[Review]Daniel C. Dennett_The Intentional Stance (3)

 Folk science and the Manifest Image

“What then do we see when we look at this bustling public world? Among the most complicated and interesting of the phenomena are the doings of our fellow human beings. If we try to predict and describe them using the same methods and concepts we have developed to describe landslides, germination, and magnetism, we can make a few important inroads, but the bulk of their observable macro- activity-their "behavior"-is hopelessly unpredictable from these perspectives. People are even less predictable than the weather, if we rely on the scientific techniques of meteorologists and even biologists. But there is another perspective, familiar to us since childhood and used effortlessly by us all every day, that seems wonderfully able to make sense of this complexity. It is often called folk psychology. It is the perspective that invokes the family of "mentalistic" concepts, such as belief, desire, knowledge, fear, pain, expectation, intention, understanding, dreaming, imagination, self-consciousness, and so on.”(1987. 7)


In this article, Daniel C. Dennett addresses the conceptual limitations of folk psychology and folk physics and their philosophical approaches. His basic assumption is that intuition plays an important role in how humans understand and interact with the world, but it does not guarantee truth and must be reexamined through scientific methodology and empirical verification. In other words, for him intuition means the instinctive and immediate understanding and expectations that humans naturally use in their daily lives, mainly found in ‘folk psychology’ and ‘folk physics’. 
According to Dennett, intuition is an instinctive understanding that we acquire through experience or have innately. For example, it explores the intuitive understanding of how physical objects move (folk physics) and the ability to guess the behavior and state of mind of others (folk psychology).(10-1) Also, for example, intuitively knowing that you will get wet if water spills and being able to guess what someone wants can be said to be useful for intuition.(8)

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Husserl’s and Dennett’s

Let’s take a moment to look at Edmund Husserl’s intuition and Dennett’s intuition. Husserl's intuition, in other words, essential intuition can capture the essence and nature of things. Essential knowledge in Husserl-phenomenology is the experience of consciousness that returns to transcendental subjectivity. So that, Only what is direct and self-evident given to consciousness becomes pure knowledge. Dennett’s thing is acquired through experience. Our intuition is formed and develops through real-life experiences. Accordingly, the two approaches to intuition are different.

[Reference]

  • Danial C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance, The MIT press, 1987.

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