Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

contents of mental states and behaviour. To actually use the contents of mental states
to predict behaviour—assuming rationality—is to adopt the intentional stance.
For instance, given the propositional attitudes “Dawson believes that Charles
Ives’ music anticipated minimalism” and “Dawson desires to only listen to early
minimalist music,” and assuming that Dawson’s behaviour rationally follows from
the contents of his intentional states, one might predict that “Dawson often listens
to Ives’ compositions.” The assumption of rationality, “in combination with home
truths about our needs, capacities and typical circumstances, generates both an
intentional interpretation of us as believers and desirers and actual predictions of
behavior in great profusion” (Dennett, 1987, p. 50).
Adopting the intentional stance is also known as employing commonsense
psychology or folk psychology. The status of folk psychology, and of
its relation to cognitive science, provides a source of continual controversy
(Christensen & Turner, 1993; Churchland, 1988; Fletcher, 1995; Greenwood, 1991;
Haselager, 1997; Ratcliffe, 2007; Stich, 1983). Is folk psychology truly predictive?
If so, should the theories of cognitive science involve lawful operations on propositional
attitudes? If not, should folk psychology be expunged from cognitive science?
Positions on these issues range from eliminative materialism’s argument
to erase folk-psychological terms from cognitive science (Churchland, 1988), to
experimental philosophy’s position that folk concepts are valid and informative,
and therefore should be empirically examined to supplant philosophical concepts
that have been developed from a purely theoretical or analytic tradition
(French & Wettstein, 2007; Knobe & Nichols, 2008).
In form, at least, the intentional stance or folk psychology has the appearance
of a scientific theory. The intentional stance involves using a set of general, abstract
laws (e.g., the principle of rationality) to predict future events. This brings it into contact
with an important view of cognitive development known as the theory-theory
(Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Kuhl, 1999; Gopnik & Wellman, 1992;
Wellman, 1990). According to the theory-theory, children come to understand the
world by adopting and modifying theories about its regularities. That is, the child
develops intuitive, representational theories in a fashion that is analogous to a scientist
using observations to construct a scientific theory. One of the theories that a
child develops is a theory of mind that begins to emerge when a child is three years
old (Wellman, 1990).
The scientific structure of the intentional stance should be of no surprise,
because this is another example of the logicism that serves as one of the foundations
of classical cognitive science. If cognition really is the product of a physical symbol
system, if intelligence really does emerge from the manipulation of intentional
representations according to the rules of some mental logic, then the semanticist’s
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