Daniel Clement Dennett III (March 28, 1942 – April 19, 2024) was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.Beardsley, T. (1996) Profile: Daniel C. Dennett – Dennett's Dangerous Idea, Scientific American 274(2), 34–35.
Dennett was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Dennett was a member of the editorial board for The Rutherford Journal and a co-founder of The Clergy Project.
Dennett has been described as "one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers". A vocal atheist and secularist, he was referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism, along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens.
Early life and education Daniel Clement Dennett III was born on March 28, 1942, in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Ruth Marjorie (née Leck; 1903–1971) and Daniel Clement Dennett Jr. (1910–1947).
Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father, who had a PhD in Islamic studies from Harvard University, was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut. His mother, an English major at Carleton College, went for a master's degree at the University of Minnesota before becoming an English teacher at the American Community School in Beirut. In 1947, his father was killed in a plane crash in Ethiopia. Shortly after, his mother took him back to Massachusetts. Dennett's sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.
Dennett said that he was first introduced to the notion of philosophy while attending Camp Mowglis in Hebron, New Hampshire, at age 11, when a camp counselor said to him, "You know what you are, Daniel? You're a philosopher."
Dennett graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1959, and spent one year at Wesleyan University before receiving his BA degree in philosophy at Harvard University in 1963. There, he was a student of Willard Van Orman Quine. He had decided to transfer to Harvard after reading Quine's From a Logical Point of View and, thinking that Quine was wrong about some things, decided, as he said "as only a freshman could, that I had to go to Harvard and confront this man with my corrections to his errors!"
Academic career In 1965, Dennett received his DPhil in philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he studied under Gilbert Ryle and was a member of Hertford College. His doctoral dissertation was entitled The Mind and the Brain: Introspective Description in the Light of Neurological Findings; Intentionality.
From 1965 to 1971, Dennett taught at the University of California, Irvine, before moving to Tufts University where he taught for five decades. He also spent periods visiting at Harvard University and several other universities. Dennett described himself as "an autodidact—or, more properly, the beneficiary of hundreds of hours of informal tutorials on all the fields that interest me, from some of the world's leading scientists".
Throughout his career, he was an interdisciplinarian who argued for "breaking the silos of knowledge", and he collaborated widely with computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and biologists.
Dennett co-edited and co-authored the 1981 collection The Mind's I with Douglas Hofstadter. He wrote an afterword for the 1999 reissue of The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins. He wrote an introduction to a 2002 edition of Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind. Dennett was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and two Guggenheim Fellowships.
He retired emeritus from Tufts in 2022 in a shared celebration with his longtime friend and colleague in philosophy George E. Smith.
Philosophical views
Free will and determinism While he was a confirmed compatibilist on free will, in "On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want"—chapter 15 of his 1978 book BrainstormsBrainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, MIT Press (1981), pp. 286–99.—Dennett articulated the case for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to libertarian views.
While other philosophers have developed two-stage models, including William James, Henri Poincaré, Arthur Compton, and Henry Margenau, Dennett defended this model for the following reasons:
Leading libertarian philosophers such as Robert Kane have rejected Dennett's model, specifically that random chance is directly involved in a decision, on the basis that they believe this eliminates the agent's motives and reasons, character and values, and feelings and desires. They claim that, if chance is the primary cause of decisions, then agents cannot be liable for resultant actions. Kane says:
Mind
Dennett was a proponent of materialism in the philosophy of mind. He argued that mental states, including consciousness, are entirely the result of physical processes in the brain. In his book Consciousness Explained (1991), Dennett presented his arguments for a materialist understanding of consciousness, rejecting Cartesian dualism in favor of a physicalist perspective.
Dennett remarked in several places (such as "Self-portrait", in Brainchildren) that his overall philosophical project remained largely the same from his time at Oxford onwards. He was primarily concerned with providing a philosophy of mind that is grounded in empirical research. In his original dissertation, Content and Consciousness, he broke up the problem of explaining the mind into the need for a theory of content and for a theory of consciousness. His approach to this project also stayed true to this distinction. Just as Content and Consciousness has a bipartite structure, he similarly divided Brainstorms into two sections. He would later collect several essays on content in The Intentional Stance and synthesize his views on consciousness into a unified theory in Consciousness Explained. These volumes respectively form the most extensive development of his views..
In chapter 5 of Consciousness Explained, Dennett described his multiple drafts model of consciousness. In this model, various streams of information-processing compete for "cerebral celebrity" at any given moment. Central to this theory is the metaphor of the "Joycean machine," which describes human consciousness as a Virtual Machine, a serial software layer composed of language and habits (memes) running on the highly parallel hardware of the biological brain. By this logic, Dennett argues that the "Self" is not a physical organ or a soul, but a "Center of Narrative Gravity"—a useful fiction that the brain constructs to make sense of its own behavior to itself and others.
He stated that, "all varieties of perception—indeed all varieties of thought or mental activity—are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under continuous 'editorial revision.'" (p. 111). Later he asserts, "These yield, over the course of time, something rather like a narrative stream or sequence, which can be thought of as subject to continual editing by many processes distributed around the brain, ..." (p. 135, emphasis in the original).
In this work, Dennett's interest in the ability of evolution to explain some of the content-producing features of consciousness is already apparent, and this later became an integral part of his program. He stated his view is materialist and scientific, and he presents an argument against qualia; he argued that the concept of qualia is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism.
This view is rejected by neuroscientists Gerald Edelman, Antonio Damasio, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Giulio Tononi, and Rodolfo Llinás, all of whom state that qualia exist and that the desire to eliminate them is based on an erroneous interpretation on the part of some philosophers regarding what constitutes science.Edelman, G., Gally, J. & Baars, B. (2011). "Biology of consciousness". Frontiers In Psychology, 2, 4, 1–6.Overgaard, M., Mogensen, J. & Kirkeby-Hinrup, A. (Eds.) (2021). Beyond neural correlates of consciousness. Routledge Taylor & Francis.Tononi, G., Boly, M., Massimini, M., & Koch, C. (2016). "Integrated information theory: From consciousness to its physical substrate". Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 17, 450–61.
Dennett's strategy mirrored his teacher Ryle's approach of redefining first-person phenomena in third-person terms, and denying the coherence of the concepts which this approach struggles with.
Dennett self-identified with a few terms:
In Consciousness Explained, he affirmed "I am a sort of 'teleofunctionalist', of course, perhaps the original teleofunctionalist". He went on to say, "I am ready to come out of the closet as some sort of verificationist." (pp. 460–61).
Dennett was creditedDoherty, M. J. (2009). Theory of Mind: How Children Understand Others’ Thoughts and Feelings. Psychology Press. with inspiring false belief tasks used in developmental psychology. He noted that when four-year-olds watch the Punch and Judy puppet show, they laugh because they know that they know more about what's going on than one of the characters does:Dennett, D. C. (1978). Beliefs about Beliefs (commentary on Premack, et al.). Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1, pp. 568-70.
Evolutionary debate Much of Dennett's work from the 1990s onwards was concerned with fleshing out his previous ideas by addressing the same topics from an evolutionary standpoint, ranging from what distinguishes human minds from animal minds (Kinds of Minds), to how free will is compatible with a naturalist view of the world (Freedom Evolves).
Dennett saw evolution by natural selection as an algorithmic process (though he spelt out that algorithms as simple as long division often incorporate a significant degree of randomness).Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Simon & Schuster, 1996, pp. 52–60, . This idea is in conflict with the evolutionary philosophy of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who preferred to stress the "pluralism" of evolution (i.e., its dependence on many crucial factors, of which natural selection is only one).
Dennett's views on evolution are identified as being strongly adaptationist, in line with his theory of the intentional stance, and the evolutionary views of biologist Richard Dawkins. In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett showed himself even more willing than Dawkins to defend adaptationism in print, devoting an entire chapter to a criticism of the ideas of Gould. This stems from Gould's long-running public debate with E. O. Wilson and other evolutionary biologists over human sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary psychology, which Gould and Richard Lewontin opposed, but which Dennett advocated, together with Dawkins and Steven Pinker. Gould argued that Dennett overstated his claims and misrepresented Gould's, to reinforce what Gould describes as Dennett's "Darwinian fundamentalism".
Religion and morality
Dennett was a vocal atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, and a member of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett was referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism", along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.