p.1 Understanding - making sense of things - is the mark of the mental. This is not to deny that intentionality,
rationality, objective knowledge, or self-consciousness might also be marks of the mental... each of these latter, properly
understood, presupposes understanding and is impossible without it.
p.2 More interesting is the question of what distinguishes people form non-people: what - if anything
- is the root or essence of their distinctiveness.
p.3 The thirteen essays collected here, spanning some two decades, are all about
understanding and intelligibility in one way or another, often several.
p.6 The pivotal issue is understanding... which, as I read them, neither Dennett nor Searle seriously
addresses, and, without which, neither of their accounts of intentionality can be adequate.
p.9 From time to time, the ills of psychology are laid to a misguided effort to emulate physics and chemistry.
p.10 Science in general as an endeavor to understand what occurs in the world; hence explanation, which
is essentially a means to understanding, has a pivotal importance.
p.15 An aspect common to all explanations discussed in the last section (indeed, to all explanations) is
that they presuppose some things in the course of explaining others.
p.30 if neurons are to be functional components in a system, some specific few of their countless physical,
chemical, and biological interactions must encapsulate all that is relevant to understanding whatever ability of that system
is being explained.
p.41 How else than by struggling to build chess players could we have found out so definitely that the skill
of deciding which moves to consider is not a simple matter of a few readily ascertained heuristics? [JLJ - "so definitely...not
a simple matter of a few readily ascertained heuristics" huh? We'll see about that. We see here generalizations about computer
chess from someone who has not demonstrated chess skill of any kind]
p.48 Intentional interpretation is essentially holistic. It is supported empirically only
by observing that its object makes generally "sensible" outputs, given the circumstances. But the relevant
circumstances are fixed by the object's prior inputs and other outputs, as interpreted.
p.113 In principle, of course, Ockham's famous razor, "Don't multiply entities beyond necessity", gets its
edge from Beetle Baily's more incisive "Don't do anything beyond necessity".
p.127 Intentionality is hard to get a glove on.
p.148-149 The net effect of conformism is a systematic peer pressure within the community,
which can be conceived as a kind of mutual attraction among the behavioral dispositions of the different community members...
When behavioral dispositions aggregate under the force of conformism, it isn't herds that coalesce, but norms...
The censure attendant of deviation automatically gives these standards... a de facto normative force.
p.200 special cases aside, skillful performance is essentially adaptive to current circumstances,
which is to say responsive to recognized relevant developments; and recognition in general can be nothing other than production
of responses relevant to what is recognized.
p.223 Specific complexity in the perceptual capacities of the organism itself is what sustains the corresponding
complexity in what it perceives, via tightly coupled, high-bandwidth interaction - at the level of description appropriate
to understanding perception.
p.247 dogs and cats don't have a clue about chess. [JLJ - perhaps Haugeland has not met user mycatplayschess
at chessgames.com. One could argue that the games that cats and dogs play are more suited to their physical and mental capacities.
One could also argue that the positional play of chess mimics the positional play required in work or social situations -
the pleasure center of the mind is simply wired to enjoy the diagnostic efforts required to play the game.]
p.283 Famously, Dennett introduces and explicates intentionality in terms of what he calls "the intentional
stance". A stance, on the face of it, is a kind of posture or attitude that somebody can
take toward something, a specific way of regarding and dealing with it... Officially, a stance is a strategy
that one might adopt in order to predict and explain the behavior of something. Which stance one adopts in a given
case is, of course, constrained by which strategies can be expected to work; but it is otherwise optional - a pragmatic decision,
based on interests and purposes.
p.284 a stance is more than just an attitude toward or a perspective on things, more even than a method
and terminology for dealing with them. Adopting a stance is taking a stand. Why?
Because it is this alone - commitment to constitutive standards - that allows that toward which
the stand is taken to stand out as phenomena, to stand over against us as objects. Such standards determine the being
of the objects: what it is for them to be, and what is possible and impossible for them.
p.284 For the intentional domain, rationality is the constitutive standard - "rationality is the
mother of intention"
p.292 Dennett introduced his notion of the intentional stance to articulate his view that intentionality
is, in a certain sense, in the eye of the beholder... intentional states and processes are, in principle, nothing but
our projected filling in of the pattern, in such a way as it makes sense overall.
p.293 The essential principle of the intentional stance is a constitutive standard of rationality.
p.300 My commitment to getting my intentional states "right" is what makes their intentionality
my own - that is, intrinsic to me.
p.300 Dennett understands intentionality in terms of a particular stance - the intentional stance - adopted
toward a system; whereas I am suggesting that we understand intentionality in terms of a stance - any stance
- adopted by a system.
p.300-301 Here is why I think adopting a stance is prerequisite to intentionality... Understanding
a domain and its entities is understanding the principles according to which that domain and those entities are constituted;
and such understanding can be nothing other than a commitment to those principles. Intentionality presupposes
a committed stance because intentionality - meaning - presupposes understanding.
p.301 Searle once said of computers, including AI... systems, that they understand exactly nothing;
they are not in that line of business. (1980, 288) I like the straight-forwardness of this claim; and, what's more, I agree
with it completely. [JLJ - so do I. A computer does what it is told to do.]
