The Intentional Stance

Definition

Dennett distinguishes three strategies for predicting a system's behavior: the physical stance (use physics and the system's material makeup), the design stance (assume it works as designed, like predicting an alarm clock will ring when set), and the intentional stance (treat it as a rational agent — figure out what beliefs and desires it ought to have given its situation and purpose, then predict it will act to further its goals in light of those beliefs). Dennett's central claim is that belief is real but observer-relative to this strategy's success: "What it is to be a true believer is to be an intentional system, a system whose behavior is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy."

In the Book

The chapter opens by rejecting a forced choice between belief-as-internal-fact (realism) and belief-as-arbitrary-interpretation, arguing instead that belief attribution is objective precisely because it is confirmed by the intentional strategy's predictive success — like the astrological strategy would be vindicated if it actually worked (it doesn't). Dennett develops this with the alarm-clock case for the design stance, then shows how the intentional stance is not restricted to humans: any system — thermostat, chess computer, simple organism — whose behavior a designer or observer can only usefully predict by assuming rationality, beliefs, and desires becomes, by that very fact, an intentional system. The chapter builds toward the claim (developed further via chess-playing programs and evolutionary "free-floating rationales") that folk-psychological ascription and rigorous cognitive science are continuous with each other, not opposed.

Why It Matters

The intentional stance offers a non-mysterious criterion for when "mental" vocabulary — believes, wants, intends — legitimately applies to a system, without requiring that the system have any particular internal architecture. It lets you ask, of any complex system (a machine, an animal, an organization), whether the stance actually earns its predictive keep, separating real explanatory power from anthropomorphic decoration.