CONCEPT
Real Patterns
Dennett's 1991 argument that patterns are real if they compress — if treating them as existing yields genuine predictive leverage — a criterion that legitimizes the intentional stance without requiring metaphysical substance.
In his 1991 paper Real Patterns, Dennett addressed a long-standing objection to his intentional stance: if beliefs and desires are merely useful predictive postulates, are they real? His answer introduced a general criterion: a pattern is real if describing it compresses the data — if treating the system as having the pattern gives you predictive traction beyond what the raw physical description provides. On this criterion, belief-desire psychology is real (because it compresses enormous amounts of behavioral data), the stock market is real, species are real, and, when we notice that the intentional stance works on language models, the patterns it describes in the models are also real. The paper supplies the ontological footing for everything else in Dennett's framework.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The paper was Dennett's response to critics — W.V.O. Quine, Paul Churchland, Jerry Fodor — who had pressed him from opposite directions. Quine and Churchland wanted to eliminate intentional talk as unscientific; Fodor wanted