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Instrumental Intentionality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Lynne Rudder Baker
Lynne Rudder Baker*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy Middlebury College
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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.

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

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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

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