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plebian;673059 wrote:Depends I guess. Do keep in mind that this isn't something I've deeply thought through. Yes though. When we look at system states and outputs, I think we are generally using the design stance. My point is that there is some clear benefit to using each stance appropriately and avoiding privileging a certain stance or worse, conflating two or more stances.
You guys use the stance thing a LOT.
I'm not offering a better lens, and I'm not saying the stances aren't useful, and I've been trying to use the same model in order to avoid speaking in a different language, but sometimes (and like you I haven't thought this through) if feels as if dividing things into various stances may be...artificial, especially if, as seems the case, you say we can't interoperably interchange them, or can only explain stuff in one but not the other.
To think of another way of looking.....might lead us to..dissolve some of the boundaries between perspectives, and we might end up applying the words cognition and rationality/agenthood down at very low levels, such as for instance to a living cell, or a thermostat, respectively. It does seem counter-intuitive, perhaps, but it starts to think of everything, all the way up, as being on a continuum.[/QUOTE]
I'm not sure stances are a 'lens' in the sense that they this word is usually used here.
The physical stance is simply the bottom level of description for physics. individual units modified by exceptionless laws.
The intentional stance is, if you don't want to see it as a theory, simply a language game:
You assume that a system has beliefs, That is that the content in their head can be cleanly expressed as simple declarative statements (or propositions) such as 'it is raining'.
you also assume that they have attitudes towards these beliefs, again expressed as clear cut declarative statements(or propositions): 'fears it is raining' 'wants it to rain' and so on. This is why IST is sometimes called Propositional Attitude Talk, The propositional attitudes or even, in shorthand, The Attitudes
So to play this game you decide, discover or theorise what the system believes. Then you decide, discover or theorise what the system desires, what attitudes it has to those beliefs.
Finally, assume the system is rational (uses logic to work through the implications of these beliefs) and will follow the consequences of the logic.
The game can be played in reverse - you can observe a behaviour and ask what beliefs and desires could be in play to cause such behaviour.
So IST can be applied top down or bottom up and just like the eye trying to make sense of an image, the reality is that it is usually a dynamic interplay between the two refining predictions and explanations on the fly in response to what is actually happening.
However, and this is important. IST only needs to take account of behaviour. nothing else. It is utterly neutral about the physical stuff that makes up the system in question. In this way, if there is any regularity at all in behaviour, then IST gets traction on it. However, given this anyone who actually thought that these beliefs were real would be entirely missing the point.
So predictions from the intentional stance and the design stance are not merely the result of handy levels of descriptions or different lenses. They are entirely different games with almost entirely unrelated ontologies and barely the same subject matter.
As for the design stance, while it looks simple it's actually the most easy to get lost in for one simple reason: it's a bastard halfway house kluge - on the one hand it just looks like something that is entirely reducible to the physical stance. However, this is misleading, because what makes something a design is the intentions of the designer. to say something is working properly is to say it is working properly relative to the intentions of the designer. The same problem with 'faulty' 'malfunctioning' and so on.
This is problematic enough, when faced with man made artifacts, but when faced by evolved things then the idea of design becomes hugely problematic and the idea that something has malfunctioned has to be met with the question 'relative to what?' The whole issue of design is actually a sub issue of the question of intentions. Without a designer or a design then things are just what they are, no more no less. Things don't go wrong, they just change.
This opens up into a real problem about the status of (just for a start) psychological explanation: against what background can we talk of mental illness, or indeed illness? There's no design or designer against which malfunction can be grounded.
You'd want to say both are just the wrong way of looking at something, but it's a bit late...
