Learning our way to intelligence: Refl ections on dennett and appropriateness

Abstract

In chapter three of Content and Consciousness, Dennett writes that the “capacity to learn from experience in such a way that […] behavior improves in prudence is what I shall call the intelligent storage of information”. This statement amounts to a claim that learning functions as the criterion of intelligence, or, at least, the criterion for the intelligent storage of information. It is this connection between learning and intelligence that I defend in this essay. I begin by forwarding a definition of learning that combines a flexibility requirement with a success requirement. I then go on to argue that four features often cited as characteristic of intelligence: Flexibility, transferability, manipulability, and appropriateness, are related to intelligence only insofar as they as they satisfy one of the two requirements of learning. Moreover, I argue that positing learning as the criterion of intelligence explains why there seems to be a natural connection between the above-listed features and intelligence. In the final section of the paper, I identify and categorize four different learning kinds. These categories correspond to distinctions that Dennett has proposed between Darwinian, Skinnerian, Popperian, and Gregorian creatures. Taken together, these considerations provide reason to accept that learning is the criterion of intelligence and that intelligence is a natural, biological, evolved phenomenon.