Intentional stance
A way of predicting what a system will do by treating it as a rational agent with beliefs and desires, without knowing anything about how it is built inside. It is one of three angles an observer can take on a system — looking at its physics, at its design, or at it as an agent — and the agent-angle works by attributing reasons rather than by inspecting parts. It is how we already read other people, whose inner workings we never actually open up.
Daniel Dennett's strategy of predicting a system's behaviour by treating it as a rational agent with beliefs and desires, without any access to how it is physically built. One of three stances — physical, design, intentional — an observer can take toward a system; the intentional one works, when it works, by ascription rather than by opening the mechanism.
Etymology§
From Dennett's 1971 Journal of Philosophy paper "Intentional Systems," systematised in The Intentional Stance (MIT Press, 1987).
Dennett's claim is that we predict and make sense of one another by ascribing beliefs and desires, never by opening anyone's head — we have no mechanistic access to another mind and do not miss it — which sets up the question of why a machine should owe a standard of inner legibility that human dealings never meet.
It connects to the rest of the topic from the philosophy side. Nisbett and Wilson suggest the inner access we imagine we have to ourselves is largely absent; Lipton asks what interpretability could mean for a system at all; Miller treats explaining an agent as a social act rather than a disclosure of parts. The stance is a way of living with a black box without opening it.