Specter of Reason

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."  "Hark ye yet again- the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd ...

One of Dennett's most well-known contributions to philosophy is the idea of the intentional stance .  This is supposed to be a template for understanding minds and rational agency.  However, Dennett's view of the intentional stance has shifted since he first began its formulation in the mid-1970s.  His earliest work on the topic indicates the following thesis:  An object is an intentional system just in case it is advantageous to regard it as such.  Here he is, in 1976 : An Intentional system is a system whose behavior can be (at least sometimes) explained and predicted by relying on ascriptions to the system of beliefs and desires (and other Intentionally characterized features--what I will call Intentions here, meaning to include hopes, fears, intentions, perceptions, expectations, etc.). There may in every case be other ways of predicting and explaining the behavior of an Intentional system--for instance, mechanistic or physical ways--but the Intentional...