p.1 Talking about the mind, for many people, is... slightly
embarrassing, undignified, maybe even disreputable. "Of course it exists," some might say, "but do
we have to talk about it?" Yes, we do... This book is about how to talk about the mind. It is a philosophical book,
written by a philosopher... but it is not for philosophers only. Those in other disciplines... find that philosophers, who
have never been shy about talking about the mind, have a lot to tell them about how to do it.
p.4 We must all in one way or another start from the base of common sense
if we hope to be understood, or to understand ourselves.... As Fodor says, "The form of a philosophical theory, often
enough, is: Let's try looking over here."
p.6 [Thomas Nagel] Certain forms of perplexity - for example, about freedom,
knowledge, and the meaning of life - seem to me to embody more insight than any of the supposed solutions to those problems.
p.6 Nagel... what counts for him as flat obvious, and in need of no further
support, often fails to impress me.
p.6 Any theory that makes progress is bound to be initially counterintuitive.
p.11 our nervous systems were designed to make the distinctions
we need swiftly and reliably, to bring under single sensory rubrics the relevant common features in our environment,
and to ignore what we can usually get away with ignoring
p.11 How do we manage to acquire such a general capacity
to interpret our fellow human beings? ...I do have an explanation of the power and success of folk psychology: we
make sense of each other by adopting the intentional stance.
[True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works - see notes in
separate section]
p.35 The fact that all language of thought models of mental representation
so far proposed fall victim to combinatorial explosion in one way or another should temper one's enthusiasm for engaging in
what Fodor aptly calls "the only game in town."
p.39 I claim that the intentional stance provides a vantage point for descerning... useful patterns.
These patterns are objective - they are there to be detected - but from our point
of view they are not out there independently of us, since they are patterns composed partly of our own "subjective"
reactions to what is out there... If you "look at" the world in the right way, the patterns are obvious. If you look
at (or describe) the world in any other way, they are, in general, invisible.
p.41 [Donald Davidson] Indeterminacy of meaning... marks the fact that certain apparent distinctions are
not significant. If there is indeterminacy, it is because when all the evidence is in, alternative ways of stating the facts
remain open.
p.41 Suppose that a certain club exists for several years, holding regular meetings. The meetings then cease.
Some years later, some of the members of this club form a club with the same name, and the same rules. We ask: "Have these
people reconvened the very same club? Or have they merely started up another club, which is exactly similar?"
[JLJ - I will answer this question with a counter question. Suppose that I denounce questions of this sort, on this web page,
as trivial and a waste of time. I then stop publishing material on this web page, and in fact close it down. Some years later,
I start publishing material again on this same web page, where I again denounce such questions as trivial and a waste
of time. Have I reconvened the very same web page where I belittled the question? Or have I merely started up another
web page, which is exactly similar, to belittle it?]
p.42 I claim, in other words, that some of the most vigorously disputed questions about belief attribution
are... empty questions.
How is this persistent illusion created? ...I describe a false contrast... that creates the mistaken
conviction that our own beliefs and other mental states must have determinate content.
p.42 Some concepts have what might be called an essential causal element... some,
including Fodor, have held that such concepts as the concept of intelligent action also have an essential causal element;
behavior that appeared to be intelligent might be shown not to be by being shown to have the wrong sort of cause. [JLJ - I
would say that intelligent action in simplest form requires the presence of a sensor and an actuator and a rule that converts
the output of the sensor to the input of the actuator. Additionally, in order to prevent a thermostat from becoming classified
as intelligent we should eliminate from consideration "programmed tools" such as alarm clocks, thermostats, automatic transmissions,
garage door openers, locks, light-activated streetlights, and other "convenience" items such as computers where the existence
and operational control is owed to a human trying to make his or her life easier. The hallmark of intelligence is the ability
to continuously generate custom diagnostic tests to reduce the complexity, ambiguity, or uncertainty of the environment in
order to understand consequential power relations and adopt an isolated or communal "stance" [ or even a sequential
movement profile such as driving a car] in the environment that is sustainable and which offers the promise of benefits to
the intelligent entity. Our environment can be social (such as a family, business or university), the world of ideas (such
as that of a researcher or inventor), or involve the use of tools, information or collaboration.]
p.47 One way of distinguishing the good from the bad, the essential from the gratuitous, in folk theory
is to see what must be included in the theory to account for whatever predictive or explanatory success it seems to have in
ordinary use. In this way we can criticize as we analyze
p.49 We approach each other as intentional systems (Dennett 1971), that is, as entities
whose behavior can be predicted by the method of attributing beliefs, desires, and rational acumen... A system's
beliefs are those it ought to have, given its perceptual capacities, its epistemic needs, and its biography... A
system's desires are those it ought to have, given its biological needs and the most practicable means of satisfying
them... A system's behavior will consist of those acts that it would be rational for an agent with those beliefs
and desires to perform.
p.50 I have just described in outline a method of predicting and explaining the behavior of people and other
intelligent creatures.
p.51 If we are designed by evolution, then we are almost certainly nothing more than a bag of tricks,
patched together
p.58 The first new theory, intentional system theory, is envisaged as a close kin of, and
overlapped with, such already existing disciplines as decision theory and game theory, which are similarly
abstract, normative, and couched in intentional language... The theory deals with the "production" of new beliefs and desires
from old, via an interaction among old beliefs and desires, features in the environment, and the system's actions... the processing...
consists in updating the intentional characterization of the whole system according to the rules of attribution.
p.59 one can ask such questions as "What must a system's epistemic capabilities and propensities be for
it to survive in environment A?"
p.59-60 Intentional system theory deals just with the performance specifications of believers while remaining
silent on how the systems are to be implemented... This level of generality is essential if we want a theory to have anything
meaningful and defensible to say about such topics as intelligence in general... or such grand topics as meaning or reference
or representation.
p.61 The task of sub-personal cognitive psychology is to explain something that at first glance seems utterly
mysterious and inexplicable. [JLJ - ok, let's read about this then apply it to computer chess]
p.61 By what alchemy, then, does the brain extract semantically reliable results from syntactically driven
operations? ...The basic idea is familiar. An animal needs to know when it has satisfied the goal of finding and ingesting
food, but it settles for a friction-int-the-throat-followed-by-stretched-stomach detector, a mechanical switch turned
on by a relatively simple mechanical condition that normally co-occurs with the satisfaction of the animals "real" goal.
It's not fancy and can easily be exploited... it does well enough by the animal in its normal environment.
p.61 More accurately... the brain's task is to come to produce internal mediating responses that reliably
vary in concert with variation in the actual environmental significance... of their distal [JLJ - remote] causes and independently
of meaning-irrelevant variations in their proximal causes, and moreover to respond to its own mediating responses in ways
that systematically tend to improve the creature's prospects in its environment if the mediating responses are varying as
they ought to vary.
p.62-63 You must put together a bag of tricks and hope nature will be kind enough to let your device
get by. Of course some tricks are elegant and appeal to deep principles of organization, but in
the end all one can hope to produce... are systems that seem to discriminate meanings by actually discriminating
things... that co-vary reliably with meanings... It is the task of sub-personal cognitive psychology
to propose and test models of such activity - of pattern recognition or stimulus generalization, concept learning, expectation,
learning, goal-directed behavior, problem-solving - that not only produce... genuine content-sensitivity, but that do this
in ways demonstrably like the way people's brains do it
p.79 Moving away from an oversimple ideal toward greater realism is not always a wise tactic. It depends
on what you want
p.79-80 I have always stressed the actual predictive power of the pure intentional stance.
I have claimed, for instance, that one can use the intentional stance to predict the behavior of an unknown chess opponent
(human or artifact)... What about the opponent's moves in the middle game? These are seldom reliably
predictable down to uniqueness... but it is a rare situation when the thirty or forty legal moves
available to the opponent can't be cut down by the intentional stance to an unordered short list of half a dozen
most likely moves on which one could bet very successfully if given even money on all legal moves. This is a tremendous
predictive advantage plucked from thin air in the face of almost total ignorance of the intervening
mechanisms, thanks to the power of the intentional stance.
p.80 Instead of devoting equal attention to all possible continuations of the game, a chess program
at some point will concentrate on those branches of the decision tree on which its opponent makes (what the program
calculates to be) its best response. It makes no difference to the chess program whether its opponent
is human or artifact; it simply calculates on the assumption that any opponent worth playing will try to make the best moves
it can.
p.80 What is Black not likely to notice? I can tell you without even knowing who Black
is. Being approximately rational, Black is not likely to notice threats that would take a great deal of time and effort
to discover and is extremely likely to notice obvious threats. If Black is, as Fodor supposes, rather unlikely to
notice the threat, it must be because the threat is somewhat distant in the search tree and hence may well fall
outside Black's more or less optimal focus of attention.
So even when we are planning to exploit another rational agent's foibles, we make use of the rationality
assumption to guide our efforts
p.101 In both cases, knowledge of the imitated object is needed to drive the make-believe "simulation,"
and the knowledge must be organized into something rather like a theory.
p.155 Now the question is: what guides our construction of an organism's notional world?
p.173 the problems encountered in the story of Shakey's Pizza Parlor come from the attempt to apply a single
set of categories to two (or more) very different styles of cognitive operation. In one of these styles, we do
have internal representations of things in the world, the content of which in some way guides our behavior. In the
other style we have something like procedures for keeping track of things in the world, which permit us to minimize our representations
of those things by letting us consult the things themselves, rather than their representations, when we need more information
about them.
p.287 Sometimes it takes years of debate for philosophers to discover what it is they really disagree about.
p.318 So if there is to be any original intentionality - original just in the sense of being derived from
no other, ulterior source - the intentionality of natural selection deserves the honor.
p.319 We cannot begin to make sense of functional attributions until we abandon the idea that there has
to be one, determinate, right answer to the question: What is it for?
p.350 Philosophers are never quite sure what they are talking about - about what
the issues really are - and so it often takes them rather a long time to recognize that someone with a somewhat
different approach (or destination, or starting point) is making a contribution.
