social cognitive function, mentalizing. Here we report a study that investigates the neural substrates of "on-line" mentalizing, using PET, by asking volunte...
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Humans readily adopt an intentional stance to other people, comprehending their behavior as guided by unobservable mental states such as belief, desire, and intention. We used fMRI in healthy adults to test the hypothesis that this stance is primed by the default mode of human brain function present when the mind is at rest. We report three findings that support this hypothesis. First, brain re...
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Reading Mother Nature's Mind I wonder how Dennett and I, both firm naturalists and believers in the relevance and importance of natural selection for understanding the human mind, should have come to such different conclusions about holism in the theory of meaning. I try to focus our differences by examining the relation between what Dennett has termed "the intentional stance" and "the design s...
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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, r...
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