Realism, instrumentalism, and the intentional stance

One of Dennett’s principal arguments for on instrumentolistic construal of in-tentionol ottributions (e.g., ottributions of belief, etc.) is that such attributions ore environment relative. I argue that one can and should odopt a realist per-spective toword such ottributions, but accommodate their environmental rela-tivity by treoting intentional properties as relational properties. By doing so one acquires a useful perspective on experimental cognitive psychology; in particular, one con overcome the temptation to treat ecological accounts ond information processing accounts OS incompatible alternatives and come to see them OS mutually supportive. Treating intentional properties OS relotionol may be counter-intuitive, but I provide exomples of how other sciences have had to treat what seem to be intrinsic properties as relotionol. Many philosophers have argued that a major difference between the expla-nations offered in psychology (and the social sciences) and those offered in physics, chemistry, and biology is that the former often employ intentional idioms while the latter do not. Examples of intentional idioms are expres-sions like “believes that ” and “fears that. ” Such expressions typically char-acterize a subject as having an attitude towards a proposition. What makes intentional idioms seem problematic is that the proposition toward which the attitude is held may in fact be false. Some philosophers have seen inten-tional idioms as posing an obstacle to developing a science of psychology (see Rosenberg, 1980). As a result, numerous attempts have been made to show how one can do away with intentional discourse. Dennett (1978), how-ever, offers us a different approach, one that grants a role to intentional dis-course and then directs us to consider how the design of a system could l The preparation of this paper was aided by a grant from the National Endowment fo