The Intentional Stance
The Intentional Stance

Author: Daniel C. Dennett

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1989-03-06

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9780262540537

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How are we able to understand and anticipate each other in everyday life, in our daily interactions? Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, asserts Daniel Dennett in this first full-scale presentation of a theory of intentionality that he has been developing for almost twenty years. We adopt a stance, he argues, a predictive strategy of interpretation that presupposes the rationality of the people—or other entities—we are hoping to understand and predict. These principles of radical interpretation have far-reaching implications for the metaphysical and scientific status of the processes referred to by the everday terms of folk psychology and their corresponding terms in cognitive science.While Dennett's philosophical stance has been steadfast over the years, his views have undergone successive enrichments, refinements, and extensions. The Intentional Stance brings together both previously published and original material: four of the book's ten chapters—its first and the final three—appear here for the first time and push the theory into surprising new territory. The remaining six were published earlier in the 1980s but were not easily accessible; each is followed by a reflection—an essay reconsidering and extending the claims of the earlier work. These reflections and the new chapters represent the vanguard of Dennett's thought. They reveal fresh lines of inquiry into fundamental issues in psychology, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary theory as well as traditional issues in the philosophy of mind. A Bradford Book.

Brainstorms
Brainstorms

Author: Daniel Clement Dennett

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9780262540377

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This collection of 17 essays by the author offers a comprehensive theory of mind, encompassing traditional issues of consciousness and free will. Using careful arguments and ingenious thought-experiments, the author exposes familiar preconceptions and hobbling institutions. This collection of 17 essays by the author offers a comprehensive theory of mind, encompassing traditional issues of consciousness and free will. Using careful arguments and ingenious thought-experiments, the author exposes familiar preconceptions and hobbling institutions. The essays are grouped into four sections: Intentional Explanation and Attributions of Mentality; The Nature of Theory in Psychology; Objects of Consciousness and the Nature of Experience; and Free Will and Personhood.

Macrocognition
Macrocognition

Author: Bryce Huebner

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-11-26

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 019992628X

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We live in an age of scientific collaboration, popular uprisings, failing political parties, and increasing corporate power. Many of these kinds of collective action derive from the decisions of intelligent and powerful leaders, and many others emerge as a result of the aggregation of individual interests. But genuinely collective mentality remains a seductive possibility. This book develops a novel approach to distributed cognition and collective intentionality. It argues that genuine cognition requires the capacity to engage in flexible goal-directed behavior, and that this requires specialized representational systems that are integrated in a way that yields fluid and skillful coping with environmental contingencies. In line with this argument, the book claims that collective mentality should be posited where and only where specialized subroutines are integrated to yields goal-directed behavior that is sensitive to the concerns that are relevant to a group as such. Unlike traditional claims about collective intentionality, this approach reveals that there are many kinds of collective minds: some groups have cognitive capacities that are more like those that we find in honeybees or cats than they are like those that we find in people. Indeed, groups are unlikely to be "believers" in the fullest sense of the term, and understanding why this is the case sheds new light on questions about collective intentionality and collective responsibility.

Freedom Evolves
Freedom Evolves

Author: Daniel C. Dennett

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2004-01-27

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1101572663

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Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers “yes!” Using an array of provocative formulations, Dennett sets out to show how we alone among the animals have evolved minds that give us free will and morality. Weaving a richly detailed narrative, Dennett explains in a series of strikingly original arguments—drawing upon evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, and philosophy—that far from being an enemy of traditional explorations of freedom, morality, and meaning, the evolutionary perspective can be an indispensable ally. In Freedom Evolves, Dennett seeks to place ethics on the foundation it deserves: a realistic, naturalistic, potentially unified vision of our place in nature.

Content and Consciousness Revisited
Content and Consciousness Revisited

Author: Carlos Muñoz-Suárez

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-07-10

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 331917374X

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What are the grounds for the distinction between the mental and the physical? What is it the relation between ascribing mental states to an organism and understanding its behavior? Are animals and complex systems vehicles of inner evolutionary environments? Is there a difference between personal and sub-personal level processes in the brain? Answers to these and other questions were developed in Daniel Dennett’s first book, Content and Consciousness (1969), where he sketched a unified theoretical framework for views that are now considered foundational in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Content and Consciousness Revisited is devoted to reconsider the ideas and ideals introduced in Dennett’s seminal book, by covering its fundamental concepts, hypotheses and approaches and taking into account the findings and progress which have taken place during more than four decades. This book includes original and critical contributions about the relations between science and philosophy, the personal/sub-personal level distinction, intelligence, learning, intentionality, rationality, propositional attitudes, among other issues of scientific and philosophical interest. Each chapter embraces an updated approach to several disciplines, like cognitive science, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind and cognitive psychiatry.

Intentions and Intentionality
Intentions and Intentionality

Author: Bertram F. Malle

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 9780262632676

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Highlights the roles of intention and intentionality in social cognition.

Intentionality
Intentionality

Author: Gábor Forrai

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 9042018178

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This book contains eleven original papers about intentionality. Some explore current problems such as the status of intentional content, the intentionality of perception and emotion, the connections between intentionality and normativity, the relationship between intentionality and consciousness, the characteristics of the intentional idiom. Others discuss the work of historical figures like Locke, Brentano, Husserl and Frege.

The Sources of Intentionality
The Sources of Intentionality

Author: Uriah Kriegel

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0199380317

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What do thoughts, hopes, paintings, words, desires, photographs, traffic signs, and perceptions have in common? They are all about something, are directed, are contentful - in a way chairs and trees, for example, are not. This book inquires into the source of this power of directedness that some items exhibit while others do not. An approach to this issue prevalent in the philosophy of the past half-century seeks to explain the power of directedness in terms of certain items' ability to reliably track things in their environment. A very different approach, with a venerable history and enjoying a recent resurgence, seeks to explain the power of directedness rather in terms of an intrinsic ability of conscious experience to direct itself. This book attempts a synthesis of both approaches, developing an account of the sources of such directedness that grounds it both in reliable tracking and in conscious experience.

Mind Design II
Mind Design II

Author: John Haugeland

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1997-03-06

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 9780262581530

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Mind design is the endeavor to understand mind (thinking, intellect) in terms of its design (how it is built, how it works). Unlike traditional empirical psychology, it is more oriented toward the "how" than the "what." An experiment in mind design is more likely to be an attempt to build something and make it work—as in artificial intelligence—than to observe or analyze what already exists. Mind design is psychology by reverse engineering. When Mind Design was first published in 1981, it became a classic in the then-nascent fields of cognitive science and AI. This second edition retains four landmark essays from the first, adding to them one earlier milestone (Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence") and eleven more recent articles about connectionism, dynamical systems, and symbolic versus nonsymbolic models. The contributors are divided about evenly between philosophers and scientists. Yet all are "philosophical" in that they address fundamental issues and concepts; and all are "scientific" in that they are technically sophisticated and concerned with concrete empirical research. Contributors Rodney A. Brooks, Paul M. Churchland, Andy Clark, Daniel C. Dennett, Hubert L. Dreyfus, Jerry A. Fodor, Joseph Garon, John Haugeland, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, Zenon W. Pylyshyn, William Ramsey, Jay F. Rosenberg, David E. Rumelhart, John R. Searle, Herbert A. Simon, Paul Smolensky, Stephen Stich, A.M. Turing, Timothy van Gelder

Phenomenal Intentionality
Phenomenal Intentionality

Author: Uriah Kriegel

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-01-09

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0199720525

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Since the late 1970's, the main research program for understanding intentionality -- the mind's ability to direct itself onto the world -- has been based on the attempt naturalize intentionality, in the sense of making it intelligible how intentionality can occur in a perfectly natural, indeed entirely physical, world. Some philosophers, however, have remained skeptical of this entire approach. In particular, some have argued that phenomenal consciousness - - the subjective feel of conscious experience -- has an essential role to play in the theory of intentionality, a role missing in the naturalization program. Thus a number of authors have recently brought to the fore the notion of phenomenal intentionality, as well as a cluster of nearby notions. There is a vague sense that their work is interrelated, complementary, and mutually reinforcing, in a way that suggests a germinal research program. With twelve new essays by philosophers at the forefront of the field, this volume is designed to launch this research program in a more self-conscious way, by exploring some of the fundamental claims and themes of relevance to this program.