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Dennett's Powerful Ideas: a special issue

In this blog post, Lisa Bortolotti presents a special issue of Philosophical Psychology on Daniel Dennett's philosophy.


Daniel Dennett

It is difficult to think of a philosopher whose influence has been so pervasive as Daniel Dennett's. This is amply demonstrated by the fact that the terms he coined, the metaphors he created, and the thought experiments he devised have become instant classics, are part of everyone’s philosophical vocabulary, and still attract controversy and inspire new work.

I have an enormous intellectual debt to Dennett. He was one of the main characters in my PhD dissertation, at the same time a villain (as I was arguing against a system's rationality being a constraint on the application of the intentional stance to the prediction of the system's behaviour) and a superhero (as I blindingly accepted his methodological rejection of philosophical exceptionalism). 

It is a privilege, then, to be the editor of an issue of Philosophical Psychology dedicated to Dennett and the lasting influence of his philosophy, entitled "Dennett’s powerful ideas". The issue is made up of a brief editorial by me summarising the contents, a beautifully-written editorial by Felipe De Brigard, which starts from a conversation between Felipe and Dan in Bogotà, and ten original research papers divided into three thematic sections:

  1. Revisiting the relationship between science and philosophy
  2. Exploring philosophical approaches to consciousness
  3. Reimagining control, agency, and the self


Revisiting the relationship between science and philosophy

Elly Vintiadis addresses the charge of scientism often made to Dennett and offers an interesting way of thinking about the similarities and differences between science and philosophy.

Jag Williams and Ann Sophie Barwich’s paper defends Dennett’s willingness to be revisionist about our intuitions to ensure that our concepts adapt to new empirical evidence.

Arata Matsuda and Masashi Takeshita discuss the use of thought experiments and argue that there are more deceptive thought experiments than Dennett presumed.

Francisco Cruz and André Mata vindicate Dennett’s claim that people use different stances to explain the world around them, choosing between them based on the type of phenomena they wish to explain.


Exploring philosophical approaches to consciousness

Henry Taylor proposes an interpretation of Dennett’s theory of consciousness that makes sense of several apparently disjointed claims and that presents consciousness as a “real pattern” in the brain.

Eric Schwitzgebel and Sophie Nelson argue that conscious subjects do not need to arise in determinate whole numbers: that a typical human being is one conscious subject is a contingent fact about humans.

Qiantong Wu offers an enactivist response to Dennett's Cassette Theory of dream contents: we need to have some first-person authority during the dream to enable us to ascertain that the dream is over when we wake up.

Peter Slezak argues that, in common versions of the Homunculus Fallacy or the Cartesian Theater, Descartes is misunderstood, and Dennett attributes to him an error he did not commit.

Keith Frankish constructs a thought experiment which Dennett called the Emancipation of the Drone, which shows how the illusion that the drone has an inner life that resists explanation is created.


A drone



Reimagining control, agency, and the self

Relying on Dennett's account of self-control, Eleonora Catena, Luca Tummolini, and Vieri Giuliano Santucci address the problem of the impact of Artificial Intelligence on human autonomy.

Majid D. Beni understands agents as designed systems that have the capacity to do otherwise and develops a version of compatibilism that does not rely on the distinction between physical and psychological levels of explanation.

Nicolás Sebastián Sánchez discusses an evolution in Dennett’s formulation of the intentional stance as a predictive strategy, characterising the intentional stance as a subspecies of the design stance.

Dan Lloyd addresses Dennett’s theory of the self as a center of narrative gravity, suggesting that the most plausible center of narrative gravity is the fabula.

Thinking about Dennett's notion of Popperian animals, Laura Danón argues that great apes and New Caledonian crows may be the only nonhumans able to exercise in instrumental reasoning.


New Caledonian crow


I hope you enjoy this special issue!


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