Mind Design III: Intentionality and Understanding

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms from Part III: Intentionality and Understanding in Mind Design III.

Intentionality

The aboutness or directedness of mental states toward objects or states in the world.

Derivative intentionality

Content that depends on an external interpreter; signs or text represent things because an observer assigns meanings.

Original intentionality

Intrinsic world-directed content that a system possesses, not supplied by an interpreter.

Intentional stance

Dennett’s strategy of predicting behavior by treating a system as if it has beliefs and desires.

Intentional system

Any system whose behavior is sufficiently predictable under the intentional stance.

True believer

A system whose beliefs are the best, most predictive interpretation of its behavior.

Design stance

Predicting an object's behavior by assuming it was designed to behave that way.

Physical stance

Predicting behavior from the physical constitution and laws governing a system.

Searle’s Chinese Room

A thought experiment arguing that symbol manipulation alone cannot yield understanding; biology matters.

Strong AI

The view that a suitably programmed computer genuinely has a mind and understanding.

Weak AI

The view that computers are tools for modeling, exploring, and predicting cognitive processes.

Robot reply

The objection that adding perceptual/motor capacities to a computer does not guarantee understanding.

Brain simulator reply

A program that simulates brain neuron firings might or might not confer understanding.

Combination reply

A synthesis of robot, brain-simulation, and related approaches arguing implications for intentionality.

Systems reply

The claim that a whole system (not just a component) can understand—internal parts may not.

Twin Earth

Putnam’s thought experiment illustrating external factors in determining mental content.

Externalism

Meaning and content depend on factors outside the individual’s internal states.

Teleosemantics

Content determined by historical function and selective processes (evolution or learning).

Brentano’s mark of the mental

Intentionality as the defining feature of mental states.

Broad content

Content that depends on the environment and context, not just intrinsic states.

Narrow content

Content that supervenes on intrinsic physical states of the subject.

Marr’s theory of vision

Three levels: computation (top), algorithmic (middle), and implementation (bottom) for vision.

Proximal content

Immediate, processing-level content that may be only locally connected to distal causes.

Content ascription

Mapping internal representations to environmental content in a way that explains behavior.

Naturalistic psychology

Explaining cognition by grounding it in environment and causal relationships.

Disjunction problem

Challenge about misrepresentation when a state could be caused by many different features.

Turing test

A test of intelligence based on indistinguishable behavior from a human; not a proof of understanding.

Language of Thought (LOTS) hypothesis

Thinking is carried out in a mental language; symbolic representations underlie cognition.

Externalist content in Marr’s theory

Content is ascribed by considering distal properties in the normal environment, not just formal structure.