p.57 In the social sciences, talk about belief is ubiquitous.
p.59 My thesis will be that while belief is a perfectly objective phenomenon... it can
be discerned only from the point of view of one who adopts a certain predictive strategy, and its
existence can be confirmed only by an assessment of the success of that strategy... First I will
describe the strategy, which I call the intentional strategy or adopting the intentional stance.... What
it is to be a true believer is to be an intentional system, a system whose behavior is reliably and voluminously
predictable via the intentional strategy. I have argued for this position before... and my arguments have so far garnered
few converts and many presumed counterexamples. I shall try again here, harder, and shall also deal
with several compelling objections. [JLJ - welcome to the club of people with ideas and few converts to those ideas]
p.60 Having a good strategy is one thing; knowing why it works is another.
p.61 Only the designed behavior of a system is predictable from the design stance, of course... Sometimes
even the design stance is practically inaccessible, and then there is yet another stance or strategy one can adopt:
the intentional stance. 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. A
little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in many - but not all - instances
yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do.
p.65 Our use of the intentional strategy is so habitual and effortless that the role it
plays in shaping our expectations about people is easily overlooked. The strategy also works on most other mammals
most of the time. For instance, you can use it to design better traps to catch those mammals, by
reasoning about what the creature knows or believes about various things, what it prefers, what it wants to avoid.
p.66 In the case of people or animals or computers... often the only strategy that is at all practical is
the intentional strategy; it gives us predictive power we can get by no other method.
p.67 Once the intentional strategy is in place, it is an extraordinarily powerful tool in prediction...
Consider, for instance, predicting moves in a chess game. What makes chess an interesting game, one can see, is the
unpredictability of one's opponent's moves, except in those cases where moves are "forced" - where there is clearly
one best move - typically the least of the available evils... Even when the intentional strategy fails to distinguish
a single move with a highest probability, it can dramatically reduce the number of live options.
p.68 it is this neutrality with regard to details of implementation that permits one to exploit the intentional
strategy in complex cases, for instance, in chaining predictions
p.69 Our imagined Martians... if they did not also see us as intentional systems, they would be missing
something perfectly objective: the patterns in human behavior that are describable from the intentional stance, and
only from that stance, and that support generalizations and predictions.
p.70-71 the moral to be drawn: namely, the unavoidability of the intentional stance with regard
to oneself and one's fellow intelligent beings... Where there are intelligent beings, the patterns must be there
to be described, whether or not we care to see them.
p.72 The... claim remains: all there is to being a true believer is being a system whose behavior
is reliably predictable via the intentional strategy
p.74 as systems become perceptually richer and behaviorally more versatile, it becomes harder and harder
to make substitutions in the actual links of the system to the world without changing the organization of the system itself.
If you change its environment, it will notice, in effect, and make a change in its internal state in response...
you [can] say that the organism continuously mirrors the environment, or that there is a representation
of the environment in - or implicit in - the organization of the system.
p.74 when we discover some object for which the intentional strategy works, we endeavor to interpret some
of its internal states or processes as internal representations. What makes some internal feature of a thing a representation
could only be its role in regulating the behavior of an intentional system.
