The Intentional Stance

1. Setting Off on the Right Foot

• The Manifest Image - Our nervous systems were designed to make the distinctions we need swiftly and reliably, to bring under single sensory rubrics the relevant common features in our environment, and to ignore what we can usually get away with ignoring.
  • We have it thanks to extraordinarily efficient and reliable systems of expectation-generation.
  • Compare this to the scientific image
• We make sense of each other by adopting the intentional stance.

2. True Believers

• While belief is a perfectly objective phenomenon, it can be discerned only from the point of view of one who adopts a certain predictive strategy.
• Any system whose behavior is well predicted by this strategy is in the fullest sense of the word a believer. What it is to be a true believer is to be an intentional system, a system whose behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy.
• Strategies of understanding:
  • The physical strategy/Stance - Use your knowledge of the laws of physics
  • The design stance - Based on the assumption that a system has a design, predict that it will behave as it was designed to under various circumstances. Many biological objects are, in this sense, not just physical systems, but designed systems.
  • The intentional stance - Treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent, figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have and what desires it ought to have, and then predict that it will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs.
• In general, it seems we come to believe all the truths about the parts of the world around us we are put in a position to learn about.
• Many perfectly detectable, graspable, memorable facts are of no interest to me and hence do not come to be believed by me, so we should attribute as beliefs all the truths relevant to the system's interests (or desires) that the system's experience to date has made available.
• False beliefs have to start somewhere, the seed may be sown in hallucination, illusion, a normal variety of simple misperception, memory deterioration, or deliberate fraud.
• All but the smallest portion (say 10%) of a person's beliefs are likely true.
• Distinction between belief and opinion (where the latter are linguistically infected, relatively sophisticated cognitive states - essentially sentences)
• Desires are normally survival, absence of pain, food, comfort, procreation, entertainment, and are things a system believes to be good for it or the best means to other ends it desires.
• 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.
• Our use of the intentional strategy is so habitual and effortless that the role it plays in shaping our expectations about people is easily overlooked.
• We can also apply it to:
  • Other mammals,
  • Some artifacts (such as chess-playing computers or humble thermostats
  • Even plants and lightning! (which wants to find the best way to ground)
• Often the only strategy that is at all practical is the intentional strategy; it gives us predictive power we can get by no other method.
• Even when it fails to distinguish a single move with a highest probability, it can dramatically reduce the number of live options.
• Its inability to predict fine-grained descriptions of actions is, in fact, a source of strength, for it is this neutrality with regard to details of implementation that permits one to exploit it in complex cases, like in chaining predictions. We think he did that because she did that because they thought that and he knew that she might want to do that...
• We support generalizations and predictions by using patterns in human behavior that are describable only from the intentional stance.
• The intentional strategy works as well as it does, which is not perfectly.
• As systems become perceptually richer and behaviorally more versatile, it becomes harder and harder to make substitutions in the actual links of the system to the world without changing the organization of the system itself. We are so multifariously and intricately connected to the world that almost no substitution is possible.
• We say that the organism continuously mirrors the environment, or that there is a representation of the environment in - or implicit in - the organization of the system.
• When we discover some object for which the intentional strategy works, we endeavor to interpret some of its internal states or processes as internal representations. What makes some internal feature of a thing a representation could only be its role in regulating the behavior of an intentional system.
• Evolution has designed human beings to be rational, to believe what they ought to believe and want what they ought to want.
• Some elegant, generative, indefinitely extendable principles of representation must be responsible for how our brain has managed to solve the problem of combinatorial explosion as the scale of its complexity has increased.

3. Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology

• Chemistry has been shown to reduce, in some sense, to physics, and this is clearly a Good Thing.
• Folk psychology:
  • We learn to use folk psychology as a vernacular social technology, a craft; but we don't learn it self-consciously as a theory. Our knowledge of it is like our knowledge of the grammar of our native tongue.
  • What are beliefs? For folk psychology, roughly, they are information-bearing states of people that arise from perceptions and that, together with appropriately related desires, lead to intelligent action.
  • Folk psychology seems to be a true theory, by and large, and hence is a candidate for incorporation into science.
  • We use folk psychology all the time, to explain and predict each other's behavior; we attribute beliefs and desires to each other with confidence - and quite unselfconsciously - and spend a substantial portion of our waking lives formulating the world - not excluding ourselves - in these terms. Folk psychology is about as pervasive a part of our second nature as is our folk physics of middle-sized objects.
  • It might best be viewed as a rationalistic calculus of interpretation and prediction - an idealizing, abstract, instrumentalistic interpretation method that has evolved because it works and works because we have evolved
  • We approach each other as intentional systems where:
    • Our beliefs are those we ought to have - ie true and relevant to our lives
    • Our desires are those we ought to have - ie food, security, health, sex, wealth, power, influence, etc
    • Our behavior is those acts that it would be rational for us to do, given our beliefs and desires.
  • The system works very well because we are pretty rational!
  • It's a sort of logical behaviorism - given a belief p, a person is disposed to behave in certain ways under certain conditions.
• We seem to have an infinity of beliefs, and they seem not to be stored separately, but rather in relation to each other.
• Intentional system theory:
  • Deals just with the performance specifications of believers while remaining silent on how the systems are to be implemented.
• Sub-personal cognitive psychology:
  • The brain is a semantic engine; its task is to discover what its multifarious inputs mean, to discriminate them by their significance and "act accordingly" That's what brains are for.
  • But the brain, as physiology or plain common sense shows us, is just a syntactic engine; all it can do is discriminate its inputs by their structural, temporal, and physical features and let its entirely mechanical activities be governed by these "syntactic" features of its inputs. That's all brains can do.
  • Now how does the brain manage to get semantics from syntax?
    • All one can hope to produce (all natural selection can have produced) are systems that seem to discriminate meanings by actually discriminating things (tokens of no doubt wildly disjunctive types) that co-vary reliably with meanings. Evolution has designed our brains not only to do this but to evolve and follow strategies of self-improvement in this activity during their individual lifetimes.
    • It is the task of sub-personal cognitive psychology to prose and test models of such activity - of pattern recognition or stimulus generalization, concept learning, expectation, learning, goal-directed behavior, problem-solving - that not only produce a simulacrum of genuine content-sensitivity, but that do this in ways demonstrably like the way people's brains do it, exhibiting the same powers and the same vulnerabilities to deception, overload, and confusion.
  • We must relate the microprocesses in the brain to the level of organism-environment interaction, development, and evolution, including social interaction as a particularly important part.
  • Semantic properties are not just relational but super-relational, for the relation a particular vehicle of content, or token must bear in order to have content is not just a relation it bears to other similar things (eg other tokens, parts of tokens, sets of tokens, causes of tokens) but a relation between the token and the whole lief - and counterfactual life - of the organism it serves and that organism's requirements for survival and its evolutionary ancestry.
  • for two things both to believe that cats eat fish they need not be physically similar in any specifiable way, but they must both be in a "functional" condition specifiable in principle in the most general functional language; they must share a Turing machine description according to which they are both in some particular logical state.

4. Making Sense of Ourselves

• 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

• Beliefs, standardly, are viewed as propositional attitudes.
• Propositions are:
  • Sentence-like entities, constructed from parts according to a syntax.
  • Sets of possible worlds
  • Something like collections or arrangements of objects and properties in the world.
• Certainly some very efficient and elegant sort of compositionality accounts for the essentially limitless powers we have to perceive, think about, believe, intend... different things. Perhaps any possible universal system of representation must be recognizably sentential (ie, generating sentences, like a language).
• In general, the relations that exist between things in the world in virtue of the beliefs (and other psychological states) of believers are relations we have very good reasons to talk about, so we must have some theory or theories capable of asserting that such relations hold. No methodologically solipsistic theory will have that capacity, of course.
• One must be richly informed about, intimately connected with, the world at large, its occupants and properties, in order to be said with any propriety to have beliefs. All one's 'names' must be somewhat vivid. The idea that some beliefs, de dicto beliefs, have no vividness requirement is a symptom of the subliminal view of de dicto beliefs as mere mental sayings...
• The most promising issues (from this very long and complex paper):
  • Different ways of thinking of something - None of the ways entails the existence of something of which one is thinking.
  • The difference between episodic thinking and believing - At any time, we may have beliefs about many things we are unable to think about because we are temporarily unable to gain access to them (eg, the person who taught you long division).
  • The difference between explicit and virtual representation - We may not consciously (or unconsciously) think of something but still have implicit belief about something (eg the tyre of a rental car)
  • 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.

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.
    • 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.
    • 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, 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.
    • 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.
  • Notional Worlds
  • 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

• 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.
• Cognitive science has no allegiance to "privileged access", another of Ryle's bugbears. Indeed most of the mental representations that it talks of are presumed to be utterly inaccessible to the consciousness of the agent. It is a doctrine of unconscious mental representations for the most part. So this is not the intellectualism of the inner Cartesian theatre, with everything happening on the stage of consciousness; this is "backstage" intellectualism - and in the view of these new theorists, so much the better for it.
• Three ways of representing information:
  • Explicitly - If and only if there actually exists in the functionally relevant place in the system a physically structured object, a formula or string or tokening of some members of a system (or "language") of elements for which there is a semantics or interpretation, and a provision (a mechanism of some sort) for reading or parsing the formula. Though exigent, this definition leaves room for systems that are not linear, sequential, sentence-like systems, but might, for instance, be "map-reading systems" or "diagram interpreters".
  • Implicitly - If it is implied logically by something that is stored explicitly, including via axioms and definitions stored in a machine that can churn out theorems (as we can via Euclidean axioms). Here, importantly, it needn't take more space to store more implicit information. Here implicit depends on explicit
  • Tacitly - Here explicit depends on implicit. This is what Ryle was getting at when he claimed that explicitly proving things depended on an agent's having a lot of know-how, which could not itself be explained in terms of the explicit representation in the agent of any rules or recipes, because to be able to manipulate those rules and recipes there would have to be an inner agent with the know-how to handle those explicit items - and that would lead to an infinite regress. At the bottom, Ryle saw, there has to be a system that merely has the know-how. If it can be said to represent its know-how at all, it must represent it not explicitly and not implicitly - in the sense just defined - but tacitly. The know-how has to be built into the system in some fashion that does not require it to be represented (explicitly) in the system. People often use the word "implicit" to describe such information-holding; what they mean is what I mean by "tacit".
• All these terms - "explicit", "potentially explicit", "implicit", and "tacit" - are to be distinguished from "conscious" and "unconscious". Thus what you consciously represent to yourself is at best indirect evidence of what might be explicitly represented in you unconsciously.
• So far as cognitive science is concerned, the important phenomena are the explicit unconscious mental representations.
• You can explicitly, consciously follow a rule (say in Bridge), but Ryle argues that this is not a good model for all of human mental activity. In contrast, the "intuitive player" may also follow the rule, but has never heard of it or consciously thought about it. Finally a player could know the rule but not slavishly follow and realize that there are exceptions to it.
• Rote memorization is the worst sort of classroom activity, but is the best model for cognitive science, because it decouples memory from understanding. We want our storers and manipulators to be stupider than our understander, otherwise we'll get into a Rylean regress.
• Could virtually all the backstage know-how be merely tacit in the organization of the system? How powerful can a system of tacit representation be?
• Ryle is the foe of internal representation, but he has the good sense to acknowledge what might be called peripheral explicit representation at the input and output boundaries of people.
• Practicing may somehow be an analogous process of partial self-design: it yields; like its analogue, a "device" that "obeys" the rules without consulting any expression of them.
• Transient tacit representation - All the rules are represented all the time, but depending on the state of the system, only one set of rules is tacitly represented as being followed at any time. For instance, an animal that is both aquatic and terrestrial obeys one set of rules when it is on land and another when it is in the water. Simply getting wet could be the trigger for changing internal state from one set of rules to the other.
  • If elaborate perceptual analysis machinery drives the system into its various states, then there is no apparent limit to the specificity or complexity of the state of the world, for instance, that could be tacitly represented by the current state of such a system.
  • Such systems of tacit representation would need no terms to be "translated by" the various terms in the theorists' attempts to capture the information tacitly represented by such states. For the whole point of tacit representation is that it is tacit! States of such a system get their semantic properties directly an only from their globally defined functional roles.
  • As the number of states (each with its distinctive set of tacitly represented rules) grows, as a system becomes versatile enough to be driven into a great many significantly different control states, this profligacy demands that the design rely in one way or another on economies achieved via multiple use of resources.
  • 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?

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

• 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.

Reflections:

• There is really no substitute, in the radical translation business, for going in and talking with the natives. You can test more hypotheses in half an hour of attempted chitchat than you can in a month of observation and unobtrusive manipulation.
• Vervets live in a world in which secrets are virtually impossible. Unlike orangutans and chimps, who frequently spend time along, vervets live in the open in close proximity to the other members of their groups and have no solitary projects of any scope. So it is a rare occasion indeed when one vervet is in a position to learn something that it alone knows and know that it alone knows.
• Without frequent opportunities to recognize that one know something that the others don't know, devious reasons for or against imparting information cannot even exist - let alone be recognized and acted upon.
• The problems of interpretation in psychology and the problems of interpretation in biology are the same problems, engendering the same prospects - and false hopes - of solution, the same confusions, the same criticisms and arguments.
• Psychologists can't do their work without the rationality assumption of the intentional stance, and biologists can't do their work without the optimality assumptions of adaptionist thinking.
• Without answers to "why" questions, we cannot begin to categorize what has happened into the right sorts of parts. The biologist who helps himself to even such an obviously safe functional category as eye, leg, or lung is already committed to assumptions about what is good, just as the psychologist who helps himself to the bland categories of avoidance or recognition is committed to assumptions about what is rational.
• We take on optimality assumptions not because we naively think that evolution has made this the best of all possible worlds, but because we must be interpreters, if we are to make any progress at all, and interpretation requires the invocation of optimality.
• I stick to my guns:
  • Adaptationist thinking in biology is precisely as unavoidable, as wise, as fruitful - and as risky - as mentalist thinking in psychology and cognitive science generally.
  • Proper adaptationist thinking just is adopting a special version of the intentional stance in evolutionary thinking - uncovering the free-floating rationales of designs in nature.
• Evolutionary explanations are essentially historical narratives

8. Evolution, Error, and Intentionality

• 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

• 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

• 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.