Daniel C. Dennett

(1942 - 2024)

Daniel Dennett responds to Kitcher’s criticisms of the modern militant atheism defended by the “New Atheists.” While noting that he and Kitcher agree in most respects, especially in the ultimate goal they seek, Dennett takes issue with Kitcher on the best strategy for achieving this goal. Dennett agrees that religion can provide people’s lives with meaning, but he argues that the potential costs of maintaining religion are too great: xenophobia, violence, and so on. Moreover he sees the maintenance of religion in any form as likely delaying the work needed to replace religion with preferable secular institutions. Dennett also argues that the nonsecular varieties of Kitcher’s “orientation model” of religion are unsustainable. Once the orientation model is made explicit, those with religious commitments either lapse into Kitcher’s “belief model” or engage in faith fibbing.

Analytic metaphysics is compared with naïve aprioristic auto-anthropology and found to be a similar enterprise. A more useful anthropological approach takes folk metaphysics as a starting point, and attempts a pre-theoretical catalogue of the folk ontologies of the manifest image in preparation for accounting for the relations between things thus adumbrated and things as uncovered in the scientific image (Sellars, 1963), and it is argued that this is a proper task for philosophers. Among the candidates for thing-hood considered are sakes, dints, cahoots, smithereens, holes, voices, opportunities, dollars, fatigues, words, and numbers.

Bennet’s Rationality is an imaginative essay that sought to change the methodology of conceptual analysis, i.e. ordinary language philosophy, by asking how language contributed to human rationality. Since this movement had been launched by towering figures like Wittgenstein and Austin it had gotten bogged down in analyzing nuances of meaning. Bennett considered much more abmbitiously the central rational principles of “human talk.” He began with Karl von Frisch’s Nobel Prize-winning work on honeybees. Through an extended analysis of whether the waggle dances of honey bees transmitting information about the location of food constituted linguistic communication— and if not, what would need to be added—Bennett arrived at an understanding of rule-guided communication and other parameters as going beyond nonrational bee behaviors to constitute true rational language.

This chapter further develops a line of argument Daniel Dennett presented in his 1991 book, _Consciousness Explained_, where he argued that we should reject the intuition that Mary gains knowledge when she leaves the room. In his view, this intuition derives from a failure to appreciate the implications of knowing all the physical facts. Dennet gives a more detailed account of his case. Specifically, he (1) criticizes attempts to defend the intuition; (2) devises variations on the Mary case to illustrate how a deduction from physical information of what it's like to see in color might actually proceed; and (3) defends his arguments against objections. He affirmatively answers the question: could a proper understanding of phenomenal concepts/knowledge show that there is or is not an epistemic gap? He argues that a proper understanding of phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge helps to show that there is no epistemic gap.

How are we able to understand and anticipate each other in everyday life, in our daily interactions? Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, asserts Daniel Dennett in this first full-scale presentation of a theory of intentionality that he has been developing for almost twenty years. We adopt a stance, he argues, a predictive strategy of interpretation that presupposes the rationality of the people—or other entities—we are hoping to understand and predict. These principles of radical interpretation have far-reaching implications for the metaphysical and scientific status of the processes referred to by the everday terms of folk psychology and their corresponding terms in cognitive science.While Dennett's philosophical stance has been steadfast over the years, his views have undergone successive enrichments, refinements, and extensions. The Intentional Stance brings together both previously published and original material: four of the book's ten chapters—its first and the final three—appear here for the first time and push the theory into surprising new territory. The remaining six were published earlier in the 1980s but were not easily accessible; each is followed by a reflection—an essay reconsidering and extending the claims of the earlier work. These reflections and the new chapters represent the vanguard of Dennett's thought. They reveal fresh lines of inquiry into fundamental issues in psychology, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary theory as well as traditional issues in the philosophy of mind. A Bradford Book.

Minds are complex artifacts, partly biological and partly social; only a unified, multidisciplinary approach will yield a realistic theory of how they came into existence and how they work. One of the foremost workers in this multidisciplinary field is Daniel Dennett. This book brings together his essays on the philosphy of mind, artificial intelligence, and cognitive ethology that appeared in inaccessible journals from 1984 to 1996. Highlights include "Can Machines Think?," "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies," "Artificial Life as Philosophy," and "Animal Consciousness: What Matters and Why." Collected in a single volume, the essays are now available to a wider audience.

Three critics of Freedom Evolves (Dennett 2003) bring out important differences in philosophical outlook and method. Mele's thought experiments are supposed to expose the importance, for autonomy, of personal history, but they depend on the dubious invocation of mere logical or conceptual possibility. Fischer defends the Basic Argument for incompatibilism, while Taylor and I choose to sidestep it instead of disposing of it. Where does the burden of proof lie? O'Connor's candid expression of allegiance to traditional ideas that I reject highlights a fundamental difference in assumptions about how—and why—to do philosophy. There are indeed definable varieties of free will that are incompatible with determinism. Do they matter? I have argued, against philosophical tradition, that they don't.

Fodor's doubts about neo‐Darwinism are driven by something other than familiarity with evolutionary biology, so they should be set aside. His claim that a theory of intentionality cannot be constructed on an evolutionary foundation because there is no representation in the process of natural selection reveals that he has been blind to the chief beauty of Darwin's vision: its capacity to explain not just how the living can come, gradually, from the non‐living, but also how meaning can come, by incremental steps, out of the meaningless.

This chapter presents a science fiction tale in which the author is sent on a bomb‐defusing mission to Tulsa, Oklahoma, by NASA. He recounts his out‐of‐body adventures that test the limits of leading theories of personal identity, especially informational patternism. According to monitoring instruments, something about the nature of the device and its complex interactions with pockets of material deep in the earth had produced radiation that could cause severe abnormalities in certain tissues of the brain. No way had been found to shield the brain from these deadly rays. So it was been decided by NASA that the person sent to recover the device should leave his brain behind. It would be kept in a life‐support lab in a vat in Houston, where it could execute its normal control functions. After the author came out of anesthesia, he asked the inevitable postoperative question: “Where am I?”.