Intentional stance


The intentional stance is a term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett for the level of abstraction in which we view the behavior of an entity in terms of mental properties. It is part of a theory of mental content proposed by Dennett, which provides the underpinnings of his later works on free will, consciousness, folk psychology, and evolution.

Dennett and intentionality

Dennett states that he took the concept of "intentionality" from the work of the German philosopher Franz Brentano. When clarifying the distinction between mental phenomena and physical phenomena, Brentano argued that, in contrast with physical phenomena, the "distinguishing characteristic of all mental phenomena" was "the reference to something as an object" – a characteristic he called "intentional inexistence". Dennett constantly speaks of the "aboutness" of intentionality; for example: "the aboutness of the pencil marks composing a shopping list is derived from the intentions of the person whose list it is".
John Searle stresses that "competence" in predicting/explaining human behaviour involves being able to both recognize others as "intentional" beings, and interpret others' minds as having "intentional states" :
According to Dennett, folk psychology provides a systematic, "reason-giving explanation" for a particular action, and an account of the historical origins of that action, based on deeply embedded assumptions about the agent; namely that:
This approach is also consistent with the earlier work of Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, whose joint study revealed that, when subjects were presented with an animated display of 2-dimensional shapes, they were inclined to ascribe intentions to the shapes.
Further, Dennett argues that, based on our fixed personal views of what all humans ought to believe, desire and do, we predict the beliefs, desires and actions of others "by calculating in a normative system"; and, driven by the reasonable assumption that all humans are rational beings – who do have specific beliefs and desires and do act on the basis of those beliefs and desires in order to get what they want – these predictions/explanations are based on four simple rules:
  1. The agent's beliefs are those a rational individual ought to have ;
  2. In general, these beliefs "are both true and relevant to life;
  3. The agent's desires are those a rational individual ought to have in order to further their "survival" and "procreation" needs; and
  4. The agent's behaviour will be composed of those acts a rational individual holding those beliefs ought to perform.

    Dennett's three levels

The core idea is that, when understanding, explaining, and/or predicting the behavior of an object, we can choose to view it at varying levels of abstraction. The more concrete the level, the more accurate in principle our predictions are; the more abstract, the greater the computational power we gain by zooming out and skipping over the irrelevant details.
Dennett defines three levels of abstraction, attained by adopting one of three entirely different "stances", or intellectual strategies: the physical stance; the design stance; and the intentional stance:
A key point is that switching to a higher level of abstraction has its risks as well as its benefits. For example, when we view both a bimetallic strip and a tube of mercury as thermometers, we can lose track of the fact that they differ in accuracy and temperature range, leading to false predictions as soon as the thermometer is used outside the circumstances for which it was designed. The actions of a mercury thermometer heated to 500 °C can no longer be predicted on the basis of treating it as a thermometer; we have to sink down to the physical stance to understand it as a melted and boiled piece of junk. For that matter, the "actions" of a dead bird are not predictable in terms of beliefs or desires.
Even when there is no immediate error, a higher-level stance can simply fail to be useful. If we were to try to understand the thermostat at the level of the intentional stance, ascribing to it beliefs about how hot it is and a desire to keep the temperature just right, we would gain no traction over the problem as compared to staying at the design stance, but we would generate theoretical commitments that expose us to absurdities, such as the possibility of the thermostat not being in the mood to work today because the weather is so nice. Whether to take a particular stance, then, is determined by how successful that stance is when applied.
Dennett argues that it is best to understand human behavior at the level of the intentional stance, without making any specific commitments to any deeper reality of the artifacts of folk psychology. In addition to the controversy inherent in this, there is also some dispute about the extent to which Dennett is committing to realism about mental properties. Initially, Dennett's interpretation was seen as leaning more towards instrumentalism, but over the years, as this idea has been used to support more extensive theories of consciousness, it has been taken as being more like Realism. His own words hint at something in the middle, as he suggests that the self is as real as a center of gravity, "an abstract object, a theorist's fiction", but operationally valid.
As a way of thinking about things, Dennett's intentional stance is entirely consistent with everyday commonsense understanding; and, thus, it meets Eleanor Rosch's criterion of the "maximum information with the least cognitive effort". Rosch argues that, implicit within any system of categorization, are the assumptions that:
Also, the intentional stance meets the criteria Dennett specified for algorithms:

Variants of Dennett's three stances

The general notion of a three level system was widespread in the late 1970s/early 1980s; for example, when discussing the mental representation of information from a cognitive psychology perspective, Glass and his colleagues distinguished three important aspects of representation:
Other significant cognitive scientists who also advocated a three level system were Allen Newell, Zenon Pylyshyn, and David Marr. The parallels between the four representations are detailed in the following table:
Daniel Dennett
"Stances"		Zenon Pylyshyn
"Levels of Organization"		Allen Newell
"Levels of Description"		David Marr
"Levels of Analysis"

Physical Stance.

Physical Level, or Biological Level.Physical Level, or Device Level.Hardware Implementation Level.

Design Stance.

Symbol Level.Program Level, or Symbol Level.Representation and Algorithm Level.

Intentional Stance.

Semantic, or Knowledge Level.Knowledge Level.Computational Theory Level.

Objections and replies

The most obvious objection to Dennett is the intuition that it "matters" to us whether an object has an inner life or not. The claim is that we don't just imagine the intentional states of other people in order to predict their behaviour; the fact that they have thoughts and feelings just like we do is central to notions such as trust, friendship and love. The Blockhead argument proposes that someone, Jones, has a twin who is in fact not a person but a very sophisticated robot which looks and acts like Jones in every way, but who somehow does not have any thoughts or feelings at all, just a chip which controls his behaviour; in other words, "the lights are on but no one's home". According to the intentional systems theory, Jones and the robot have precisely the same beliefs and desires, but this is claimed to be false. The IST expert assigns the same mental states to Blockhead as he does to Jones, "whereas in fact has not a thought in his head." Dennett has argued against this by denying the premise, on the basis that the robot is a philosophical zombie and therefore metaphysically impossible. In other words, if something acts in all ways conscious, it necessarily is, as consciousness is defined in terms of behavioral capacity, not ineffable qualia.
Another objection attacks the premise that treating people as ideally rational creatures will yield the best predictions. Stephen Stich argues that people often have beliefs or desires which are irrational or bizarre, and IST doesn't allow us to say anything about these. If the person's "environmental niche" is examined closely enough, and the possibility of malfunction in their brain is looked into, it may be possible to formulate a predictive strategy specific to that person. Indeed this is what we often do when someone is behaving unpredictably — we look for the reasons why. In other words, we can only deal with irrationality by contrasting it against the background assumption of rationality. This development significantly undermines the claims of the intentional stance argument.
The rationale behind the intentional stance is based on evolutionary theory, particularly the notion that the ability to make quick predictions of a system's behaviour based on what we think it might be thinking was an evolutionary adaptive advantage. The fact that our predictive powers are not perfect is a further result of the advantages sometimes accrued by acting contrary to expectations.

Neural evidence

Philip Robbins and Anthony I. Jack suggest that "Dennett's philosophical distinction between the physical and intentional stances has a lot going for it" from the perspective of psychology and neuroscience. They review studies on abilities to adopt an intentional stance as distinct from adopting a physical stance. Autism seems to be a deficit in the intentional stance with preservation of the physical stance, while Williams syndrome can involve deficits in the physical stance with preservation of the intentional stance. This tentatively suggests a double dissociation of intentional and physical stances in the brain. However, most studies have found no evidence of impairment in autistic individuals' ability to understand other people's basic intentions or goals; instead, data suggests that impairments are found in understanding more complex social emotions or in considering others' viewpoints.
Robbins and Jack point to a 2003 study in which participants viewed animated geometric shapes in different "vignettes," some of which could be interpreted as constituting social interaction, while others suggested mechanical behavior. Viewing social interactions elicited activity in brain regions associated with identifying faces and biological objects, as well as emotion processing. Meanwhile, the mechanical interactions activated regions related to identifying objects like tools that can be manipulated. The authors suggest "that these findings reveal putative 'core systems' for social and mechanical understanding that are divisible into constituent parts or elements with distinct processing and storage capabilities."

Phenomenal stance

Robbins and Jack argue for an additional stance beyond the three that Dennett outlined. They call it the phenomenal stance: Attributing consciousness, emotions, and inner experience to a mind. The explanatory gap of the hard problem of consciousness illustrates this tendency of people to see phenomenal experience as different from physical processes. The authors suggest that psychopathy may represent a deficit in the phenomenal but not intentional stance, while people with autism appear to have intact moral sensibilities, just not mind-reading abilities. These examples suggest a double dissociation between the intentional and phenomenal stances.
In a follow-up paper, Robbins and Jack describe four experiments about how the intentional and phenomenal stances relate to feelings of moral concern. The first two experiments showed that talking about lobsters as strongly emotional led to a much greater sentiment that lobsters deserved welfare protections than did talking about lobsters as highly intelligent. The third and fourth studies found that perceiving an agent as vulnerable led to greater attributions of phenomenal experience. Also, people who scored higher on the empathetic-concern subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index had generally higher absolute attributions of mental experience.
Bryce Huebner performed two experimental philosophy studies to test students' ascriptions of various mental states to humans compared with cyborgs and robots. Experiment 1 showed that while students attributed both beliefs and pains most strongly to humans, they were more willing to attribute beliefs than pains to robots and cyborgs. "hese data seem to confirm that commonsense psychology does draw a distinction between phenomenal and non-phenomenal states--and this distinction seems to be dependent on the structural properties of an entity in a way that ascriptions of non-phenomenal states are not." However, this conclusion is only tentative in view of the high variance among participants. Experiment 2 showed analogous results: Both beliefs and happiness were ascribed most strongly to biological humans, and ascriptions of happiness to robots or cyborgs were less common than ascriptions of beliefs.

Footnotes