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person in Black box

1942 2024

Daniel C. Dennett

Intentional stance

in Black box

Daniel C. Dennett (1942–2024), American philosopher of mind. Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, known for naturalistic accounts of consciousness and intentionality in Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea. The Intentional Stance (MIT Press, 1987) systematises the intentional-systems theory he had developed since a 1971 paper.

Stake§

Intellectual — the book advances a definite philosophical position against realist and eliminativist rivals. No commercial or professional conflict beyond scholarly reputation.

Dennett's contribution to this topic is to relativise the demand for transparency. The intentional stance predicts a system by treating it as a rational agent with beliefs and desires, without access to its physical innards — a way of understanding any black box that bypasses the mechanism. His point that we predict and make sense of one another without opening anyone's head sets the terms for asking why a machine should owe a legibility no mind has ever provided, a question that connects to Nisbett and Wilson on the absence of self-access and to Lipton on what interpretability could mean.

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Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs.
— The Intentional Stance (1987)

Dennett's recipe for the [[concept:intentional-stance|intentional stance]]: predict a system by ascribing beliefs and desires to it, never touching its physical innards. It is a way of understanding any black box — a person, an animal, a thermostat, a program — that bypasses the mechanism entirely.

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