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

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

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8. Evolution, Error, and Intentionality

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9. Fast Thinking

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10. Mid-Term Examination: Compare and Contrast

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