Secondly, following Dennett, the point of modeling cognitive systems according to the intentional stance is that we evaluate them on a behavioral basis and that is all there is to evaluate.
I am confused on this point. Several people have stated that Dennett believes something like this, e.g., Quintin and Nora argue that Dennett is a goal “reductionist,” by which I think they mean something like “goal is the word we use to refer to certain patterns of behavior, but it’s not more fundamental than that.”
But I don’t think Dennett believes this. He’s pretty critical of behaviorism, for instance, and his essay Skinner Skinneddoes a good job, imo, of showing why this orientation is misguided. Dennett believes, I think, that things like “goals,” “beliefs,” “desires,” etc. do exist, just that we haven’t found the mechanistic or scientific explanation of them yet. But he doesn’t think that explanations of intention will necessarily bottom out in just their outward behavior, he expects such explanations to make reference to internal states as well. Dennett is a materialist, so of course at the end of the day all explanations will be in terms of behavior (inward or outward), on some level, much like any physical explanation is. But that’s a pretty different claim from “mental states do not exist.”
I’m also not sure if you’re making that claim here or not, but curious if you disagree with the above?
I am confused on this point. Several people have stated that Dennett believes something like this, e.g., Quintin and Nora argue that Dennett is a goal “reductionist,” by which I think they mean something like “goal is the word we use to refer to certain patterns of behavior, but it’s not more fundamental than that.”
But I don’t think Dennett believes this. He’s pretty critical of behaviorism, for instance, and his essay Skinner Skinned does a good job, imo, of showing why this orientation is misguided. Dennett believes, I think, that things like “goals,” “beliefs,” “desires,” etc. do exist, just that we haven’t found the mechanistic or scientific explanation of them yet. But he doesn’t think that explanations of intention will necessarily bottom out in just their outward behavior, he expects such explanations to make reference to internal states as well. Dennett is a materialist, so of course at the end of the day all explanations will be in terms of behavior (inward or outward), on some level, much like any physical explanation is. But that’s a pretty different claim from “mental states do not exist.”
I’m also not sure if you’re making that claim here or not, but curious if you disagree with the above?