Lecture 4/9/2009

Intentionality

 
 

Is folk psychology a theory about the causes of behavior?

 
 

Topics

1. Thermostats
   
2. Patterns
   
3. Patterns without Causation
   
4. What it Takes to have beliefs
   
5. Problems
   

 
 

 
 

The Intentional Strategy:

'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'

'finally you predict that ...

 
 

Thermostats

We could take this strategy towards a thermostat:

'it's too hot'

It's too cold

Ahh! It's just right.

 
 

But we have a better strategy

'the engineers among us can quite fully grasp its internal operation without the aid of this anthropomorphizing.'

 
 

Suppose there are Martian of great intelligence

Suppose they have no trouble understanding us as mechanical devices

• The way engineers view thermostat
  

 
 

The Martians could understand us without taking the intentional strategy,

But we would still need it, because we are cognitively limited.

This eliminates propositional attitudes.

 
 

Patterns

 

Not taking the intentionality strategy, the Martians' would be missing something perfectly objective: the pattern in human behavior that are describable from the intentional stance, and only from that stance…'

 
 

Our predictive powers, using the intentional strategy, would seem magical to a Martian

 
 

 
 

Dennett:

The intentional strategy doesn't try to find the cause of the behavior.