Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T04:58:08.006Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Instrumental Intentionality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Lynne Rudder Baker
Lynne Rudder Baker*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy Middlebury College
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Many physicalists are committed to an austere dichotomy: either beliefs, desires and intentions are scientifically respectable or attributions of such attitudes are all false. One physicalist, Daniel Dennett, offers a third alternative, which seems to permit a kind of instrumentalism concerning attitudes. I argue that Dennett's attempt to reconcile an instrumentalistic account of attributions of attitudes with a thoroughgoing physicalism founders on unresolvable conflicts between his official theory and his actual treatment of key concepts. As a result, instrumentalism concerning attitudes is exposed as inadequate to be a genuine alternative to the physicalist's dichotomy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , June 1989 , pp. 303 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by Princeton University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

I wish to thank Hilary Kornblith, Derk Pereboom, and Daniel Dennett for comments on an earlier version of this article. Since Dennett continues to develop his position, he may no longer hold all the views that I attribute to him here. (See his The Intentional Stance, Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford/MIT Press, 1987). Nevertheless, these views well illustrate the difficulties of working out the details of an instrumentalism about belief.

This article is based on Chapter 8 of my book Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism, copyright 1988 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

References

REFERENCES

Churchland, P. M. (1981), “Eliminative Materialism and Propositional Attitudes”, Journal of Philosophy 78: 67–90.Google Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1971), “Intentional Systems”, Journal of Philosophy 68: 87–106. Reprinted in Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. Montgomery, Vermont: Bradford Books, 1978, pp. 3–22. Page references are to the latter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1973), “Mechanism and Responsibility”, in T. Honderich, (ed.), Essays on Freedom of Action. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Reprinted in Brainstorms. Page references are to the latter.Google Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1975), “Why the Law of Effect Won't Go Away”, Journal of the Theory of Social Behavior 5: 169–87. Reprinted in Brainstorms. Page references are to the latter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1976), “Conditions of Personhood”, in Amelie Rorty, (ed.), The Identities of Persons. Berkeley: University of California. Reprinted in Brainstorms. Page references are to the latter.Google Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1978a), Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology. Montgomery, Vermont: Bradford Books.Google Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1978b), “On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want”, in Brainstorms, pp. 286–299.Google Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1981a), “Making Sense of Ourselves”, Philosophical Topics 12: 63–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1981b), “Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology”, in Richard Healey, (ed.), Time, Reduction and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 37–61.Google Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1981c), “True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works”, in A. F. Heath, (ed.), Scientific Explanation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 53–78.Google Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1982), “How to Study Consciousness Empirically, Or Nothing Comes to Mind”, Synthese 53: 159–180.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1983), “Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethology: The ‘Panglossian Paradigm’ Defended”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6: 343–390.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dennett, D. C. (1984), Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford/MIT Press.Google Scholar
Grünbaum, A. (1968), Modern Science and Zeno's Paradoxes. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd.Google Scholar
Haugeland, J. (1982), “The Mother of Intention”, Noûs 16: 613–619.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stich, S. P. (1983), From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief. Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford/MIT Press.Google Scholar