The Intentional Stance - Revision history

Robert.adlington: /* 10. Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast */

2026-03-07T16:55:24Z

10. Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast

← Older revision		Revision as of 16:55, 7 March 2026
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	== 10. Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast ==		== 10. Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast ==

	* ~~Quote~~		* Two proposed principles of interpretation:
			** Normative Principle - (rationalizers) Attribute to a creature the propositional attitudes it ought to have given its circumstances.
			** Projective Principle - (projectors) Attribute the propositional attitudes one supposed one would have oneself in those circumstances.
			*Quine's double standard - strictly speaking there are no such things as beliefs, even if speaking as if there were is a practical necessity.
			*Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what the issues really are - and so it often takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
			*Philosophers, being roughly rational intentional systems, are gradually being persuaded that Dennett is right. But that is no doubt an illusion of perspective.

Robert.adlington: /* 8. Evolution, Error, and Intentionality */

2026-03-07T16:49:47Z

8. Evolution, Error, and Intentionality

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	== 8. Evolution, Error, and Intentionality ==		== 8. Evolution, Error, and Intentionality ==

	* ~~Quote~~		* An encyclopedia has derived intentionality. In contains information about thousands of things in the world, but only insofar as it is a device designed and intended for our use.
			* The doctrine of original intentionality: Any computer program, any robot we might design and build, no matter how strong the illusion we may create that is has become a genuine agent, could never be a truly autonomous thinker with the same sort of original intentionality we enjoy.
			* Either you must abandon meaning rationalism - the idea that you are unlike the fledgling cuckoo not only in having access, but also in having privileged access to your meanings - or you must abandon the naturalism that insists that you are, after all, just a product of natural selection, whose intentionality is thus derivative and hence potentially indeterminate.
			* Natural selection does not consciously seek out these rationales, but when it stumbles on them, the brute requirements of replication ensure that it "recognizes" their value. The illusion of intelligence is created because of our limited perspective on the process; evolution may well have tried all the "stupid moves" in addition to the "smart moves", but the stupid moves, being failures, disappeared from view. All we see is the unbroken string of triumphs. When we set ourselves the task of explaining why those were the triumphs, we uncover the reasons for things - the reasons already "acknowledged" by the relative success of organisms endowed with those things.
			* The original reasons, and the original responses that "tracked" them, were not ours, or our mammalian ancestors' but Nature's. Nature appreciated these reasons without representing them. And the design process itself is the source of our own intentionality. We, the reason-representers, the self-representers, are a late and specialized product.
			* So if there is to be any original intentionality - original just in the sense of being derived from no other, ulterior source - the intentionality of natural selection deserves the honor.
			* There is no ultimate User's Manual in which the real functions, and real meanings, of biological artifacts are officially represented. There is no more bedrock for what we might call original functionality than there is for its cognitivistic scion, original intentionality. You can't have realism about meanings without realism about functions. As Gould notes, "we may not be flattered" - especially when we apply the moral to our sense of our own authority about meanings - but we have no other reason to disbelieve it.

	== 9. Fast Thinking ==		== 9. Fast Thinking ==

	* ~~Quote~~		* Searle: "the man in the [Chinese] room has all the syntax we can give him, but he does not thereby acquire the relevant semantics."
			* Searle's propositions:
			** Proposition 1: Programs are purely formal (ie syntactical).
			** Proposition 2: Syntax is neither equivalent to nor sufficient by itself for semantics.
			** Proposition 3: Minds have mental contents (ie semantic contents).
			** Conclusion 1: Having a program - any program by itself - is neither sufficient for nor equivalent to having a mind.
			*Dennett's two propositions:
			**Searle: No computer program by itself could ever be sufficient to produce what an organic human brain, with its particular causal powers, demonstrably can produce: mental phenomena with intentional content.
			**Dennett: There is no way an electronic digital computer could be programmed so that it could produce what an organic human brain, with its particular causal powers, demonstrably can produce: control of the swift, intelligent, intentional activity exhibited by normal human beings.
			*It is no news that the brain gives every evidence of having a massively parallel architecture - millions if not billions of channels wide, all capable of simultaneous activity.
			*This is what makes the causal powers Searle imagines so mysterious: they have, by his own admission, no telltale effect on behavior (internal or external) - unlike the causal powers I take so seriously: the powers required to guide a body through life, seeing, hearing, acting, talking, deciding, investigating, and so on.
			*Searle has apparently confused a claim about the underivability of semantics from syntax with a claim about the underivability of the consciousness of semantics from syntax. For Searle, the idea of genuine understanding, genuine "semanticity" as he often calls it, is inextricable from the idea of consciousness. He does not so much as consider the possibility of unconscious semanticity.
			*Embodied, running syntax - the right program on a suitably fast machine - is sufficient for derived intentionality, and that is the only kind of semantics there is.
			*There is no such thing as intrinsic intentionality - especially if this is viewed, as Searle can now be seen to require, as a proerty to which the subject has conscious, privileged access.

	== 10. Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast ==		== 10. Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast ==

	* Quote		* Quote

Robert.adlington: /* 7. Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethnology: The "Panglossian Paradigm" Defended */

2026-03-06T16:26:28Z

7. Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethnology: The "Panglossian Paradigm" Defended

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 ** The first iteration - to a second-order intentional system - is the crucial step in recursion. There seems to be no interesting difference between say a fourth and a fifth-order intentional system.
 * I expect the results of the effort at intentional interpretations of monkeys, like the results of intentional interpretations of small children, to be riffled with the sorts of gaps and foggy places that are inevitable in the interpretation of systems that are, after all, only imperfectly rational.
 == 8. Evolution, Error, and Intentionality ==

Robert.adlington at 16:40, 5 March 2026

2026-03-05T16:40:23Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 16:40, 5 March 2026
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	**The difference between linguistically infected beliefs and the rest		**The difference between linguistically infected beliefs and the rest
	**The difference between artifactual or transparently notional objects and other notional objects - we can imagine things and not all of those things we imagine are (or must remain) fictional.		**The difference between artifactual or transparently notional objects and other notional objects - we can imagine things and not all of those things we imagine are (or must remain) fictional.
	*Reflections:
	**Four chief claims:
	***Propositions - The two conflicting view of propositions, "propositions as sentence-like things" and "propositions as sets of possible worlds" are strongly incompatible.		Reflections:
	****But if there is one thing the rest of academia needs from philosophers, it is a theory of propositions (or something like propositions). The term information is commonly used as a mass noun, as if information were some kind of substance that could be moved, stored, compressed, chopped up. Theorists in all kinds of disciplines pretend to know how to measure and characterize batches of this stuff, but in fact we have no sound and mutually recognized understanding of what information is and what kinds of parcels it should be measured in.		*Four chief claims:
	****A DVD can contain an entire encyclopedia or three hours of Bugs Bunny. The same amount of information is in each, but not the same amount of "semantic information".		**Propositions - The two conflicting view of propositions, "propositions as sentence-like things" and "propositions as sets of possible worlds" are strongly incompatible.
	****Propositions, as the ultimate medium of information transfer, as logically distinct, observer-independent, language-neutral morsels of fact (or fiction) continue to play a foundational role as atomic elements in many different theoretical investigations.		***But if there is one thing the rest of academia needs from philosophers, it is a theory of propositions (or something like propositions). The term information is commonly used as a mass noun, as if information were some kind of substance that could be moved, stored, compressed, chopped up. Theorists in all kinds of disciplines pretend to know how to measure and characterize batches of this stuff, but in fact we have no sound and mutually recognized understanding of what information is and what kinds of parcels it should be measured in.
	****Once one relaxes the grip of graspability by treating propositions as only indirectly and approximately "measuring" psychological states, they play their limited role rather well. So long as one recognizes that proposition talk is only a heuristic overlay, a useful - if sometimes treacherous - approximation that is systematically incapable of being rendered precise, one can get away with what is in essence the pretense that all informing can be modeled on telling - sending a dictum from A to B. What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain is not anything that one can capture whole in a sentence. But one can typically find a sentence that usefully distills the gist (not the essence in any stronger sense) of the informing to which one is referring. This sentence can be held to express, to a first approximation, the proposition at issue.		***A DVD can contain an entire encyclopedia or three hours of Bugs Bunny. The same amount of information is in each, but not the same amount of "semantic information".
	***Notional Worlds		***Propositions, as the ultimate medium of information transfer, as logically distinct, observer-independent, language-neutral morsels of fact (or fiction) continue to play a foundational role as atomic elements in many different theoretical investigations.
	***Russell's Principle - where you have to know what object you are making a judgment about - must be abandoned.		***Once one relaxes the grip of graspability by treating propositions as only indirectly and approximately "measuring" psychological states, they play their limited role rather well. So long as one recognizes that proposition talk is only a heuristic overlay, a useful - if sometimes treacherous - approximation that is systematically incapable of being rendered precise, one can get away with what is in essence the pretense that all informing can be modeled on telling - sending a dictum from A to B. What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain is not anything that one can capture whole in a sentence. But one can typically find a sentence that usefully distills the gist (not the essence in any stronger sense) of the informing to which one is referring. This sentence can be held to express, to a first approximation, the proposition at issue.
	***De re/de dicto - There is no stable, coherent view of this distinction		**Notional Worlds
	**Philosophy of psychology driven by the concerns of philosophy of language seems to be a dead end (presumably because however opinions and thoughts are stored, it is not in a purely (or possibly in any way) linguistic manner.		**Russell's Principle - where you have to know what object you are making a judgment about - must be abandoned.
			**De re/de dicto - There is no stable, coherent view of this distinction
			*Philosophy of psychology driven by the concerns of philosophy of language seems to be a dead end (presumably because however opinions and thoughts are stored, it is not in a purely (or possibly in any way) linguistic manner.

	== 6. Styles of Mental Representation ==		== 6. Styles of Mental Representation ==
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	**Changing states by editing and revising, one might say, instead of discarding and replacing. Economies of this sort require systematicity; the loci into which substitutions can be made have to have fixed ways of changing their functions as a function of the identity of the substitutends. The whole system thus does begin to look somewhat like a language, with counterparts for all the syntactical features mentioned at the outset.		**Changing states by editing and revising, one might say, instead of discarding and replacing. Economies of this sort require systematicity; the loci into which substitutions can be made have to have fixed ways of changing their functions as a function of the identity of the substitutends. The whole system thus does begin to look somewhat like a language, with counterparts for all the syntactical features mentioned at the outset.
	**Should we say that such a system finally emerges as a truly explicit system of internal representation?		**Should we say that such a system finally emerges as a truly explicit system of internal representation?


			Reflections:
			*If we probably do not need a language of thought, then, to get to and from the peripheries, do we need a language of thought to handle the most central control processes of higher animals (or just human beings)? Such "higher cognitive functions" as planning, problem solving, and "belief fixation" are intuitively the functions that involve thinking (as opposed to "mere" perceiving and acting). Here, if anywhere, the intellectualist vision should triumph.
			*Nowhere in AI connectionist networks are any rules explicitly represented; they are, of course, tacitly represented in the emergent dispositional structure of the network, but nothin happens in the network which is anything like checking to see if a rule applies or looking up the target term in a table of exception - paradigms of the covert intellectualist activities Ryle disparaged.

	== 7. Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethnology: The "Panglossian Paradigm" Defended ==		== 7. Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethnology: The "Panglossian Paradigm" Defended ==

	* ~~Quote~~		* The decision to conduct one's science in terms of beliefs, desires, and other "mentalistic" notions, the decision to adopt "the intentional stance" is not an unusual sort of decision in science.
			* The decision to adopt the intentional stance banks on the soundness of some as yet imprecisely described concept of information called semantic information.
			* Information in the semantic view is a perfectly real but very abstract commodity, the storage, transmission, and transformation of which is informally - but quite sure-footedly - recounted in ordinary talk in terms of beliefs and desires and the other states and acts philosophers call intentional.
			* Intentionality, in philosophical jargon, is - in a word - aboutness. Some of the things, states, and events in the world have the interesting property of being about other things, states, and events; figuratively, they point to other things. It's the sense of conceiving as, seeing as, thinking of as that the intentional idioms focus on.
			* The most familiar of such idioms are "believes that", "knows that", "respects (that)", "wants (it to be that)", "recognizes (that), "understands (that)". In short, the "mentalistic" vocabulary shunned by behaviorists and celebrated by cognitivists is quite well picked out by the logical test for referential opacity.
			* Levels of intentional systems:
			** First order - have beliefs and desires etc, but no beliefs and desires about beliefs and desires.
			** Second order - have beliefs and desires (and no doubt other intentional states) about beliefs and desires (and other intentional states) - both those of others and its own.
			** Third order - are capable of such states as "x wants y to believe that x believes he is alone."
			*** Fourth order - might want you to think it understood you to be requesting that it leave.
			* How high can humans go? Most of us can keep track of only about five or six orders, under the best of circumstances.
			** These orders ascend what is intuitively a scale of intelligence; higher-order attributions strike us as much more sophisticated, much more human, requiring much more intelligence.
			** Genuine communication, speech acts in the strong, human sense of the word, depend on at least three orders of intentionality in both speaker and audience.
			** It has been speculated that the increasing complexity of mental representation required for the maintenance of systems of reciprocal altruism (and other complex social relations) led, in evolution, to a sort of brain-power arms race.
			** The first iteration - to a second-order intentional system - is the crucial step in recursion. There seems to be no interesting difference between say a fourth and a fifth-order intentional system.
			* I expect the results of the effort at intentional interpretations of monkeys, like the results of intentional interpretations of small children, to be riffled with the sorts of gaps and foggy places that are inevitable in the interpretation of systems that are, after all, only imperfectly rational.
			*

	== 8. Evolution, Error, and Intentionality ==		== 8. Evolution, Error, and Intentionality ==

Robert.adlington: /* 6. Styles of Mental Representation */

2026-03-03T16:52:04Z

6. Styles of Mental Representation

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 == 6. Styles of Mental Representation ==
-* Quote
+* In [[The Concept of Mind]] (1949), Gilbert Ryle attacked a vision of the mind he called the intellectualist myth. This is the idea that minds are composed mainly of such episodes as the thinking of private thoughts, the consultation of rules and recipes, the application of general truths to particular circumstances, and the subsequent deduction of implications about those particulars.
 == 7. Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethnology: The "Panglossian Paradigm" Defended ==

Robert.adlington: /* 5. Beyond Belief */

2026-03-02T07:56:32Z

5. Beyond Belief

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 **The difference between linguistically infected beliefs and the rest
 **The difference between artifactual or transparently notional objects and other notional objects - we can imagine things and not all of those things we imagine are (or must remain) fictional.
 == 6. Styles of Mental Representation ==

Robert.adlington: /* 5. Beyond Belief */

2026-03-01T11:27:26Z

5. Beyond Belief

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 == 5. Beyond Belief ==
-* Quote
+* Beliefs, standardly, are viewed as propositional attitudes.
 == 6. Styles of Mental Representation ==

Robert.adlington: /* 4. Making Sense of Ourselves */

2026-03-01T10:59:30Z

4. Making Sense of Ourselves

← Older revision		Revision as of 10:59, 1 March 2026
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	== 4. Making Sense of Ourselves ==		== 4. Making Sense of Ourselves ==

	* ~~Quote~~		* Each of us is in most regards a sort of inveterate auto-psychologist, effortlessly inventing intentional interpretations of our own actions in an inseparable mix of confabulation, retrospective self-justification, and (on occasion, no doubt) good theorizing.
			* Rationality is not deductive closure. Nor is it perfect logical consistency.
			* Given the ubiquity of words, and our incessant working, playing, and fiddling with words, there is an inexhaustible and ever-growing supply of human artifacts composed of words: not just public utterances and inscriptions, but sentences running through our heads to be contemplated, endorsed, discarded, denied, memorized, avowed. These products of human activities are easily confused with beliefs (and desires and other mental states).
			* One thing that happens when we are asked what we ourselves believe is that sentences of our natural languages arise in us as candidates for our endorsement and possible public expression.
			* The self-questioning process that individuates belief expressions so crisply need not be revealing any psychologically important underlying individuation (or beliefs, presumably) but be just an artifact of the environmental demand for a particular sort of act.
			* Churchland: A declarative utterance is a "one-dimensional projection - through the compound lens of Wernicke's and Broca's areas onto the idiosyncratic surface of the speaker's language - a 1D projection of a 4- or 5D 'solid" that is an element in his true kinematical state."

	== 5. Beyond Belief ==		== 5. Beyond Belief ==

Robert.adlington: /* 3. Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology */

2026-02-19T17:46:38Z

3. Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology

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 == 3. Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology ==
-* Quote
+* Chemistry has been shown to reduce, in some sense, to physics, and this is clearly a Good Thing.
 == 4. Making Sense of Ourselves ==

Robert.adlington: /* 2. True Believers */

2026-02-18T17:48:21Z

2. True Believers

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 * Language enables us to formulate highly specific desires, but it also forces us on occasion to commit ourselves to desires altogether more stringent in their conditions of satisfaction than anything we would otherwise have any reason to endeavor to satisfy.
 ** One can easily be misled, since we are language-using creatures, into thinking that it is obvious that beliefs and desires are rather like sentences stored in the head. But these are special cases of belief and desire and as such may not be reliable models for the whole domain.
 == 3. Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology ==