Psycho-Babble Writing Thread 476514

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(iii) Intentional systems theory

Posted by alexandra_k on March 27, 2005, at 22:52:30

(I apologise for this in advance...)

Now that we have seen something of the mainstream views it will be useful for me to provide an outline of a philosophical doctrine in philosophy of mind known as intentional systems theory. The account that I will go on to offer of alters may be considered something of an extension of intentional systems theory and I will use it to recast the problem of alters in a way that is fairly abstract thus neutral between the above accounts. While it might seem that there is much empirical work to be done with respect to aetiology and treatment, the issue of how we should conceive of alters is more a conceptual or theoretical issue than an empirical one. While there is a tendency for theorists within psychology and psychiatry to consider the conceptualisation of alters to be an issue of construct validity to be determined by the remainder of aetiology and treatment; construct validity is not the subject of this paper. I am interested in providing an account of the phenomenon of subjects presenting / living their lives with multiple identities. How we are best to conceive of their behaviour and the presence of alters would seem to me to be an issue that can be teased out from how they came to be that way and how clinicians can successfully treat them. This approach may also cast a new light on aetiology and treatment though it is logically separable from them.

Intentional systems theory is often taken to be an explicit rendering, or extension of what is known as ‘folk-psychology’. Despite the behaviourists’ success in the laboratory it would seem that we cannot function effectively in society without making use of such attributions as ‘believes’, ‘desires’, ‘hopes’, ‘wants’, ’fears’ etc. The fact is we attribute these mental (or intentional) states to ourselves and others; and we use these attributed states to predict, explain, and thus make sense of our own and others behaviour. Whether these notions can be reductively explained in terms of neurological states, or whether they are merely fictions (so strictly speaking do not exist) is controversial. I will have more to say about the issues of reduction and fictionalism in subsequent sections.

Intentional systems theory notes that sometimes we regard an object as an intentional system. An intentional system is an object (or system) with mental states that interact so as to produce behaviour. When we want to predict, explain, or make sense of the behaviour of a system we can adopt the intentional stance towards the system, which consists in the following:

(a) The attribution of particular beliefs to the system.

(b) The attribution of specific desires to the system.

(c) The attribution of practical rationality to the system.

The notion is that we attribute beliefs on the basis that a system ‘believes what it ought to believe, given the situation they are in’ (Braddon-Mitchell & Jackson, 1996 p. 146). We thus consider that an intentional system has beliefs regarding its environment. For example, we would consider that an intentional system sitting on a chair would believe that it was sitting on a chair (unusual circumstances aside). We attribute desires on much the same grounds. Living intentional systems are attributed desires for biological needs such as food and shelter at the appropriate times, and so forth. We also attribute all sorts of other beliefs and desires to intentional systems that are hard to specify but come quite naturally to us in our daily lives when we are employing folk psychology. Practical rationality is the ability to ‘act to satisfy ones desires were ones beliefs true’, or the ability to coordinate beliefs and desires in such a way as to produce the relevant action (Braddon-Mitchell & Jackson, 1996 p. 145). For example, one may have the ability to coordinate ones belief that there is food in the fridge with ones desire for food in order to produce the relevant action of going to the fridge in order to get some food .

Dennett, (1987, 1988) and Davidson, (1980) consider that there are patterns that emerge when one adopts the intentional stance towards the behaviour of a system. Although this does not seem to be explicit in the literature it seems that by ‘pattern’ intentional systems theorists are primarily concerned with patterns discernable from something approaching a snapshot view as opposed to over significant periods of time . As an example of what is meant by a snapshot view, we could briefly view a scene where someone is walking and there is a hole in the ground in front of them. By adopting the intentional stance we could attribute that the system believes that there is a hole in front of them and that if they continue walking they will fall into it. They desire not to fall into it and they are rational enough to realise (and act from the understanding that) they thus should walk around the hole. The ‘patterns’ would seem to be kinds of events or objects that are multiply realised on the physical level and thus are irreducible to it . Intentional systems theorists are not committed to the view that we go around explicitly considering others to be intentional systems by running through these little hypotheses sub-vocally all the time. But they do consider that if we are asked to provide an explanation or make a prediction regarding behaviour then belief-desire explanations are cited as to what makes the behaviour, or our predictions of it rational (Braddon-Mitchell & Jackson, 1996 pp. 144-158).

Controversial issues within intentional systems theory include specifying in greater detail how we form hypotheses regarding what an intentional system believes and desires. The theory requires a specification of a criterion by which we accept or reject candidate hypotheses for belief and desire attribution. While intentional systems theorists may consider that this is the full story to be told about intentional states, other theorists consider that it needs to be supplemented with an account of corresponding brain states. It is also a matter of controversy as to whether it is plausible or legitimate to attribute optimal rationality to intentional systems. We seem prone to a variety of cognitive biases and heuristics that show us that the rationality exhibited by an intentional system is limited. While it is indeed an interesting research program to attempt to specify this in enough detail so that a computer could be programmed to formulate acceptable predictions and explanations from the intentional stance, I am happy to run with it at a fairly superficial level. While much clarification needs to be done, intentional systems theory seems to offer a plausible picture-view of how we go about attributing intentional states both to ourselves and others in our daily lives.

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