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In his discussion of intentional states, Daniel Dennet approaches the matter from an epistemological point of view. He asks how we can know about the beliefs of others. He never questions the existence of beliefs and the like. The biggest problems in his paper “True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why it Works” is how we can know whether someone (or some thing) has intentional states and what the content of these states is. Dennet thinks that the way we get knowledge of these things is by using the ‘intentional strategy’: a strategy which amounts to a theory of mind that allows us to make good predictions about the behavior of others. Dennet’s description of this strategy is interesting and useful since it sheds light on the nature of intentional states.

The problem of intentional states is at least in part the fact that there is disunity about whether beliefs are to be thought of as discrete sentences with a determinate truth or falsity or if we should liken the "question of whether a person has a particular belief to the question of whether a person is immoral, or has style, or talent, or would make a good wife." (Dennet, 1981) This is really the problem of scientific realism versus scientific relativism (or as Dennet calls it, interpretationism). The realist would like to argue that beliefs are really sentences that are ‘written’ in some mental language and could-given the proper observation technology and more complete knowledge of physics and biochemistry-be identified as specific brain processes. The interpretationist (really half of Dennet’s position: the more common name for this philosophical position is relativism or anti-realism) describes beliefs in terms of speculations about internal states of mind which are made because they explain and allow the prediction of behavior.

But Dennet is striving to define a Middle Way between these two options to create a seamless unity. The question which this essay addresses asks if intentional states only exist as a result of a particular ‘stance’ that an observer might choose to take. The answer to this is really ‘yes and no’. But I think that there should be more ‘no’ than ‘yes’ in the answer. The reason for this is that humans really do have wants, desires, and beliefs and they really are rational (for the most part). This is evidenced by the patterns recognized in the use of the intentional stance-which will be described shortly. The predictive strategy embodied in the intentional stance at once postulates intentional states and confirms their existence when the success of the strategy is gauged. (340) Furthermore it’s at least a good bet (though admittedly not a certainty) that the beliefs, etc. recognized in the use of the intentional strategy correspond to some sort of ‘internal machinery’. The exact nature of such machinery is imperfectly defined and even less well understood. But this can’t stop claims that there is such an internal machinery which is the real nature of beliefs. (348)

Questions of the physical reality of beliefs aside for the moment; I would like now to turn to "The Intentional Strategy and How It Works". (340) Dennet compares and contrasts several strategies that are available for the prediction of events. First he describes the ‘astrological strategy’ which is known to be very unreliable. The next two strategies however are very important for their contrast to the intentional strategy. All three are useful but all of them are useful in different ways. First, the physical strategy would allow, barring unknown non-physical objects, perfect prediction of events. "If you want to predict the behavior of a system, determine its physical constitution…and the physical nature of the impingements upon it, and use your knowledge of the laws of physics to predict the outcome for any input." (340) Sometimes it just isn’t practical to use this strategy (say for extremely complex systems) but it is presumed in principle that it will always work. The second predictive strategy uses the design of an object to predict the behavior that a thing was designed to do. If someone has a good idea of what something was designed to do, then they can probably do a good job of predicting its behavior. The design strategy is only useful in cases where no circumstances hold which were not taken account of in the design of an object. And it too is subject to an impracticability in the face of highly complex systems that resembles the limits of the physical strategy.

Finally, the third strategy (the one we’ve all been waiting for) takes over in the cases where prediction is simply too complicated or it is otherwise impractical for the physical or design strategies. "Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs." (341) Dennet goes on to suggest that we "attribute as beliefs all the truths relevant to the system’s interests (or desires) that the system’s experience to date has made available." (341) He continues with a finer description of how a reasonably accurate picture of an intentional system’s-another person’s-beliefs could be obtained. He also gives an explanation for how false beliefs could be held. But this isn’t important to my main concern. What’s important is that beliefs are things that can be objectively recognized and understood. And most importantly, we gain a reasonable amount of confirmation that a person actually held such-and-such a belief when our predictions, which were based on our convictions about their holding that belief, come true.

Now that we have an idea of how the beliefs of others can come to be known to us, it remains to describe what they in fact are like. This is important because it is the nature of beliefs and desires (etc.) that makes it so difficult to decide if they are something that could conceivably be physically realized or if they are simply ‘useful fictions’ (in the parlance of the anti-realist). Dennet describes beliefs as being really none too precise, insofar as they are formulated to ourselves when we have them. He thinks, and I think he is probably right, that "our linguistic environment is forever forcing us to give-or concede-precise verbal expression to convictions that lack the hard edges verbalization endows them with." (342) We are tempted to think that beliefs are just sentences stored in our heads that we can repeat aloud. But if you think more carefully it is easy to see that although some of our beliefs really are just sentences that we have said before or heard somewhere, some of them are much less specific than that. Take for example my beliefs about the beautiful weather outside right now. Since I am slaving away on this beautiful day to create a flawless paper, I am unable to go out and enjoy it much. So if someone asked me if I believed it was a sunny day I would most likely say, "Yes, but what do I care?" And this statement of belief would leave out many aspects of my real beliefs about the deep blue of the sky, the warmth of the sun that everyone else is enjoying, and many other things which, if pressed, I would reveal formed the complex concept I have of a sunny day. My actual beliefs are manifold and somewhat vague so that to ask whether at any given time that I believe something or not is to deny the possibility that my belief is really indeterminate.

Now it becomes obvious why someone might think that the question of the existence of beliefs is only a matter of the stance one takes. If beliefs are indeterminate in nature then it is very hard or even impossible to decide whether it is true or false that a person holds a given specific belief. A related problem is posed in the use different intentional strategies; for instance, the strategies used by people from two different cultures making attributions about a member of a third would almost certainly come up with different ideas about what the third person believes. Who would have the right answer? Could either of them have the right answer? It seems likely that both attributers of beliefs could make accurate predictions even though they assume different beliefs to be the causes of behavior. So the predictions of behavior from attributed beliefs, though very useful, cannot carry any information about what those beliefs really are.

This dilemma caused by the equal adequacy of several different intentional strategies is solved by the same indeterminacy that we talked about before. When two people make attributions of beliefs about a third and derive predictions therefrom which turn out to have been at least mostly right, then it seems safe to say that the different attributed beliefs were probably similar to one another. Perhaps they could be seen as translations of a single idea in one language into two different languages. Both of the attributions would carry the idea that was in the real belief but would of necessity express it differently (since we can’t read one another’s minds). So the two interpretations would, though different, use the same idea as a reference.

There could not be a perfectly accurate picture of the belief in the third person but there could be a close enough approximation for it to be possible to say that, if your prediction were correct, you knew what the person was believing or desiring. So the indeterminacy of the exact meaning of a person’s belief just means that there is no more evidence to be gathered about what a person was actually thinking; an approximation can carry the meaning (though this term is used rather oddly here) of what a person was believing.

Indeterminacy of meaning or translation does not represent a failure to capture significant distinctions; it marks the fact that certain apparent distinctions are not significant. If there is indeterminacy, it is because when all the evidence is in, alternative ways of stating the facts remain open. (p. 322, Davidson, 1974a) (352)

And so we know that alternate manners of disclosing the facts are available, and that none is better than the others. The truth is that there is no advantage or disadvantage to putting the attribution of belief in one wording or another so long as resulting predictions of behavior come true. So when our predictions come true based on our attribution of certain beliefs and desires we can know, one, that a ‘system’ (more often than not a person) has beliefs, and two, we know as accurately as we can and need know what those beliefs are.

So it is not the case that the existence of beliefs is entirely dependent on the stance that one takes toward them. Beliefs exist regardless of your position in the realist/anti-realist landscape. Some confusion is created when it comes to putting a belief into words so that the wording you choose-the meaning of the belief that you attribute-might not be exactly the belief as it is in the mind of the person believing it. But as we’ve seen, even if there isn’t a single proper ‘translation’ of a belief, that doesn’t mean that we’ve missed anything by wording it the way we chose to. On the contrary, if our predictions come out correct then the person to whom we attributed a given belief really believed what we attributed to them-or at least something similar enough that the difference is without importance.

The best reason for saying that beliefs aren’t just interpretive tools is that there is an objectively observable pattern apparent in the behavior of intentional systems which leads us to conclude that the system actually holds beliefs. We can grant that “all there is to being a true believer is being a system whose behaviour is reliably predictable via the intentional strategy, and hence all there is to really and truly believing that p (for any proposition p) is being an intentional system for which p occurs as a belief in the best (most predictive) interpretation.” (346) But even granting this, we don’t have to admit that beliefs don’t actually exist in the intentional system itself. The reason we don’t have to give in on this point is that beliefs can be used so reliably to predict behavior. Only by thinking of an intentional system as really having beliefs allows us to use belief attributions predictively and explanatorily. To think of beliefs merely as interpretations and useful fictions is to remove any power they have to explain the later actions of intentional systems. Why else would so many predictions based on the intentional strategy come true if there were really no such thing as internal representation (I mean, belief)?

The final point that leads us to believe that we have a good idea of what the inner nature of belief actually is, is that we can’t imagine what else beliefs could be if they aren’t sentences written in a mental language. Human language is the only system of representation that is versatile enough to give us an idea of the nature of our internal system of representation. “Some elegant, generative, indefinitely extendable principles of representation must be responsible” for making us “capable of learning new behaviours, vocabularies, [and] theories, almost without limit.” And “we only have one model of such a representation system: a human language.” (349) This alone is good enough reason to think that this is a good avenue to pursue in research and thought on this topic.

Davidson, D. (1974a) “Belief and the Basis of Meaning” Synthese, 27, pp.309-23. (Quoted by Dennet and subsequently quoted by the author.

Dennet, Daniel C. “True believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works”. Scientific Explanation: Papers based on Herbert Spencer Lectures Given in the University of Oxford, A.F. Heath, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 53-75. Copyright © 1981. Anthologized in The Nature of Mind David M. Rosenthal, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.339-350. Copyright © 1991.

Dennet, Daniel C. “Reflections: Real Patterns, Deeper Facts, and Empty Questions”. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1987, pp. 37-42. Anthologized in The Nature of Mind David M. Rosenthal, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.350-353. Copyright © 1991.