The hard question is “original intentionality”: under what circumstances (if any) is something inherently representational, & how does that work? E.g., is a chess program’s representation of board states inherently that, or is it like a stop sign, requiring human interpretation?
Dennett’s “intentional stance” is perfectly sensible: thinking about other people *as if* they had beliefs, desires, and so on, while considering that those are useful fictions, is often (not always) the most effective way to understand them.
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But, by construction, it doesn’t seem that this can be extended into a mechanistic theory of cognition, which is what cognitivists want (in order to prove materialism correct).
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But is this "the representationalist story is wrong" or "the representationalist story can't be the whole story"? You might not be able to have a full theory with representations alone, but they can still play important roles in their original sense.
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