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there is another important group of theorists who insist that folk psychology is not a theory. on this view, sometimes called interpretationalism, folk psychology is best seen as the taking of a particular attitude or stance to a wide range of systems. this view originates in the work of W. V. o. Quine (1960) and Donald Davidson (1985); however, it has received its most extensive articulation in the work of Daniel Dennett (see especially 1971 and 1981a).

I’ll begin with the case of attributing beliefs and desires to our fellow human beings. (later we will see that Dennett does not restrict the attribution of beliefs and desires to members of our species.) according to Dennett, we attribute beliefs and desires to our fellow human beings by taking the intentional stance towards them. central to the intentional stance is the assumption that the person to whom we are attributing beliefs and desires is rational. Rationality is a normative notion: a rational agent has the beliefs and desires it ought to have. Which beliefs and desires are those? Dennett suggests that, given time, a rational agent will come to believe most of the facts about her environment which (i) can be ascertained by simple obser- vation and (ii) are of sufficient relevance to her projects to warrant her attention. In addition, a rational agent will, given time, come to know many of the more obvious,

and more pertinent, logical consequences of her beliefs. similarly, Dennett suggests that a rational agent will desire food, mates, the absence of pain, and so forth, and will also (instrumentally) desire those states of affairs which are likely to ensure the consumption of food, the having of mates, the absence of pain, and so forth (see Dennett 1981a).

It is important to note that the intentional stance is not merely a device for making attributions which could, in principle, be made some other way. Rather, being attrib- utable from the intentional stance is constitutive of what beliefs and desires are. In short, Dennett is advancing a metaphysical claim as well as an epistemological one, that is, he is advancing a claim about what beliefs and desires are as well as a claim about how we gain knowledge of who has what beliefs and desires. Dennett’s position is sometimes called “fictionalist” to stress that he doubts that beliefs and desires are entities in the head which could, in principle, be recognized without recourse to the intentional stance. It may be, he asserts, that there is no subcomponent or pattern of activation of the brain which can be identified as, say, the belief that snow is white. however, it is important to stress that, according to Dennett, the attributions made from the intentional stance are objective (see especially Dennett [1987b]). It is possible to get them wrong, just as it is possible to incorrectly measure the mass of the hydrogen nucleus. I might, for example, quite incorrectly attribute to my wife the desire to dine out tonight because I have not attended closely enough to what she is saying and doing. Moreover, the attributions are objective in that they typically yield accurate predictions of behaviour.

of course, not all humans are rational, and even the best of us have lapses. Dennett is aware of this (although some of his critics have written as if he were not). small lapses of observation, memory, reason and so forth can, Dennett argues, be handled by temporarily moving away from the intentional stance. on the basis of common knowledge and life experience, we can sometimes identify the relevant errors of observation, reasoning or memory, and adjust accordingly. For example, in a poorly lit cafe I receive the wrong change and hypothesize that the barista has mistaken a five dollar bill for a twenty. I cannot have arrived at this hypothesis via the intentional stance since the barista is clearly not forming the beliefs he ought to. Rather, I rely on my extensive experience of varied lighting conditions, baristas and five dollar bills. once I have concluded that the barista believes my five dollar bill is a twenty, I can return to the intentional stance taking, as it were, my conclusion with me.

What about more radical cases of irrationality? consider the following description of a schizophrenic patient at the height of her florid, delusional state:

she repeatedly removed her dressing gown and made highly inappropriate sexual advances to the male staff, and then tore bits off a picture of a swan. . . . she said that god talked to her, saying “shut up and get out of here.” When replying to an enquiry as to interference with her thinking the patient said “the thoughts go back to the swan. I want the cross to keep it for ever and ever. It depends on the soldier Marcus the nurse.” (Frith 1992: 3)

It is apparent that this patient lacks many of the beliefs and desires she ought to have, and has a good number she ought not to have. consequently, the intentional stance is unavailable in this instance. this is not, however, a strike against Dennett. For surely we are at a loss in cases like this. Does this patient really believe that the swan in the picture is interfering with her thoughts and that god told her to shut up and get out? Is it appropriate to say that she believes that something (the cross? the interference?) depends on the soldier Marcus the nurse? Intentional idioms seem unduly strained in cases like this.

so far I have only considered the application of the intentional stance to human beings. Dennett proposes that it can be applied to a vast range of systems. For example, he thinks that we can – and do – apply the intentional stance to thermostats (see, for example, Dennett 1981a). I know that the thermostat in my office is supposed to maintain room temperature within a certain range because that is what it was designed to do. consequently, if I assume that the thermostat is rational I can attribute to it certain beliefs and desires. For example, when the room is too hot it will believe that the room is too hot and desire that the room be cooler. given those beliefs and desires, the assumption of rationality leads me to predict that the thermostat will turn off the heater. such attributions are sometimes dismissed as “anthropomorphizing”; however, Dennett regards them as literally – and objectively – true.

any system whose behaviour can be predicted from the intentional stance is called an intentional system. We have seen that the class of intentional systems includes both thermostats and human beings. Is there any general way of characterizing the set of intentional systems? Dennett includes amongst the intentional systems those which have been naturally selected and those which have been designed by rational agents such as ourselves. It may, though, include other kinds of systems. For example, the behaviour of the planets can be accurately predicted by assuming them to be rational agents which overwhelmingly desire to follow paths described by Kepler’s laws. Realists about mental states claim that beliefs and desires are bona fide states of the human organism (and perhaps of other systems as well). they can, in principle, be located and measured by appropriate anatomical and physiological procedures.

Antirealists deny that there are any such states. We have seen that, according to

Dennett, a system has beliefs and desires if, and only if, we can successfully predict its behaviour from the intentional stance. there may be structures within the system which can be identified as beliefs and desires; there may not. Dennett is strongly inclined to the view that there are unlikely to be such structures, at least in the human case. he is, consequently, strongly inclined to a form of antirealism about beliefs and desires. however, his antirealism is more moderate than other antirealist positions. this is because, as mentioned above, the attribution of beliefs and desires from the intentional stance is objective.

It is not clear, though, that Dennett can both insist that the intentional stance yields, in a wide range of circumstances, accurate behavioural predictions and deny that beliefs and desires are real internal states of intentional systems. We are entitled to ask why the intentional stance works so well, and one plausible answer is that the beliefs and desires identified from the intentional stance are real, causally efficacious

states inside the human brain (Fodor 1985). By way of analogy, consider Mendelian genetics. the very considerable explanatory success of Mendelian genetics supports the claim that genes are real, causally efficacious states inside organisms. It is important to note that, once again, Dennett is alert to this objection, drawing attention to cases where we don’t accept the inference from predictive success to realism. an example he offers is the attribution of centres of gravity to objects with mass. such attribu- tions are predictively successful and yet we don’t conclude that all the mass of an object really is located at the centre of gravity. should we think of beliefs and desires as analogous to Mendelian genes, or think of them as more like centres of gravity? I doubt that this question can be satisfactorily answered from the armchair; rather, settling the realism-antirealism debate about mental states will involve extensive empirical research in psychology and neuroscience. From psychology we might hope to learn more about the nature of beliefs and desires; from neuroscience, we might hope to learn more about the causally efficacious structures of the brain. the realist bets that these inquiries will allow us to identify mental state tokens with neurological tokens; the antirealist bets that even when all the science is in no such identifica- tions will be forthcoming. as indicated in the fourth section, my own view is that the existing evidence supports some version of realism.

I remarked that we are entitled to ask why the intentional stance works so well. so far we have considered what might be called a proximal answer to that question: an answer in terms of the internal states of the agent. Dennett offers what we might call a distal answer to that question. he suggests that natural selection will, over time, give rise to agents which typically form true beliefs and typically desire food, mates, the absence of pain, etc. (1983). that is, natural selection will tend to favour organisms which closely approximate the assumptions made by the intentional stance. however, it is not clear to what extent natural selection will tend to give rise to such organisms. For example, stephen stich (1990) has argued that natural selection will not necessarily favour true believers. Finding out the truth can be expensive, and under some circumstances natural selection may favour organisms which are satisfied with cheap approximation. the mouse which falsely concludes that the cat is present on the basis of scant evidence may have more reproductive success than the mouse which stubbornly refuses to form a judgment about the cat’s whereabouts in the absence of incontrovertible evidence. the simple claim that natural selection favours agents which typically form true beliefs must be carefully qualified. Dennett (1981b) has, however, offered such qualifications, arguing that neither the theory of natural selection, nor intentional systems theory, naively predict that organisms will always and everywhere believe the truth. this is not the place, though, to further pursue these issues.

Notes

1. these two ways of understanding folk psychology (taken to be a theory) were originally distinguished in stich and Ravenscroft (1994).

2. Pain is almost certainly not identical to c-fibre firing. this was, however, a common speculation at the time Place and others were writing.

3. Better: the person who best or adequately fits that description. If no one comes close to fitting the description, then “aristotle” fails to refer.

4. For a very sophisticated discussion of these issues by someone sympathetic to the platitude approach to folk psychology, see Jackson (2000).

5. see for example Marr (1982) and Rock (1983) on vision; Mccloskey (1983) and hayes (1985), on our capacity to predict the movements of middle-sized objects.

6. For arguments in favour of the claim that grammar is largely innate, see Pinker (1994); for a highly sceptical discussion of the innateness claim, see cowie (1999).

7. For an especially penetrating discussion of the evolution of folk psychology see sterelny 2003, especially pt III.

8. the classic work in this area is Beck (1967).

9. see elkin et al. (1989). subsequent studies suggest that cognitive behavioural therapy is more effective than drug therapy at preventing the recurrence of depression. see hollon et al. (1990). 10. For an extensive discussion of churchland’s eliminativist arguments see horgan and Woodward

(1995).

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