Research On Dennett’s Naturalistic Theory Of Mind

Daniel Clement Dennett is one of the most influential philosophers of philosophy of mind and the cognitive science of the past forty years. As a naturalist, his theory is attractive and admirable to many cognitive scientists for its originality, while being blamed for deviation and unorthodox. Whether Dennett’s research on mind and cognitive issues constitutes a philosophical system with a definite purport is the most controversial issue about his academic ideas. By analyzing Dennett’s discourse about three mental phenomenon of intentionality, consciousness and free will, this dissertation certifies that all of his research is actually around the very center of reconciling the scientific and manifest image of human beings. Therefore, it is a grand system of naturalist theory of mind that Dennett’s intentional theory, consciousness theory and free will compatibilism have actually established.There are five parts in this dissertation. The introduction focuses on the significance of the topic while introducing Dennett’s academic background and his naturalist position. We can also make clear the domestic and foreign research status on Dennett’s project and our emphasis, difficulties, innovations and even the insufficiency of this paper from this part.Chapter one named "naturalizing intentionality" states Dennett’s intentional theory from three aspects. Firstly, it concerns his three explaining strategy—physical stance, design stance and intentional stance. Dennett thinks that each stance has its scope of application for its explaining efficiency and accuracy. For those complicated systems, we have to adopt intentional stance to treat them as intentional ones which act on their intentional status. Although the intentional system theory is efficient in interpreting and predicting behaviors of systems, it is more probable to view it as an "instrumental theory". That is to say, intentional theory is just one of useful tools which commit no reality of intentionality. Dennett’s responses to the "instrumentalism" and his "mild realism" are two main contents of the second part of this chapter. According to Dennett, either the intentional pattern or the intentional states is real. They are realities of another level which we might discriminate just from the intentional stance. The last part discusses the evolution of intentionality while pointing out that the intentionality of human beings is come from the intentionality of all the part of human brains. Mechanical devices can also demonstrate intentionality in the intentional stance.Chapter two,"naturalizing consciousness", analyzes Dennett’s consciousness theory entirely. Dennett argues that if we want to explain consciousness naturally, we must change the research tradition from Descartes. The first part concentrates on the characteristics of Descartes’ consciousness theory and Dennett’s critiques to it. Then we turn to Dennett’s third-person method of consciousness studies which is called "heterophenomenology" and his "multiple drafts model" of conscious phenomenon which consider consciousness as the result of competition of lots of drafts. Lastly, with inspections of the evolutionary history of consciousness, we views consciouness as a production of a three-phase process which is consist of selection for specific genotypes, selection for phenotypic plasticity and selection for memes. To Dennett, consciousness is a kind of virtual machine running on the brain hardware.Chapter three named "naturalizing free will" is about Dennett’s compatibilism and his explanation of the emergence of free will. We first investigate his refutations to incompatibilist standpoint in order to show that, indeed, he hopes to solve the problem of the compatibility of free will and determinism by attribiting the concepts of self-control, rationality and evitability, which have intimate connection with human free will, to the intentional stance. Then, we focus on the evolutionary understanding of free will. Dennett sees our free will as chances to choose under the condition of being capable to take responsibility. Therefore, if someone desires to be free he has to accept some kind of practice to learn how to be responsible first. Our aspiration to be responsible is from our desires to be a number of the group of cooperators. So, free will is resulted from the emergence of cooperation and altruism with human’s self-design to be a cooperator.The fourth chapter is an assessment to Dennett’s theory of mind, which estimates his academic thingkings from two aspects:on the one hand, Dennett’s theory of mind, which is a hybrid of behaviorism and functionalism, intakes their theoretical quintessence with making some innovation; on the other hand, Dennett’s theory also has several specific characteristics such as naturalism, anti-essentialism and non-reductionism.The conclusion reviews four main ideas of this dissertation and meanwhile, comments the contributions Dennett’s naturalist project and theory of mind make to the development of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. With putting forward some issues not discussed here, we propose exactly what we should concentrate on and solve in the future.