I. Dennett and Kukla on Stances and the Real

Kukla extends Dennett's (Reference Dennett1987, Reference Dennett1991b) conception of an explanatory stance and its ontological implications,Footnote ¹ which Dennett (Reference Dennett and Huebner2018) endorses as mostly friendly amendments. The intentional, design, and physical stances are explanatory strategies whose Quinean theoretical posits in favorable cases enhance the predictive capacities of those who employ them. Such predictive enhancements show beliefs and desires, evolutionary adaptations and instrumental functions, or causally efficacious microstructure to be real patterns within the world, but only as recognizable correlates to the associated stance. For Dennett, a system is an intentional system with beliefs and desires or a physical system with unobservable microstructure if attributing these characteristics to the system in the right way would enhance the ability to predict (or retrodict) its behavior. Stances such as the astrological stance, whose posits and ascribed standards at best yield trivial or coincidental predictive successes, by contrast show that no entities correspond to its theoretical posits or stand in its purported explanatory relations.

Kukla begins discussing stances as strategic orientations by noting, ‘Outside of philosophy, a stance is a kind of a physical posture that readies our body for some sorts of reactions, activities, and perceptions, while making others difficult or impossible. Our bodily stance will shape what features of the world can be salient to us and how we can and cannot engage with it’ (Kukla Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 8). Guided by that ordinary sense, Kukla notes the intentional stance commonly involves making eye contact, and listening and talking to people rather than physically manipulating their bodies. The design stance is similarly embedded in such ordinary activities as putting bread in the toaster and pushing the lever, or climbing onto a bicycle seat and pushing the pedals while turning the handlebars forward. So conceived, stances are not intellectual exercises, but instead world-involving bodily comportments: ‘As I read stances . . . the relevant kind of discernment—of patterns of rational connection between beliefs and desires, for instance—is a concrete part of coping. We discern what we need to respond to and what we need to navigate. As such, the concrete character of things richly constrains how we cope with them; our discernment is intimately enmeshed with the world itself’ (Kukla Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 10).

Kukla's reconception of stances as bodily comportments gains concreteness and pragmatic significance, but seems to separate stances from Dennett's concern with explanation. In most concrete, bodily engagements, we do not explain anything or hazard definite predictions. We also mostly do not explicitly attribute beliefs and desires, functions and ways to fulfill them, or physical properties, dispositions, causes, or laws. Moreover, in shifting from engaging with others to interpreting them, from using a device to figuring out how it works, or from intervening in causal chains to modeling them, our bodily postures, comportments, and strategies also change dramatically. For the intentional stance, Kukla later draws a consequential distinction between ordinary intentional responsiveness to others and the ‘interpretive stance’ in which we ‘employ a variety of strategies in order to decode the meaning of what another system is saying or thinking’ (Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 24). These initial appearances may be deceptive, however. Kukla recognizes that the ordinary sense of ‘stance’ or ‘posture’ is too simple, atomistic, and static to capture the robust, strategic engagements that matter to Dennett, with implications for understanding ‘stances’ as a term of philosophical art: ‘[T]he term “stance”’ suggests something overly static and synchronic. A bodily stance is just a starting position, not really an entire “stance”, albeit one that interestingly constrains the worldly engagements that follow it. On my reading, “stances” are systematic collections of embodied strategies for coping and coordinating; in fact, any Dennettian “stance” will in fact be made up of a wide and counterfactually flexible repertoire of bodily positions’ (Kukla Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 8–9). With that qualification, it remains open whether explicitly explanatory comportments and the unreflectively skillful engagements they analyze belong to the same wide bodily repertoire, or require shifts among stances. Addressing that question requires better understanding of such shifts and what is at stake in locating boundaries between bodily repertoires.

A central feature of stances bearing on their scope is their normativity. For both Dennett and Kukla, stance-taking can fail, and understanding the varieties of failure and their manifestations is revealing. Stance-taking can fail utterly for lack of know-how but can also suffer partial failures of execution. In Kukla's example of the boxing stance, one might fail to take up that stance at all while cluelessly stepping into the ring wearing gloves, but one can also box while boxing poorly. One can take up a stance toward the wrong entities (conversing with an automated phone system, using a marketing display facsimile of a tool, or tilting at windmills), or the right entities at the wrong time or place. Stances can also be properly performed without any entities for which they are appropriate (the failure of the astrological stance to discern ‘stellar influences’ is more evidently displayed by its most learned and practiced devotees rather than by casual followers). Success nevertheless need not, and perhaps cannot be complete. As Kukla indicates, ‘Taking a stance involves engaging a set of strategies for wrangling with resistant material things of various sorts, and doing so necessarily involves trying to implement these strategies, perhaps in the face of resistance, being thwarted by things, and so forth. Indeed, I want to claim that it is only in the face of this sort of commitment-requiring resistance that we ought to consider the entities toward which our stances are directed as real’ (Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 15). Dennett (Reference Dennett1991b) similarly emphasizes the importance of recognizing real patterns amidst noise, and Kukla added that ‘It turns out that even when people experience themselves as making choices based on their beliefs and desires and executing their intentions, in fact their behavior is driven to a startling degree by subpersonal pressures [such as i]mplicit biases and contextual cues. . . . But such subpersonal phenomena do not undercut the intentional stance; they merely showcase its finitude’ (Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 15).

Dennett and Kukla nevertheless diverge on the normativity of stances in ways relevant to Being and Time. For Dennett, stances are Quinean-theoretical positings whose successes and failures are predictive. The intentional stance posits rationally interconnected beliefs and desires; the design stance posits components and interfaces with functional roles in an organismic or instrumental system; the physical stance posits causal microstructure or lawful patterns. Predictive failures sometimes accrue to the stance and sometimes deflect onto how it is taken. Nevertheless, a stance's predictive success indicates that the entities it posits exist in the univocal sense of being real. Heidegger's distinction between ontic concern with entities and ontological concern with their ways of being brings out a significant philosophical difference between Dennett and Kukla on stances and reality. Dennett's Heideggerian-ontological monism is manifest in the possibilities he acknowledges for ontic pluralism: ‘There could be two different, but equally real, patterns discernable in the noisy world. The rival theorists would not even agree on which parts of the world were pattern and which were noise, and yet nothing deeper would settle the issue’ (Reference Dennett1991b: 118).Footnote ² The predictive success derived from these patterns is what makes them ‘equally real’. Kukla criticizes the priority Dennett accords to the entities discovered via the physical stance, the ‘world of atoms and molecules’ and the patterns of their ‘arrangements’ (Dennett Reference Dennett, Ross, Ladyman and Kincaid2013), but their deeper difference about ontology concerns this role for predictive success as neutral adjudicator of reality.

Kukla proposes instead a univocal but irreducibly stance-relative sense of reality that might seem to differ only subtly from Dennett's, as based on pragmatically successful coping rather than empirical-predictive success. Reading Kukla's account of embodied stances through Heidegger's ontological (not ontic) pluralism about understandings of being shows the difference to be more significant. Kukla replaces Dennett's Heideggerian-ontological monism with an opposing ontological pluralism. Dennett's appeal to predictive success can be assessed from a neutral meta-stance, whereas the standards for successful coping are stance-dependent. ‘One can ask questions about what is real from within any stance, and one can, upon investigation, give fallible but well-supported answers. One will get these answers by employing the body of coping strategies available from that stance. . . . But there is no extra-stance perspective from which to assess the correctness of a stance’ (Kukla Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 29).

In what follows, I argue that sustaining Kukla's reconception of stances as repertoires of embodied strategies for coping with the world calls for a more complex conclusion. If Heidegger enables instructive revision of Kukla, however, Kukla in turn allows informative readings of central issues where Heidegger himself made undeveloped suggestions.

II. Stances and the Being of Entities

For Dennett, stances are theoretical positings for making our way in the world, assessed by a univocal standard of predictive success. Pragmatic dealings with things are continuous with those theoretical orientations as implicit positings and corrective adjustments; all fit within a holistic web of often-implicit belief constrained by experience only at its ‘boundary’. Dennett does disavow overly intellectualist conceptions of prediction: ‘The primary role of the intentional stance is not the dry intellectual role of an option, deciding which framework will work best to couch one's attempts at explanation and prediction of complex behavior; the primary role is to enable people to cope with each other's differences at a level that privileges our rational capacities’ (Dennett Reference Dennett and Huebner2018: 32). His focus is nevertheless the predictive and explanatory patterns that constitute the objects made available by a stance. The intentional stance, for example, is oriented toward coping with what others do and say. Dennett does say that we also take the intentional stance toward ourselves (Reference Dennett1987: 27), but it is not clear in what sense we try to predict our own behavior, or even cope with it. Indeed, one could construe the intentional stance as Dennett's proposal for how to incorporate other people's or animals’ predictive orientation within a Quinean ‘total theory’.

Kukla also wants to understand the objects of stances, but their treatment is shaped by a more extensive account of stance-taking. In taking us to inhabit the stances that enable active engagement with the world and let it show up intelligibly, Kukla reverses Dennett's Quinean version of pragmatism. Instead of incorporating unreflective dealings with things and people within an implicit ‘total theory’ for predictive purposes, they treat theoretical reflection and interpretation as distinctive embodied strategies for coping with things pragmatically and deny any neutral or holistically inclusive cross-stance orientation. Further elaboration of Kukla's conception of stances, in a spirit of aspirationally friendly amendment comparable to their response to Dennett, accentuates and clarifies the intended divergence from Dennett's approach.

Consider Kukla's initial characterization of embodied stances and what they make available: ‘We can see that three types of things are essentially complementary: (a) stances, or sets of coping strategies and expectations that are first and foremost embodied postures and performances flowing from these postures; (b) kinds of information made available by these stances, and (c) kinds of entities that are the bearers of this information, and are the objective targets of the coping strategies that make up the stances’ (Kukla Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 9). This characterization of embodied stances is surprisingly third-personal, given Kukla's insistence elsewhere on the ineliminability of first- and second-person involvements (Kukla and Lance Reference Kukla and Lance2009: 101–5, 121–28, 157–77). From within a stance, the ‘performances flowing from a posture’ are manifest as abilities and inabilities, orientations toward what one can do and can encounter. Those abilities are also world-involving in two interdependent ways. They are always grounded and more or less balanced, since a stance and its affordances are taken up against that ground from that balance. If one is standing, the hard or soft, level or sloped, rough or smooth ground is integral to one's posture and balance, and the perceptual openness of a stance similarly depends upon and responds to the ambient light, noise, and smell. The interdependence of stance and ground is all the more evident in water, on a low seat, in free fall, or on crutches, and in the dark or amidst deafening noise or noxious odor. From a grounded balance, a stance is differently world-involving in its directedness toward and aspectual focus upon or attunement to what one's surroundings afford. A stance is not a property of a body as object, but a dynamic practical orientation within, upon, and toward a field of correlated abilities and possibilities. In Heidegger's terms, embodied stances are Dasein's bodily ways of being.

Stances do make available a range of information, but that is a third-personal, static, and disengaged description of what stances afford. From within a stance, we encounter not ‘information’ but more or less definite solicitations, resistances and hazards. The ‘information’ available from a stance ‘informs’ a situation whose configuration is not just accessibly arrayed before us, but actively involves us materially and affectively. Taking up a stance as a dynamic repertoire of embodied orientations is what Heidegger called ‘pressing into possibilities’ and letting oneself be open to and affected by how entities show themselves as mattering (Reference Heidegger1962: sections 29–32). As Dennett prominently acknowledged, stances are also discursively articulated (Reference Dennett1987: 20–21). They prepare us for more-or-less appropriate things to hear and to say, how others ostensively or vocatively redirect our orientation, and how various possibilities thereby ‘make sense’.

Kukla's account of stances and their concrete examples treat the information-bearing entities targeted by coping strategies not as discrete, occurrent things, but complex patterns of worldly entanglement. To that extent, Kukla pushes even further Dennett's (Reference Dennett1991b) characterization of entities as ‘real patterns’. Consider money, which Dennett treats as abstract, and others understand as gerrymandered collections of physical tokens with collectively determined social statuses as money (‘The piece of paper in my hand counts as a twenty-dollar bill, thus giving it a status and with that status a function that it cannot perform without collective recognition of that status’ (Searle Reference Searle2010: 10). Kukla responds that

Similarly, the stances taken in clinical-medical examination and the entities it targets are not easily localized despite their orientation toward the patient's body as potential locus of disease, injury, or other risks. Kukla notes that this stance conjoins physically probing the body and discursively engaging the patient, while emphasizing that ‘large swaths of your beliefs, desires, social relationships, and so forth, are hidden from view by the setting and the forms of interaction, and indeed, they ought to remain that way as they are simply not on the table, as it were’ (Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 9). Much like money, however, clinical disease entities and their manifestation are richly entangled with life outside the examination room. Patients’ diet, drug use, sexual partners, exercise routines, chemical exposures, social connectivity, seat belt use, and attitudes toward vaccination are now on the table. The multifaceted understanding enabling these determinations of clinical relevance is partially constitutive of a clinical orientation.

These friendly revisions to Kukla indicates how their discussion of embodied stances illuminates Heidegger's conception of an understanding of being alongside Dennett on stances. Kukla's account suggests how Dasein's ‘being-in as such’ is embodied in its understanding, affectivity and discourse as well as its existential spatiality. Well-known difficulties in Heidegger's account of existential spatiality (Cerbone Reference Cerbone and Wrathall2013) easily obscure its close connection to Dasein's ‘being-in as such’ and hence Dasein's disclosedness (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1927: section 28; Reference Heidegger1962: section 28). That connection can be better understood if we think about existential spatiality and the articulation of Dasein's disclosedness as understanding, affectivity, and discourse in light of Kukla on embodied stances. In what follows, I consider the import of Kukla's account for Heidegger's ontological pluralism and his question of the sense of being in general. Reading Kukla in light of Heidegger on the ontological difference also elicits and accentuates further divergence between Dennett's and Kukla's conceptions of stances and the real.

Addressing the ontological implications of embodied stances and what they disclose requires expanding Kukla's initial exposition of embodied stances. First, despite emphasizing stances as embodied, Kukla says nothing explicitly about bodies and their needs or capacities. We need to understand the bodies that are always in some stance or other while retaining their identity through stance shifts (Kukla Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 16). Among relevant aspects of Dasein's bodily way of being are its coordinated functionality, activity, and perceptual openness; its conjoined ground-dependence, outward-directedness, and responsiveness; and the neediness and vulnerability that permeate bodily being-in-the-world. Heidegger is comparably reticent about these aspects of Dasein's being, which are ontological ‘givens’ in Being and Time. I argue elsewhere that despite Heidegger's explicit contrary commitment his characterizations of Dasein's being are consistent with, and perhaps even dependent upon, recognizing Dasein's animality (Rouse Reference Rouse, Burch, Marsh and McMullin2019, Reference Rouse2003). Animality encompasses the Aristotelian sense of energeia as goal-directedness whose goal is continuation of its own activity (Okrent Reference Okrent2007, Reference Okrent2018), the functional interdependence of bodily organs and symbiotic organisms, the ecological-developmental and niche-constructive recognition of the interdependence of organisms and their ecological-selective-developmental environments, an organism's place in an evolutionary lineage, and the omnipresent vulnerability of both to death or extinction. Kukla inherits similar commitments from Dennett, and I proceed accordingly here. Your mileage may vary (Haugeland Reference Haugeland2013: 272).

A second extension to Kukla concerns differences between inhabiting a stance and taking it up. Kukla uses the phrase ‘taking up a stance’ to discuss inhabiting a stance. They eloquently describe how stances enable some activities and disable others; configure patterns of perceptual salience and occlusion; let various entities show up as ‘loci of norm-governed behavior, resistance, and explanatory power’ (Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 4); and thereby let us cope with how entities resist the strategic orientations of those stances. Since we are always in some stance or other, however, taking up a stance involves shifting from one stance to another. Kukla initiated their account with their ex-husband's shifts from the intentional to the design stance but was reticent about how shifts are undertaken, what normative concerns govern stance-shifting, or even how stance-shifting is possible. Kukla accords no place to a neutral or meta-stance or any basis for assessing a stance's correctness. They therefore seem committed to claiming that the stances we inhabit also open us to the possibility and significance of (some) other stances, and the perceptual encounters and pragmatic failures that might prompt a stance shift. Kukla nevertheless does not discuss how some stances show up as intelligible possibilities from within another stance, or how stance-shifts are norm-governed from within a stance. Heidegger also never discusses concretely how a ‘changeover’ (Reference Heidegger1962: section 69b) takes place from one understanding of being to another, but I argue below he does provide the basis for such an account.

The question of how and why to shift from one stance to another also places greater weight on demarcating one ‘wide and counterfactually flexible repertoire of bodily positions’ from another (Kukla Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 9). This issue shows up implicitly when Kukla discusses how money becomes manifest from the ‘economic stance’ as an entity with normative significance: ‘A cat, quite literally, cannot see money. Not even a brilliant cat. Cats just aren't capable of taking the economic stance’ (Kukla Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 13).

The cat's limitation is not perceptual but existential. Cats cannot be, that is, do not live, in ways that let money be intelligible, which is why they cannot perceive it and cannot recognize or mis-recognize what it is. Based on considerations advanced elsewhere (Rouse Reference Rouse2015: chapters 3–5; Rouse Reference Rousemanuscript), I somewhat contentiously claim that other organisms’ ways of life each makes up a single, inexorable stance toward what thereby becomes their biological environment. The extraordinarily wide-ranging, flexible, and intelligent behavior that many organisms display makes up in each taxon a single ‘wide and counterfactually flexible repertoire of bodily positions’. In light of the evolutionary continuity between human beings and other animals that is especially important to Dennett, this contention confers still greater import to the questions of what unifies a stance as a counterfactually flexible repertoire of bodily positions, and what considerations identify, enable, and motivate stance-shifting.

A third issue that requires further development in Kukla's discussion is their univocal characterization of stances as coping strategies, and the forms of success and failure they determine as pragmatic. This treatment may seem parallel to Dennett's conception of stances as predictive strategies. For Dennett, however, predictive success is an over-arching norm governing stances. For Kukla, identification of ‘coping’ strategies cannot be normative in the same way, having explicitly denied that overarching norms govern the diverse ways we ‘cope’ with money, ethical obligations, hand tools, clunky prose we read, clunky prose we write, people's political recalcitrance or emotional immaturity, food allergies, pets, social faux pas, philosophical counterexamples, aesthetic genres, and other kinds of entity encountered as significant and possibly recalcitrant. The divergence between Dennett and Kukla brought out by the Heideggerian ontological difference is thus significant. We saw Dennett's ontological monism displayed in his univocal conception of reality: real entities are those reliably predictable from a stance. For Kukla, the norms that govern these heterogeneous coping strategies and the real entities that stand up to them are irreducibly stance-relative, and hence they determine not only the entities but also their irreducibly plural ways of being.

The unity of these diverse targets and resistances to pragmatic coping is nevertheless partly addressed by a fourth issue that Kukla treats quickly: the normative force of needs and commitments, and the relations between them. Both forms of normative accountability play important roles. Kukla insists that our pragmatic goals ‘are typically neither idiosyncratic nor up to us. As we move through the world we need to cope and coordinate with objects, situations, and other bodies and their material reality—including their instantiation of intentional patterns and teleological patterns—tightly constrains how we do this’ (Kukla Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 14). Recall their similar insistence that the economic stance is not optional, as we cannot avoid having to deal with money or its absence. While rightly insistent upon these forms of needy dependence and constraint, however, Kukla is reticent about their normative force. Kukla nevertheless complements these normative demands that the world imposes with normative commitments we take up: ‘Responding to Dennett in “Pattern and Being,” John Haugeland . . . brings out the point that stances are not just repertoires of behaviors; they require that we take on various commitments to things behaving a certain way, treating it as a problem or challenge if they do not. To take the intentional stance with someone is not just to read her as having beliefs and desires, but to be committed to doing so, so that their violation of basic principles of rationality shows up as a norm-violation’ (Kukla Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 14).

For Kukla, our needs and commitments allow entities to show up as resistant or enabling to our stances, and consequently to manifest themselves as real. Indeed, Kukla explicitly appeals to a generic capacity to resist stanced comportments as glosses on Kant's distinction between objective perceptions and subjective impressions and Haugeland's account of objectivity, and these connections further emphasize why reading Kukla's Dennett through Heidegger is not an arbitrary or alien imposition. The sense of being Kukla ascribes under the heading ‘reality’ is a modally robust capacity to resist or thwart norm-generating needs or commitments. Section three considers how to understand the generic sense of being invoked in Kukla's and Heidegger's ontological pluralisms.

III. Ontological Regions and the Sense of Being in General

Kukla deployed this reconception of Dennettian stances to address the recurring issue of the ‘ontic status’ (reality) of entities posited/discovered from various stances. I have been arguing that, read through Heidegger on the ontological difference, Kukla's account importantly differs from Dennett's as an ontological pluralism about ways of being in contrast to Dennett's ontic pluralism of kinds of entities. In this section, I show how that difference makes a difference to Kukla's conception of embodied stances and the resulting conclusions about the real. I do not assess those conclusions directly. I proceed indirectly by considering some examples of stances, what they disclose, and how they bear on Kukla's claims. These examples indicate how each of those claims gets something importantly right, but each also needs further qualification or reinterpretation. Those lessons in turn instructively gloss issues in Heidegger concerning how to understand the ‘ontic status’ of entities via both the plural understandings of being that disclose them as entities and the sense of being in general. Once we recognize and clarify the extent of Kukla's divergence from Dennett, further considerations would be needed for a decisive defense of Kukla's ontological pluralism against Dennett's prediction-based monism. At the very least, however, these considerations show that defending Dennett's original view against Kukla's reading would now require developing accounts of stance-taking, of the normative considerations motivating and justifying stance shifts, and of how to account for a stance-neutral or stance-independent assessment of predictive success.

I begin by noting Kukla's principal conclusions about stances and reality, against the background of interpreting Dennettian stances as ‘systematic collections of embodied strategies for coping and coordinating’ (Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 9):

1. 1. Stances incorporate a repertoire of bodily positions and movement patterns, the forms of perceptual and practical salience they enable, but also implicit but contestable standards for satisfying the needs or commitments guiding a stance's strategic, practical orientation;

2. 2. A kind of entity is ‘real’ if and only if it would robustly stand up to the coping strategies and normative concerns that make up a stance (although the standards expressing those concerns are contestable);

3. 3. ‘[E]ntities and patterns that are available from one stance are typically not from others. Hence an attempt to explain why a stance works or what kind of reality its entities have, in terms foreign to that stance, will routinely fail to capture what is available from inside the stance’ (Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 18);

4. 4. ‘[T]here is no such thing as a stance-independent stance on what is real, or what is ‘really real’, [but] we need not abandon first-order debates over the reality of various things, including debates over whether some kinds of entities or patterns reduce to others. These are perfectly legitimate debates, but they are first-order debates that appeal directly to evidence and anomalies that show up as we cope with things, rather than metadebates that transcend any stance’ (Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 17–18);

   1. 4.a. The philosophical stance that names and describes stances, the interpretive stance toward what another system is saying, thinking, or doing, and the semantic stance that asks whether the ‘contents or meanings [of a sentence or claim] map onto the world in some standard way . . . that is somehow faithful and direct, rather than metaphorical, hyperbolical or distorted in some way’ (Reference Kukla and Huebner2018: 20) are not meta-stances, but alternative first-order stances serving specifically philosophical purposes, with no bearing on assessments of the stances that are their objects of inquiry (Kukla argues elsewhere (Kukla and Winsberg Reference Kukla, Winsberg, Gross, Tebben and Williams2015) for a deflationary approach to truth and semantic facts, but insists that these disagreements with truth-functionalist, Davidsonian, and other semantic theories are first order debates about the robustness of meanings and reference relations within and solely for the purposes of a semantic/philosophical stance).

5. 5. Stances do not determine what is or is not real, but only let entities become manifest as real or not, by constituting transcendental conditions under which certain kinds of things could show up intelligibly.

Kukla exemplifies one important and wide-ranging group of embodied stances in discussing the stances taken up in boxing and in clinical medical examination. Such stances arise within practical domains such as work, sports or games, formal education, aesthetic disciplines such as painting, ballet, or poetry, religious worship, and everyday life activities such as parenting, negotiating traffic or public transport, or preparing food. I call these stances ‘occupational,’ in the temporal sense of what ‘occupies’ us rather than socially recognized occupational statuses. Access to these domains normally requires developing body postures and skills, including how to use equipment appropriately, attend to what they make perceptually salient, and respond to opportunities they open. Occupational stances thereby conjoin practical and perceptual directedness. Perceptual awareness is sensitive to how we move through the world, while bodily movement is always responsive to what it makes perceptually available—compare the difference between reaching to grasp a delicate teacup, a heavy weight, or an uneven handhold to pull oneself up. Such practices also constitute goods and virtues whose normative claims are only concretely recognizable and appreciable by those who take up the relevant stances and acquire the requisite perceptual discernment and practical skill (MacIntyre Reference MacIntyre1981: chapter 13).

‘Occupational’ stances often incorporate, together or in rapid succession, Kukla's embodied versions of Dennett's troika of the intentional, design, and physical stances. The ‘wide repertoire of body positions’ required to ride a bicycle through traffic makes salient together the intentional commitments of drivers; the instrumental capacities and roles of brakes, shifters, pedals, and handlebars; the differences in mass and speed among those vehicles, the bicycle, and nearby pedestrians; and their positioning with respect to traffic lanes, intersections, signs, and weather conditions. The clinical medical stance requires skillfully coordinating physical examination of patients’ bodies for clinical symptoms; listening to their symptom reports and medical history with an interpretive concern for their medical significance; use of medical equipment as designed; and assessing the implications of the conjoined results for the functional roles of organ systems and the facilitation or diminution of patients’ life activities and prospects.

Dennett's classic stances are not only conjoined within these ‘occupational’ stances, but track patterns that persist across shifts among these orientations. We might initially describe these patterns as manifesting the different ways of being of persons, organisms, equipment, signs, ‘natural’ phenomena, or social institutions. These ‘ontological’ patterns are also entities in the Heideggerian sense of something that is, but that term formally indicates patterns robustly specified by those understandings of being. Consider my colleague Elise and my encounters with her as a person: I notice and leave space for where she parks her bicycle, see students stream through the door as her class lets out, tell an advisee to enroll in that class, receive a Facebook announcement of her birthday, reread an argument in her book, see her partner walk up the stairs toward her office, anticipate her concerns about a department policy, scan a faculty meeting to see if she has arrived, recall some personal and professional stresses she recently encountered, smile in response to her buoyant demeanor in the hall, and later meet to discuss a possible collaboration. I never encounter Elise as an isolated, bounded entity even when perceptually focused upon and closely attuned to her facial expressions, bodily posture, and utterances, and the intentional orientations and commitments they embody. I understand and can only encounter her as personally situated in various ways, marked by and marking things and circumstances as personally significant, trackable as the same person through the interdependent belonging together of many personal encounters, and mattering to me in part through how things matter to her personally.

Other examples of ontological stances show comparably entangled entification. Heidegger famously highlighted the complexly entangled being of equipment, including a diverse range of signs as ‘equipment for indicating’ (Reference Heidegger1927: sections 15–18). Nonhuman organisms show up differently. I encounter the woodchuck living in our yard not only as a visible body scurrying under the garden bench, but also as inhabiting a different way of life encompassing and configuring its own partially subterranean environment. The woodchuck has a lived environment impervious to the boundary of my neighbor's yard and minimally responsive but highly vulnerable to the street in front, and is closely attuned to differentiations in soil and vegetation that mostly escape my comprehension, and acutely sensitive to ambient olfactory and auditory patterns I cannot discern. It also provides an intermittent but vaguely satisfying ecological interpellation of my all too anthropocentric preoccupations, about which it could not care less. My salary exists in another way, as an unidentifiably denumerable financial entity whose relation between quantification and entification is more complex than Willard van Orman Quine (Reference Quine1960: 242–43) indicates. I can count the dollars I receive and note when they come in or go out; I allocate them to different bills, gifts, causes, or projects, but cannot differentiate which ones I assign to which payment, or track them through subsequent encounters (although auditors concerned about money laundering, illegal campaign contributions, or investments in boycotted industries can and do assign trajectories to specific sets of dollars and their movements through other currencies). It shows up not only in electronic signals from my bank, but also as qualitatively manifest in a range of things I can or cannot afford, and how these capacities and incapacities mark my social presence to others with differing personal and political significance.

Reading these examples of stances through Heidegger shows that occupational and ontological bodily postures are not different kinds of stance, but instead function together within the ‘wide and counterfactually flexible repertoire of bodily positions’ that constitute a single embodied stance as Kukla reconstructs Dennettian predictive strategies. Embodied stances thus have a more complex structure than either Dennett or Kukla indicates. In their occupational aspect, they are thematically directed toward the task at hand and the entities it involves. That thematic focus is nevertheless grounded in a more extensive but unthematic orientation that situates it within the world. That unthematic aspect of stance-taking includes maintaining the grounded balance of its own bodily postures, but also an ontological aspect concerning how to engage the entities it encounters in their ways of being, which I had previously characterized as a distinct kind of stance-taking. The occupational and ontological aspects of stances display what Heidegger calls the articulation of being, as what-being that determines entities as differentiated in kinds and that-being that discloses the ways of being of those (kinds of) entities (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1985: part one, chapter 2). Although there are kinds of entity corresponding to these ways of being, entities of such kinds also have more specific occupational-stance determinations. There is no such thing as generic equipment, but only equipment belonging to some practical domain or other, or to specific multipurpose roles. Organisms always embody specific ways of life, modes of development, and patterns of descent with modification. Theories are always theories in or of some domain. We always encounter persons through some more specific stance, as friends, co-workers, fellow citizens, family, or just strangers thrown together by contingent circumstances, even though these roles must, with greater or lesser intelligibility, fit together within a single life. These ways of being articulate differences in how things can show up as something that is and can be ‘coped with’ appropriately or deficiently, which can be tracked across practical domains as different kinds of persons, tools, living beings, and so forth. That is why domains of entities and ways of being do not show up from different stances, but instead articulate a stance according to what it is directed toward and how those entities are or are not ‘there’ to discover.

These conjoined thematic and unthematic aspects of the stances through which we encounter entities of various kinds with diverse ways of being are embodied versions of what Heidegger (Reference Heidegger1979: 64–99; Reference Heidegger1985: 47–72) characterized as the conjoining of simple and categorial intuition in any intentional directedness. He cautioned that the phenomenological sense of ‘intuition’ means ‘simply apprehending the bodily given as it shows itself . . . [implying] no special capacity, no exceptional way of transposing oneself into otherwise closed domains and depths of the world’ (Reference Heidegger1985: 47; Reference Heidegger1979: 64). He also insistently distinguished his phenomenology of categorial intentional directedness from philosophical categories. The categorial understanding belonging to every intentional directedness is not directedness toward an abstract entity (a category, a meaning, a norm, or a possible world), but rather ‘discloses the simply given objects anew, such that these objects come to explicit apprehension precisely in what they are’ (Reference Heidegger1985: 62; Reference Heidegger1979: 85). This point phenomenologically displays the ontological difference: the ontological understandings involved in stance-taking and its categorial aspects are not stances toward distinct categories as entities, but instead toward ordinary entities as they are in different ways. This unthematic grasp of one's own stance-taking directedness enables adjusting that stance in response to patterns of resistance and accommodation in what it makes practically and perceptually available and also opens onto possible alternative stances. It thereby not only allows us to encounter and cope with entities in intelligible ways, but also situates those encounters in relation to other possible orientations.

We can see this more complex structure of stances at work in Kukla's example of the boxing stance as a norm-governed directedness toward entities that only show up intelligibly from within that stance. Such a stance does not just direct us toward such entities as opponents, openings, punches, and defenses. In taking up a stance, I situate myself within the world. A boxing stance can be rehearsed almost anywhere, but even rehearsals are stances oriented towards specific material settings and others’ involvements in those settings. Without the availability of boxing gloves, rings, bells, timers, and crucially, other boxers and referees, there is no stance to take up; rehearsing or practicing a boxing stance in other situations is still an orientation toward those settings in their absence. A boxing stance also does not make sense in isolation, however. One cannot be a boxer without many additional involvements. That is not only because boxing depends upon the bodily maintenance provided by adequate nutrition and rest, aerobic conditioning, and more. Boxing only makes sense within a life beyond boxing, which is why the material setting of the gym includes locker rooms and showers, entrances and exits to the building, and placement in a ‘neighborhood’ outside with ways to move in and through it.

The ‘wide and counterfactually flexible repertoire of bodily positions’ that make up the boxing stance that can intelligibly disclose such entities as jabs and openings thus has to incorporate an existential spatiality and a practical situatedness within world-time (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1962: sections 22–24, 70, 70–81). Taking up a boxing stance implicitly involves a recognition in practice that now is the time for boxing, whereas earlier it was time for meeting a student, followed by times for lunch, walking to the gym, changing clothes and warming up, and later, showering and walking home, where it will then be time for other occupational stances. World-times are also nested: within the extended ‘now’ of time for boxing is the more specifically focused time-for-a-jab-to-set-up-an-opening-for-a-hook, but today is also a boxing day, in which other activities are sequenced and located differently than on other days. World-times are thereby entangled with existential spatiality, since at any given (world-)time, you need to be in the right place, and various involvements must be located to get there from here, with normative differences in its being easy or hard to do so. Other occupational stances work similarly. A stance that discovers robust capacities to stand up to and resist its characteristic forms of ‘strategic coping’ not only lets these entities be what they are; it also discovers their existentiell entanglements with a wide range of other entities and stances. There is no outer boundary to those entanglements, even though their existential spatiality and world-temporality are horizonally configured. That is why occupational stances and the entities they let us encounter are not a self-enclosed domain of entities, but an opening onto ‘the world,’ which is not a comprehensively inclusive entity, but a categorial structuring of any embodied stance-taking.

I cannot here develop a fuller account of what this ‘ontological’ or ‘categorial’ aspect of embodied stance-taking incorporates. One important aspect of this aspect of stance-taking nevertheless bears directly on Kukla's invocation of neediness and commitment and my reinterpretation. The ontological/categorial aspect of stance-taking is a stance's unthematic directedness toward the ‘how’ of its own stance-taking. Jesse Prinz (Reference Prinz2004) develops a compelling account of ‘emotion’ as a perceptual openness and responsiveness to patterned changes in our bodies, which I take to be integral to stance-taking. Reinterpreted through my reading of Kukla on embodied stances, Prinz's psychological identification of emotions as entities can be reinterpreted as belonging to the categorial/ontological aspect of embodied stances, akin to what Heidegger characterizes as Befindlichkeit, an ontological dimension of being-amidst (Sein-bei) entities. I cannot discuss this issue here, but we need to keep in mind for both Kukla and me that these affective aspects of neediness and the ‘thrown projection’ of having-taken-a-stand are integral to embodied stances.

With these considerations in the background, we can now return to Dennett's and Kukla's concerns over what there is, and what it means to be. I endorse Kukla's claim that ‘there are’ entities of various kinds as robustly standing up to (‘occupational’)-stance-dependent ways of coping with them, and that these (kinds of) entities only show up as something there is in their ability to stand up to those stances.Footnote ³ Kukla's insistence that stances involve a repertoire of interconnected bodily orientations and responsiveness does important work here, however. The normativity of ‘standing-up’ to the stance depends upon the interconnected sustainability of the stance in the face of any resistance to its ability to cope with the things it purports to reveal. These domain-constitutive forms of normativity nevertheless open different possibilities for success or failure. We can fail to take up a stance, or fail to undertake it well or appropriately. The latter, however, takes diverse forms. We can fail to cope with what is there, try and fail to cope with situations where no entities of the right kinds exist, or fail to sustain this stance-taking within its existential-spatial and/or world-temporal horizons. We can also succeed or fail in transforming the stance and what it discloses, in ways that not only change what shows up from within that stance, but what it is to be that kind of entity. In this respect, consider the historical shifts in how medical practitioners (ought to) comport themselves toward patients’ health or illness, and what forms of disease, illness or disability are thereby intelligible.

Entities can also contribute to successful or failed coping within some domain in different ways of being, or in the associated ways in which they are mutually implicated. Equipment can break, be unavailable when needed, or in the way. People can perform incompetently or inattentively, fail to show up, or be recalcitrant or obstructive, which we (should) understand and respond to quite differently from broken or missing equipment, junk, or trash. Organisms can be poorly adapted to changing environments, and environments can be vulnerable, resource-impoverished, toxic, unsustainably small, or insufficiently diverse. Persons’ lives can be tragically shortened, diseased, oppressed, ‘pointless,’ or unfulfilled. Theories can be false, inapplicable, conceptually confused, inadequately justified, or their implications untestable. These ontological deficiencies always show themselves in more specific ways in different occupational contexts, but they also differ from one another in kind.

I now reassess Kukla's rejection of any neutral or cross-stance stance and consequent rejection of Dennett's univocal criterion of predictive enhancement, his prioritization of the physical stance, and other philosophers’ attempts to treat literal meanings and/or semantic truthmakers as univocal determinations of what there (really, literally) ‘is’. I endorse Kukla's claim that kinds of entity only show up as what they are and as really there for us to (have to) cope with in their responsiveness to counterfactually robust embodied stances that constitute and sustain whole domains of practical involvement in the world, which Heidegger describes as ‘existentiell worlds’ (Reference Heidegger1962: section 14). Without the ability to take up an appropriately embodied, grounded and orienting stance, with its requisite skills, affective grip, and consequently commitive or needy worldly dependence, nothing would show up intelligibly as something that is.

Stances themselves nevertheless provide for the connectedness among stances and the possibilities for assessment across stances, in at least three distinct ways that do not involve any neutral or higher-order stance. First, we saw that stances themselves are more complex than Kukla indicates. They embody not only an intentional directedness toward the entities and situations for which they are prepared and responsive but also a ‘categorial’ openness to encountering and responding to different kinds of entities and ways of being, and to telling in practice the differences among them. Second, that categorial openness brings together both a world-temporal, sequential ordering of different occupational stances and an existential-spatial sense of how thus to ‘turn’ one's body from one stance to another, within a stance-taking, world-dependent disclosedness (how to think together the temporality and spatiality of Dasein's existence as ‘mine’ in each case is another controversial issue in Being and Time, which I cannot take up here). These considerations respond to questions about Heideggerian ontology of whether the same entity can manifest different ways of being, and of how and why understandings of being can be appropriate or inappropriate to the entities they disclose. Embodied Dasein's existential spatiality and world-temporality are the horizonal, categorial shape of how entities that only show up within an ‘occupational’ domain can nevertheless bear on other stances and what they disclose. In the other direction, deficient modes of directedness towards a way of being (such as treating persons as items of equipment or treating equipment as a mere thing) only show up as deficient in specific ways within occupational-stance-constituted practices and norms. Third, the normative authority of that world-temporal sequencing and existential-spatial clearing of the world arises from how those stances belong together as stances of an embodied, vulnerable (way of) life. The parentheses highlight that this categorial stance-directedness toward our own stance-taking is also dually articulated in its own characteristic modes of that-being and who-being rather than what-being. Heidegger uses ‘existence’ and ‘mineness’ to indicate the articulation of Dasein's (embodied) stance-taking in its who-being and that-being. Specific stance-takings are situated amidst a thrown, vulnerable, having-to sustain an embodied, needy life by pressing into the possibilities opened or closed by an evolved, developing body. We understand those stance-takings as unified by their embodied continuity within a life that stretches between horizons of birth and death. Stances encompass our embodied having-been and having-to-be in taking a stand toward the needs and commitments they embody. That life is a life, however, because of its ontological as well as ontic interdependence with others in a shared way of life and the particular projects that living together in the world makes intelligibly possible.

The answer to Kukla's question—whether a (or the) philosophical stance is then a neutral or master stance whose normative authority governs the intelligibility and adequacy of the particular stances that are available to us and that we might or might not take up—is again split. I also endorse Kukla's claim that such a philosophical stance toward stance-taking, seeking to articulate, name, and adjudicate stances, is one particular stance among many. Like the boxing stance and other domain-constitutive stances and practices, philosophy is one among many things we can do, with its own specific interests, possibilities, and demands, and a place within a life and an encompassing way of life. Kukla's invocation of a general but stance-relative sense of the real nevertheless needs a further development. For Kukla, money, persons, beliefs, boxing openings, and chemical reaction mechanisms are all real, as reliably robust phenomena we must cope with in appropriately stance-relative ways, without any encompassing stance that assigns a common content to ‘real’. To understand what it means in each case to ‘cope’ with those entities as ‘real’, one must take up the appropriate stance and work through its first-order normative assessments. Not to do so is a failure on our part to ‘get it’ rather than a deficiency in the entity or the stance that discloses it. Kukla's claim that these entities are real is merely a compact summary of these various stance-internal assessments; its content stems solely from the concrete ways each becomes salient and reliable from within the stances that disclose them. That conclusion restates in Dennettian terms the relation in Heidegger between the manifold senses of being and the question of the sense of being as such.

The existential-spatial situatedness and temporally unifying wholeness of a life and the way of life that encompasses it nevertheless allow a more substantive specification. What does provide a cross-stance directedness toward various stances and their normative significance is the categorial orientation within every stance one takes up, towards its place within one's life amidst historically and prospectively situated ways of life. Now is or is not the time for boxing, meeting, showering, protesting, or whatever else is at issue in my situatedness within a life I am (already) living as still lying ahead of me even in the determinacy of its past as ‘having-been’. This temporal and existential-spatial sense of having to go on with my life from ‘here’ is thus not the spectatorial or biographical unity of a life narrative. It is instead unified in always having to take a stand on who I am, in my having-been and having-to-be, as at issue in first-order adjudicable ways. Those issues and their significance are not just up to me, however, because of my situated dependence upon other entities, including other lives. The first-order debates about what I and we must (really) cope with from a stance and what stance(s) we ought to take up are thus answerable to whether and how those things matter in my life, their places in our lives together, and whom that ‘we’ should encompass. They are only answerable to those issues, however, because of our manifold forms of finite dependence upon our partially shared circumstances, and how they stand up to the stances I take up. These responses include the ways others hold us accountable, and how we call ourselves to account for who and how we are. Samuel Scheffler (2016) shows why the temporal horizons of our lives, is at issue and at stake in the stances we take up, extend beyond the indefinitely projected event of my death and before the having-been of my birth, even though those events are existentially unsurpassable as always over the horizon. The only way to answer those calls is to throw myself back into the activities my situation makes available, in response to issues that arise from ongoing stance-taking, with ‘everything’ at stake. Other living organisms succeed or fail in sustaining their lives and reproducing their lineage. We are not only needy and vulnerable in those ways, but also questionable in our being and answerable to what is thereby at issue in our situation. The sense of the question of being in general ‘is’ this inexorable questionability of my life and our lives concerning whether and how I am and we are. Although making that questioning explicit philosophically is a stance we can take up, that stance is only one more of the possible stances in question. That is how I read Heidegger's insistence that the ‘roots of the existential analytic, on its part, are ultimately existentiell, that is, ontic. Only if the inquiry of philosophical research is itself seized upon in an existentiell manner as a possibility of the being of each existing [case of] Dasein, does it become at all possible to disclose the existentiality of existence and to undertake an adequately founded ontological problematic. But with this, the ontical priority of the question of being has also become plain’ (Reference Heidegger1962: 34; Reference Heidegger1927: 13–14).