The Intentional Stance

Rating:
Summary: Professor Dennett and his friends
Review: I am a cognitive science doctoral student. I read this book with a basic background in Philosophy of Mind but without having read all of the main articles in the field.

First, the title... "The intentional stance." The uninitiated will not know that this refers to a subfield of the philosophy of mind called "intentionality." Does Dennett bother giving an overview of the field for those who are unfamiliar with it? No. He makes cute references to the main scholars in this field all over the place, and their main articles and results, etc., leaving all the readers who are not already familiar with his work in the dark. To a reader like me, this book is basically a conversation between Dennett and his friends. It's kind of hilarious to read actually.

Second, the book is completely unstructured. His second chapter presents his theory (again only understandable to those who have closely followed the intentionality debate before reading it), and beyond that, it's "All of Dennett's Thoughts in No Particular Order with No Conclusion."

So basically, this is academic literature at its worst. Only to be read by those who are obligated to because they are scholars in the field. I would have given it a 3 but I took a point off for nauseating arrogance and another point off for an equally arrogant lack of structure ("I am so important that they will read my book and SEARCH for the main points, because they have to!"). I guess there are a few new ideas in it, but Dennett's high falutin', extremely arrogant prose seems to be designed for his own pleasure and for the pleasure of his old boy's club of philosopher friends.

Personally I keep it next to my bed and read it before going to sleep. It's better than sleeping pills. Definitely recommended for the insomniacs.

My real recommendation is to take a serious course in intentionality before reading this book.

Ps - those who have read "Consciousness Explained" will find this book much worse. Consciousness Explained was equally arrogant (nice title) but at least readable by someone who is not already an expert in the field.

Rating:
Summary: Professor Dennett and his friends
Review: I am a cognitive science doctoral student. I read this book with a basic background in Philosophy of Mind but without having read all of the main articles in the field.

First, the title... "The intentional stance." The uninitiated will not know that this refers to a subfield of the philosophy of mind called "intentionality." Does Dennett bother giving an overview of the field for those who are unfamiliar with it? No. He makes cute references to the main scholars in this field all over the place, and their main articles and results, etc., leaving all the readers who are not already familiar with his work in the dark. To a reader like me, this book is basically a conversation between Dennett and his friends. It's kind of hilarious to read actually.

Second, the book is completely unstructured. His second chapter presents his theory (again only understandable to those who have closely followed the intentionality debate before reading it), and beyond that, it's "All of Dennett's Thoughts in No Particular Order with No Conclusion."

So basically, this is academic literature at its worst. Only to be read by those who are obligated to because they are scholars in the field. I would have given it a 3 but I took a point off for nauseating arrogance and another point off for an equally arrogant lack of structure ("I am so important that they will read my book and SEARCH for the main points, because they have to!"). I guess there are a few new ideas in it, but Dennett's high falutin', extremely arrogant prose seems to be designed for his own pleasure and for the pleasure of his old boy's club of philosopher friends.

Personally I keep it next to my bed and read it before going to sleep. It's better than sleeping pills. Definitely recommended for the insomniacs.

My real recommendation is to take a serious course in intentionality before reading this book.

Ps - those who have read "Consciousness Explained" will find this book much worse. Consciousness Explained was equally arrogant (nice title) but at least readable by someone who is not already an expert in the field.

Rating:
Summary: A Classic
Review: I believe this work should be considered a classic given the enormous influence the articles in it have had on philosophy of mind, among other areas in philosophy. Much in here is stated more clearly about the Intentional Stance than it is in later works, such as Brain Children. That isn't a criticism. I think that around the time this work was published Dennett was more into legitimizing and explaining the Intentional Stance than into polishing up his account of mind. Indeed in later works, such as "Consciousness Explained" and "Kinds of Minds", he builds off the foundation he laid here to develop his account of mind more fully.

In IS, Dennett comments on just which philosophical schools he aligns himself with, for instance, interpretivism, methodological behaviorism, and functionalism. Part of the message to take home about exactly where he aligns himself is that it isn't really important to him. He lays his arguments down and lets others worry about whether that makes him an interpretivist or methodological behaviorist. A clearer statement of his position regarding categorization of his views can be found in the "Back to the Drawing Board" chapter in "Dennett and His Critics".

In later works, Dennett further clarifies in what sense the entities the Intentional Stance makes use of are real, entities such as beliefs and desires. The most important of these later works is probably "Real Patterns", which appears in "Brain Children". In short, beliefs are part of compression algorithms of behavior that has been subjected to radical interpretation (See Davidson) from the Intentional Stance. A compression algorithm is (you guessed it) something that compresses some series of data. For instance, imagine you wanted to print 1000 1's and you had a computer that understood a programming language that would allow you to do so. One way to output the 1000 1's would be to specify that the computer print 1 and to repeat this command a thousand times. This doesn't compress anything however. Instead, you might tell the computer to "print 1 x 1000". This program has far fewer bits than does 1000 1's. 1000 1's has 1000 bits; the program has around log (base 2) 1000 bits. Hence, because it has fewer bits than what itd output does, that program is a compression algorithm of what it outputs. I recommend reading Gregory Chaitin for further info on Algorithmic Information Theory. In "Real Patterns" (in Brain Children), Dennett makes nice use of the mathematical definition of randomness to define compression algorithms and to set a plausible standard for what makes something a useful abstract object and thus, in a sense, just as real as are all the other useful scientific objects. Much more can be said about this, but this is enough for now.

This book is an excellent starting point for future study. Dennett's writing is as always engaging, insightful, and fairly straightforward.

Rating:
Summary: A CogSci koan
Review: This is the most mind-blowing philosophy of mind book I have ever read. Regardless of your philosophical sophistication or analytic acumen, Dennett's writing acts like a zen koan on the consciousness of the reader. Dennett makes the mind seem like an impossibly vast, infinitely ramifying computer one minute and a desolate wasteland the next. A sure corrective to anyone who tends to underplay or overplay the primacy of the mind in constructing our (physical/discursive) universe.