The intentional stance is the strategy of prediction and explanation that attributes beliefs, desires, and other “intentional” states to systems – living and nonliving – and predicts future behavior from what it would be rational for an agent to do, given those beliefs and desires. Any system whose performance can be thus predicted and explained is an intentional system, whatever its innards. The strategy of treating parts of the world as intentional systems is the foundation of “folk psychology,” but is also exploited (and is virtually unavoidable) in artificial intelligence and cognitive science more generally, as well as in evolutionary theory. An analysis of the role of the intentional stance and its presuppositions supports a naturalistic theory of mental states and events, their content or intentionality, and the relation between “mentalistic” levels of explanation and neurophysiological or mechanistic levels of explanation. As such, the analysis of the intentional stance grounds a theory of the mind and its relation to the body.
