Kinds of Minds: Daniel Dennett and Philosophy of Mind
Owen Thomas

Daniel Dennett is a very good writer. And not just for a philosopher, but by any standard. Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness is a very short introduction to his Philosophy of Mind, written for a general audience.

Dennett's philosophical program fits pretty neatly into the big tent of ``Cognitive Science'' (with close relations in Psychology and Computer Science); one of the joys of Kinds of Minds is its vivid and economical exposition on such topics as the role of chemical neurotransmitters in the brain and that of Boolean Algebra in computers. Indeed, it is Dennett's sure use of memorable examples and thought experiments that most characterises his writing. As Bo Dahlbom says in the Introduction to Dennett and His Critics: ``His philosophy is in his stories.'' This does not mean that the concepts are watered down; we don't feel talked down to, and when important details are to be omitted in the interest of clarity, Dennett says so.

We are hunting very big game: nothing less than the venerable ``Mind-Body Problem''. The reader fortunately need not know about the various positions that philosophers have taken over the centuries; most of the evidence used here depends on information very recently made available by various sciences. The recent rapid growth in Philosophy of Mind is probably fueled mainly by the ongoing revolution in computing technology; however, important insights have been also been arrived at in Psychology and Ethology (the study of animal behavior).

How can our minds be explained in physical terms? One very productive way to approach this problem is to understand how thinking creatures have evolved: from Darwinian creatures with their ``more or less arbitrary processes of recombination and mutation of genes'', through Skinnerian creatures capable of learning from experience (via ``operant conditioning'') and Popperian creatures capable of planning, to Gregorian creatures capable of creating tools (Darwin and Skinner presumably need no introduction; Karl Popper is a 20th century philosopher and author of Objective Knowledge: an Evolutionary Approach and The Self and its Brain [though, strangely, Popper has no bibliography entry in Dennett's book]; Richard Gregory is a psychologist and the author of Mind in Science: A History of Explanations in Psychology). For the details, see Dennett's Chapter 4: How Intentionality Came Into Focus (adapted from his own earlier book Darwin's Dangerous Idea).

The key philosophical idea throughout is what Dennett calls the intentional stance: ``the strategy of interpreting the behavior of an entity (person, animal, artifact, whatever) by treating it as if it were a rational agent who governed its `choice' of `action' by a `consideration' of its `beliefs' and `desires.' '' For example, if we were to say of a chess playing computer that it chose to risk losing a piece because it wants to improve its position, we would be taking the intentional stance with respect to the computer. Dennett develops his Intentional Systems approach in Chapter 2 (and throughout his entire career).

The evolutionary development can be viewed from the point of view of intentionality. If we speak of the chess program as ``thinking'' about its moves, we could also speak of a program capable of modifying itself (to ``learn'' from lost games, for example) as ``thinking about its thinking'' -- a higher order of intentionality like that displayed by the more developed creatures in the Darwin-Skinner-Popper-Gregory continuum.

Chapter 6, the final chapter, explores the ``Other Minds'' question with particular reference to animal minds and the ethical implications of this research.

Kinds of Minds is one of the ``Science Masters'' series published by Basic Books: ``a platform from which leading scientists in a range of disciplines . . . can communicate their ideas to general readers'', according to the dust jacket. I haven't seen any of the others, but this appears to be a very valuable project. I note with pleasure that a set of three [P. W. Atkins, Richard Dawkins, and Ian Stewart] is available for a reasonable price from the QPB book club; mine will arrive soon.

The bibliography is supplemented by a very useful section on ``Further Reading'' by the author and is generally well-done. Surprisingly, Thomas Nagel's influential paper ``What Is It Like to Be a Bat?'' is cited only in its original Philosophical Review publication and not the much more widely available reprinting in Dennett's anthology The Mind's I (edited with Douglas R. Hofstadter).

The index seems to have been prepared somewhat carelessly. There are several not-very-useful run-on entries; for example, this part of the entry at mind-havers: ``knowledege of membership in class of, 4-5; language use and, 8-9; moral-standing and, 4-5; proof of presence of mind and, 6-7''. Why not just say ``4-9'' and use the space saved for such potentially useful missing entries as ``ants: 110, 135'', ``chimpanzees: 129, 157'', and ``Oxford: 78''?

This is of course a minor quibble. I recommend Kinds of Minds highly to any high-order intentional system interested in thinking about thinking (this category presumably includes the readers of this review).