Dominic:

<snip>
How (un-)satisfied are you with Dennett on the Intentional stance?
<snip>

Good question. I've sympathy with his eliminativism (horrid word!) and with
his relativism. The latter fits with the notion that all thought is
metaphor, for example.

More specifically, *intention* = 'aboutness' (< Brentano) is a meaning I've
always liked. And one entailment, that by attending to some things we don't
attend to others, ought to be apodictic. So it may (in turn) be possible to
say that poetry is *intentional* in being filtered, constrained (or not) by
the choices made by writers, readers etc and then to talk about three
things: about how far those choices are manifested in the extensional (the
denotative, that which can be pointed at or which is encoded in what's
said); about how far choice is provoked by but also provocative of intension
(sic: qualia; the connotative, in its linguistic form; that which cannot be
shared but which makes us burst into tears), and about the extent to which
the act of choosing is itself constrained. My direction, not Dennett's.

Dennett's line is rather different. Implicit in his view that chess with a
computer requires two fully intentioned players is a view of *intention* as
(very crudely) *the purview of a bounded system at some given time*,
something which applies in principle to, say, Windows XP as much as it does
to me. However, I want to punch my New Labour by-election candidate; by
coincidence the slogan of the Iraqi candidate is 'Give Blair a slap'. Since
XP can't have that sort of thought, we may be distinguished in other ways.

<snip>
...we are just as rigorous about sentience, agency and so forth as it is
expedient for us to be...
<snip>

It's not just that findings differ according to point of view. The system
itself is transformed, leading to differences in scope and in the power of
the proposed explanation. Ed Hutchins' *How a Cockpit Remembers its Speeds*
is an example of what I mean. *Design* adds teleology to the *physical* but
changing from a *design* to an *intentional* perspective transforms it
further, moving the deictic centre from the outside to the inside of the
system. As when Hutchins brings the aircraft personnel into the aircraft
system and takes cognition (and *intention*) out of the individual in order
to show how *flying* is to think cooperatively as a superpersonal unit.

In the *Chinese room* experiment, by contrast, Searle merely (re)discovers
the sixpence (*we are not AI*) he's already put into the pudding. This would
be arid, were not for its dangling ends.

<snip>
an explicitly strategic context: the entity making the call is - has evolved
to be - a duck-hunter, to which it is critically important to be able to
distinguish duck-like entities from non-duck-like ones.
<snip>

Dennett's *intentionality* raises questions about agency, as I've hinted at
above. Is it somehow settled (like Maturana's frog responding to a fly) or
is there some binary (such as design v free will) which has merely been
postponed, albeit subtly so? Relating 'evolved' to 'critically important'
seems to blur that problem.

As to whether duck hunting can evolve, Brentano classed the objects of
intention (he grew leery later on) into the physical and the mental. This
may lie behind your sense of how ducks are hunted here: we may look at a
duck (one sort of *intention*) but also at some picture of a duck (another
sort) which the mind holds up to view. I'm not very happy with this. There's
a recursion problem: pictures of pictures and so forth. And I see little
reason to distinguish between a mental image and some anatine
representation which is out there in the world. More importantly, it's
unclear how such a mental object might evolve (please don't mention
memetics!) in the way that both social institutions (the status of the horse
as an edible animal, for example) or the brain's physical structure might
_really_ be said to evolve.

Does that help at all? I somehow doubt it.

CW
 ____________________________________

Wasting all my days...
Boatman, I've come to the river at a bad time.
I don't know your name.
(Baul singer in Ghatak's 'Cloud Capped Star')