Daniel Dennett’s contribution to cognitive science and the philosophy of mind is matched by few living philosophers. His introduction of the intentional stance, the multiple-drafts theory of consciousness, and his ardent defense of natural selection have bought him more than fifteen minutes of fame. His influence has been aided by a stark naturalistic approach and a thought-provoking, entertaining, and engaging style. Dennett’s Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment highlights yet another virtue of Dennett’s work: its systematicity. This collection demonstrates the cohesive mechanism of Dennett’s contributions to philosophy, evolutionary theory, and cognitive science in general, assessing his neo-Darwinist view of evolution, the ontological commitments of his theory of content, his radical anti-Cartesian view of consciousness, and his naturalistic approach to morality. It reveals not only the breadth of Dennett’s corpus, but also how it all fits together in what co-editor Don Ross aptly dubs, “The Dennettian Stance”.

The essays, selected from a 1998 conference devoted to Dennett’s work, are complex, detailed and thorough. All but one are written by philosophers, prodding and clarifying Dennett’s positions, often with an eye towards traditional philosophical isms-realism, instrumentalism, verificationism, naturalism and holism. They include attempts to domesticate Dennett’s views, pulling them closer to received doctrine, as well as attempts to excuse his theories from traditional debate.

Focussing on Dennett’s various interests, the contributions share important concerns and questions about his philosophical methods and commitments. Is he committed to the existence of thoughts, beliefs, and desires, or are they merely useful but fictitious theoretical posits? Can abstract patterns of the mind fit into the ontology of the physical world? What relations can be drawn between his various explanatory stances? Does Dennett’s Quinean naturalism arbitrarily favor the physical stance to the intentional stance? How does his method of verificationism direct his theories and his dismissals of recalcitrant traditional views?

Although these essays could be grouped under such headings as “Evolution”, “Intentionality and Realism”, “Consciousness”, and “Morality” (and, in fact, Dennett does so in his replies), they resist such neat categorization (much like the positions they address). The papers tend to draw connections between Dennett’s various theories-evolution and intentionality, intentionality and consciousness, and evolution and morality-segueing from one topic to the next. These connections just solidify the conviction that Dennett’s philosophy is a systematic world view.

Each contribution certainly deserves more attention than can be given here. However, a brief description of each should help to give the general character of the volume as a whole.

Evolutionary zoologist Timothy Crowe argues that Dennett is wrong to explain evolution as biological engineering, and he is wrong that natural selection can explain, not only the evolution of species, but also that of social and cultural systems. Crowe cites his own research on guineafowl to demonstrate the role of historical contingency in evolution. Crowe’s “just-so” story explains the evolution of various nonfunctional, indeed maladaptive head-adornments and mating rituals that developed due to ecological constraints, not naturally selective algorithms.

According to natural selection, does nature “choose” certain traits because they are among the best solutions to a given problem, or because they are the only solutions available? Paul Dumouchel argues, pace Dennett, that the question cannot be meaningfully asked. In Dennett’s parlance, it is a difference without a difference. But Dumouchel tries to save natural selection by way of a Kantian antinomy showing that intentionality and reason must have been naturally selected.

Ruth Millikan’s contribution segues from evolution to the contents of thoughts. Millikan agrees with Dennett that evolutionary theory adopts a design stance towards nature’s organisms-that it is useful to describe creatures’ organs as fulfilling the functions for which they were designed. But Millikan claims that the design stance is more basic than the intentional stance. This leads to her rejection of Dennett’s holistic indeterminacy thesis in favor of local indeterminacy of intentional content. The indeterminacy of biological function is strictly limited to a few options. The indeterminacy of intentional content is thus limited by the local indeterminacy of the purpose for which thought was selected.

Timothy Kenyon’s paper weaves indeterminacy into Dennett’s alleged instrumentalism. Though adherence to Quine’s indeterminacy thesis leads to the antireductionism of the intentional stance, it need not. The underdetermination of intentional content is the result of epistemological shortcomings, not of a lack of fact of the matter about content.

William Seager seeks to reconcile Dennett’s realism towards the patterns of the intentional stance with scientific realism as a whole. The intentional stance implies that intentionality cannot be explained without prior understanding of mentality. So mentality seems resistant to a naturalistic explanation commensurate with physics, chemistry, and biology. But the mental and the physical can be reconciled by abandoning scientific realism for a “surface metaphysics” which takes the mental as basic.

Christopher Viger takes another tack towards the issue. Debate over Dennett’s instrumentalism towards beliefs and desires results from overlooking the fact that the propositional attitudes are posited to explain and predict behavior. Such explanation involves an idealized rationality, so beliefs and desires must be abstracta. More important, they cannot be among the “furniture of the universe” as reductivists would have it, because physical objects are posited to explain observables whose explanation does not require beliefs and desires. Debate about the ontology of the intentional stance is the result of a category mistake.

Don Ross claims that we can fit the mental patterns into a physicalistic theory of the world by recognizing that their existence relies, not on the existence of entities that recognize them (minds), but on the physical possibility of such pattern recognizers.

But who recognizes these patterns anyway? Dan Lloyd applauds Dennett’s debunking of philosophical myths, especially that of the Cartesian theater, and charges that as a representational theory of mind Dennett’s own intentional stance is subject to a Dennett-style debunking. There are no boundaries in the brain for representations, so there are no representations. Lloyd seeks to rescue cognitive science through “phenomenal realism”: phenomenal properties are properties detected by the brain, they are not properties of edified representations.

David Thompson examines the mental through the eyes of Husserl’s phenomenology. Dennett’s heterophenomenology, a reaction to Husserl’s autophenomenology, takes subjects’ reports as evidence about what seems to them to be the case, but not as evidence about anything in the brain. Thompson claims that giving priority to the neuroscientist’s third-person perspective leads Dennett into a Cartesian error himself: mistaking experience for attention to representations, rather than to what is represented. Thompson recommends Dennett adopt Husserl’s concept of constitution to avoid this Cartesian slip.

Andrew Brook questions Dennett’s heterophenomenology as well. Does it follow from the fallibility of subjective seemings that there are no determinate vehicles of these seemings-no such states of the brain? He concludes that Dennett is not, in fact, denying the existence of vehicles of seemings, nor the existence of subjects who have them. Rather, Dennett wants to show that neither is as it seems to us.

Thomas Polger broaches a popular intuition pump in the study of consciousness: zombies-creatures behaviorally and functionally identical to us but who lack consciousness. The possibility of zombies is supposed to tell against physico-functional explanations of the mind. But, Dennett argues, if such zombies are possible, then consciousness must be epiphenomenal. According to Polger, something other than consciousness can play the functional role in zombies that consciousness plays in us. So, zombies can be unconscious functional duplicates of consciousness-enjoying creatures even though consciousness does play a functional role in us.

Dennett’s first-person operationalism rejects the view of a stream of consciousness formed by a collection of antecedent mental states. Thoughts gain content only in consciousness. David Rosenthal argues that there are theoretical reasons for claiming that content and consciousness come apart, even though they seem to coincide in conscious experience. At times we utter sentences that are not expressions of our thoughts-e.g., when reciting the lines of a play. The difference between such parroting and normal speech suggests that normal speech expresses pre-existing thoughts. Rosenthal argues that his higher-order thought model of consciousness best explains this phenomenon in a way that accounts for the independence of content and consciousness.

T. Brian Mooney provides the sole paper in the volume dedicated to Dennett’s writings in ethics. He suggests that Dennett’s naturalistic rejection of a rule-following approach to ethics can be complemented by adopting a theory of virtue ethics.

The book concludes with a set of useful replies from Dennett, replete with thanks, some agreement, and, of course, counterarguments. Though Dennett makes no mention of his work as a cohering philosophical system, his replies reiterate the common concerns of his critics, and the systematic commitments towards which their criticisms are aimed.

As suggested by the title of Dennett’s replies (“With a little help from my friends”), the authors are generally sympathetic with his approach to the issues, often trying to free it from the traditional problems critics have raised. The book provides an introspective look from within Dennett’s camp. But Dennett does not go unchallenged, and quite a few attempts at support and clarification appear to expose his views to future criticism. Note especially William Seager’s suggestion that Dennett’s patterns can be shown to be ontologically kosher if we just adopt a “surface metaphysics” which takes the mental as basic. And note also David Rosenthal’s challenge to Dennett’s theory of consciousness, which, if successful, challenges his theory of content as well. It is, of course, your friends who know your darkest secrets. And this makes for an interesting and useful assessment of Dennett’s work.

The contributions are mostly detailed philosophical critiques, focused on fine-grained, but important issues in philosophy and cognitive science. They serve as a good introduction to Dennett’s vast interests and stances, as well as to the central concerns surrounding his work. In addition, they lay out a number of key philosophical themes in the cognitive sciences: how do we reconcile psychology with physics? What is the relation between an explanation and the entities it posits? How, in general, do the vastly differing methodologies and subject matters of cognitive science fit together to warrant membership in this interdisciplinary field?

Dennett’s Philosophy is an up-close look at the work of a contemporary philosophical giant. Reading it will prove valuable to anyone interested in Dennett’s deep philosophical commitments, anyone interested in how evolution, thought, consciousness, and morality hang together, and anyone curious about philosophy’s contributions to cognitive science.

Douglas Meehan is a doctoral student in the philosophy program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

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Dennett’s Philosophy: A Comprehensive Assessment

 

Categories: Philosophical