Intentional stance and real patterns: are beliefs and desires real patterns or merely useful instruments?

Daniel Dennett, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Beliefs and desires are real patterns, detectable by adopting the intentional stance toward a system.12 Adopting the stance is treating the system as if it had beliefs, goals, and capacities related in a systematic way. The stance is justified when prediction from it succeeds, and prediction succeeds because natural selection has engineered brains whose patterns of behavior are objectively trackable from the stance.

This is not instrumentalism: the patterns are real, in the same sense that any pattern detectable by a reliable detector is real. Quinean indeterminacy of content is also real, but the space in which radical indeterminacy actually arises is vanishingly small.345

Sources

  1. What should such a rational agent so equipped with belief and desire do? Stay put, clearly, which is just what the lectern does. I predict the lectern's behavior, accurately, from the intentional stance, so is it an intentional system? If it is, anything at all is. What should disqualify the lectern?
    The Intentional Stance, pp. 34–35
  2. So defined, intentional systems are obviously not all persons. We ascribe And sufficient, but I will not argue it here. I argue for this in Content and Conscious and more recently and explicitly in Chapters 2 and 9 of this volume. beliefs and desires to dogs and fish and thereby predict their behavior, and we can even use the procedure to predict the behavior of some machines.
    IV Free Will and Personhood, p. 292
  3. The more difficult version of the question asks, in effect, how the machinery which Nature has provided us works. And we cannot yet give a good answer to that question. We just do not know. We do know how the strategy works, and we know the easy answer to the question of why it works, but knowing these does not help us much with the hard answer. It is not that there is any dearth of doctrine, however.
    The Intentional Stance, pp. 44–45
  4. It is a measure of the success of contemporary program designers that these precarious predictions turn out to be true with enough regular ity to make the method useful.
    I Intentional Explanation and Attributions of Mentality, pp. 6–7
  5. In still further other words, when you use folk psychology to anticipate and understand its moves, you have adopted the intentional stance.
    Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, pp. 76–77

Where the argument is made

  • Content and Consciousness (1969) §III–IV
  • Brainstorms (1978) chs. 1–2
  • The Intentional Stance (1987)
  • "Real Patterns" (1991, repr. Brainchildren 1998)

How the argument was received

The most-developed position in my work. Content and Consciousness (1969) anticipates it; Brainstorms (1978) and The Intentional Stance (1987) systematize it; "Real Patterns" (1991) articulates the realist commitment most cleanly. I refuse the instrumentalist label, accept Quinean indeterminacy as genuine but local, and maintain that the intentional stance is logically prior to the design stance — contra Millikan's teleosemantic reversal.