ABSTRACT
Dan Dennett’s generous, statesmanlike paper is a well thought-out invitation to find a way to combine our somewhat different perspectives into a single binocular vision of the common phenomena we address. I agree entirely with his assessment that we agree about a great deal – including issues on which our views put us at odds with those of the greater part of our philosophical colleagues. We share large-scale, orienting methodological commitments to thinking of intentionality in normative terms, to seeing assessments of rationality as ineluctably bound up with attribution of contentful thought (followed out by wanting to start semantically with inference rather than representation), to working out some version of the “stance stance”, and to preferring macroreductions rather than microreductions of intentionality (moving up to the environmentally, including socially, situated organism rather than down to the neurons). Although he does not mention such matters of detail, there are also quite specific issues on which he and I agree in taking positions that leave us in a tiny minority. One such is understanding the distinction between de dicto and de re as concerning kinds of ascriptions of beliefs (and other attitudes), rather than indicating different kinds of beliefs.
