Daniel C. Dennett (1987), The Intentional Stance, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, “A Bradford book” (1st ed., ISBN 0-262-04093-X; Library of Congress
87003018, LC class B105.I56 D46 1987; xi, 388 pp.; bibliography pp.
[351]–371; index). Paperback 1989 (ISBN 978-0-262-54053-7). The catalogue
records give only the year 1987, so published: carries the year, as the
first of January. The brief’s citation (1987, MIT Press) is right.
Key takeaways
Registered from the publisher’s description and a catalogue record, not a reading.
- The publisher’s description (for the paperback): “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.” It adds that “four of the book’s ten chapters—its first and the final three—appear here for the first time”, that the other six “were published earlier in the 1980s”, and that “each is followed by a reflection—an essay reconsidering and extending the claims of the earlier work”.
- Contents (University of Wisconsin–Madison catalogue): “1. Setting off on the right foot — 2. True believers — Reflections: Real patterns, deeper facts, and empty questions — 3. Three kinds of intentional psychology — Reflections: instrumentalism reconsidered — 4. Making sense of ourselves — Reflections: When frogs (and others) make mistakes — 5. Beyond Belief — Reflections: About Aboutness — Styles of mental representation — Reflections: the language of thought reconsidered — 7. Intentional systems in cognitive ethology: the ‘Panglossian Paradigm’ defended — Reflections: interpreting monkeys, theorists, and genes — 8. Evolution, error, and intentionality — 9. Fast thinking — 10. Mid-term examination: compare and contrast”. (The record omits the number of chapter 6.)
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request for Dennett, as the book that collects the line running from “Intentional Systems” (LIT-440, read) through True Believers (LIT-398, read: its chapter 2, in the revised text) to “Real Patterns” (LIT-220, read), whose title the reflection after chapter 2 anticipates. The record already cites the book at second hand: Levin (LIT-439) takes the stance’s rule for choosing a level of description from it, and Roberts (LIT-207, read in NOTE-157) argues, citing its p. 49, that the stance “does not go far enough” for chatbots.
What a reading would add for this record:
- The reflections, which are the book’s new thinking on the reprinted papers. “Real patterns, deeper facts, and empty questions” and “Instrumentalism reconsidered” are where Dennett says how realist the stance is; that bears on whether a group-level stance (THEORY-043) picks out something real or something convenient.
- Chapter 7 and its reflection apply the stance to monkeys and to genes, the nearest the book comes, by its contents, to applying it to something other than an individual organism or machine. Whether it says anything about groups of people is not known from the contents.
- Chapter 8, “Evolution, error, and intentionality”, is new in the book and is the natural place for its account of how content can be indeterminate.
Earlier versions of several chapters are on the Tufts Digital Library as papers (“Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology”, “Styles of Mental Representation”, “Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethology: the ‘Panglossian Paradigm’ Defended”), and Dennett’s “Précis of The Intentional Stance” (Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11(3), September 1988, pp. 495–505) is a summary by the author. None of those is the book, and this entry is not reconstructed from them.
It carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and the anthology does not hold it.