Thanks for the reply! I find your responses fairly satisfying. Now that you point it out, yeah, Dennett’s intentional stance is pretty similar to the naive definition. It’s a bit different because it’s committed to a particular kind of “relevantly similar:” if-we-think-of-it-as-this-then-we-can-predict-its-behavior-well. So it rules out e.g. caring about the internal structure. As for the methodology thing, I guess I would counter that there’s an even better way to provide evidence that there is no possible concept that would make the arguments work: actually try to find such a concept. If instead you are just trying to find the concept that according to you other people seem to be talking about, that seems like evidence, but not as strong. Or maybe it’s just as strong, but complementary: even if the concept you construct renders the arguments invalid, I for one probably won’t be fully satisfied until someone (maybe me) tries hard to make the arguments work.
Thanks for the reply! I find your responses fairly satisfying. Now that you point it out, yeah, Dennett’s intentional stance is pretty similar to the naive definition. It’s a bit different because it’s committed to a particular kind of “relevantly similar:” if-we-think-of-it-as-this-then-we-can-predict-its-behavior-well. So it rules out e.g. caring about the internal structure. As for the methodology thing, I guess I would counter that there’s an even better way to provide evidence that there is no possible concept that would make the arguments work: actually try to find such a concept. If instead you are just trying to find the concept that according to you other people seem to be talking about, that seems like evidence, but not as strong. Or maybe it’s just as strong, but complementary: even if the concept you construct renders the arguments invalid, I for one probably won’t be fully satisfied until someone (maybe me) tries hard to make the arguments work.
Glad my comment clarified some things.
About the methodology, I just published a post clarifying my thinking about it.