Abstract
I briefly review the three basic strategies for naturalizing intentionality discussed by Haugeland 4:383–427, 1990, and Hutto and Satne (2015), recounting their deficits. Then, I focus on Dennett’s version of what Haugeland calls the “second-base … neo-behaviorist” strategy. After briefly explaining Dennett’s proposal, I defend it against four common objections: circularity, relativity, under-specified rationality, and failure to track robustly natural facts. I conclude by recounting the advantages of Dennettian neo-behaviorism over the neo-Cartesian and neo-pragmatist alternatives, as well as Hutto and Satne’s proposal that intentionality comes in two distinct kinds.
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Notes
Fodor (1994) argues that this account of Frege cases is superior to appeals to so-called “narrow content”, which he regards as untenable.
In some ways, Dennett’s proposal is similar to influential analyses of secondary properties, like color. On these views, colors and other secondary properties are objective yet response-dependent. A stop sign is red, for example, because it is disposed to trigger perceptions of red in normal human observers. This is an objective though relational/dispositional property of the stop sign. Similarly, on Dennett’s understanding of intentionality, it is an objective yet response-dependent property of some kinds of behavior, i.e., those that are disposed to trigger attributions of intentionality in normal human observers.
To be sure, this is a departure from the naturalization project as classically conceived. Intentionality is in no way reduced to a natural relation like nomic dependence or teleology. But Dennett explicitly eschews such naturalization strategies, in favor of an alternative inspired by the theory of computation (1987, pp. 67–8). In Dennett’s view, Turing’s notion of computability does not involve reducing computability to some other, “more natural” phenomenon. Rather, it involves “legitimizing” the computational idiom, by providing a precise, formal framework for its systematic and useful application to observable phenomena. Dennett sees his project as doing the same for the intentional idiom. The point is not to reduce it, but to make it precise enough to systematically and usefully apply to observable phenomena, especially behavioral contexts that are systematically parsable into goals, efficient means, and available information, including higher-order goals, efficient means, and available information, as when one interprets an interpretive process.
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Zawidzki, T.W. Dennett’s Strategy for Naturalizing Intentionality: an Innovative Play at Second Base. Philosophia 43, 593–609 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9630-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9630-6