Tutorial # 4. The Intentional Stance. Discussion Questions

After having read Dennett's True Believers think about the following questions:

• Give some examples of intentional states.
• Can intentionality be naturalized?
• Paul Churchland once reported of this conversation he had with his wife Pat (in The New Yorker, February 2007): "[Pat] said, 'Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonine levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven the car into the tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute'." Do you think that folk psychological talk can\will be replaced by neurobiological talk? Why?
• Does intentional talk (i.e. beliefs – desire talk) describe or explain any real phenomenon?
• If we knew the (physical) laws that govern the behaviour of a physical system, would intentional talk still be useful?
• Is belief-desire talk a good tool for prediction? Prediction of any system (think about the Heider-Simmel’s experiment)? What’s the role of rationality assumptions in such predictions?
• How can belief-desire talk enable us to make good predictions if it doesn’t describe or explain anything real?
• What is the intentional stance?
• In which sense Dennett’s intentional stance is a form of instrumentalism?
• How should we understand Dennett’s claim that propositional attitudes are abstracta comparable to centres of gravity and economic recessions?
• Do we really take attributions of centers of gravity to be a matter of interpretation in the same way we may take propositional attitudes to be a matter of interpretation?