Daniel Dennett has argued for an approach he calls heterophenomenology, which means treating verbal reports as stories that may or may not be true, but his ideas about how to do this have not been widely adopted.

Dennett has remarked in several places ( such as " Self-portrait ", in Brainchildren ) that his overall philosophical project has remained largely the same since his time at Oxford.

Dennett lives with his wife in North Andover, Massachusetts, and has a daughter, a son, and three grandchildren.

In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett ' distinguishes between a purely metaphysical sense of epiphenomenalism, in which the epiphenomenon has no causal impact at all, and Huxley's " steam whistle " epiphenomenalism, in which effects exist but are not functionally relevant.

Jaynes's theory has been influential to philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, psychologists such as Tim Crow and Steven Pinker, and psychiatrists such as Henry Nasrallah.

This argument has been expressed by Daniel Dennett who argues that, " when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception ( or imagination ), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition ".

This argument has been rejected by compatibilists such as Daniel Dennett on the grounds that, even if humans have something in common with these things, it remains possible and plausible that we are different from such objects in important ways.

Daniel Dennett has derisively referred to certain types of thought experiments such as the Chinese Room experiment as " intuition pumps ", claiming they are simply thinly veiled appeals to intuition which fail when carefully analyzed.

Rather, we log what has changed and assume the rest has stayed the same, with the result that we miss some details, as demonstrated in various experiments and illusions, some of which Dennett outlines.

He often writes and discusses Christian apologetics and has debated against prominent atheists and skeptics, including Christopher Hitchens, Peter Singer, Daniel Dennett, Michael Shermer, and Bart Ehrman.

Since Dennett wrote Elbow Room ( 1984 ) there has been an on-going attempt by some scientists to answer this question by suggesting that the brain is a device for controlling quantum indeterminacy so as to construct behavioral choice.

Dennett has slowly, through the course of the book, stripped the idea of behavioral choice from his idea of free will.

The article was originally published in 1974 in The Philosophical Review, and has been reprinted several times, including in The Mind's I ( edited by Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter ), Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology ( edited by Ned Block ), Nagel's Mortal Questions ( 1979 ), The Nature of Mind ( edited by David M. Rosenthal ), and Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings ( edited by David J. Chalmers ).

* Daniel Dennett, in Consciousness Explained, has called into question the validity of this sort of thought experiment altogether, maintaining that when a thought experiment is too far removed from the actual state of affairs, our intuitions cease to be meaningful.

Daniel Dennett has since suggested that people that believe in the supernatural could choose to be referred to as supers.

In response to this Daniel Dennett has stated in his book Breaking the Spell:

The " intentional stance " has been defined by Daniel Dennett as an understanding that others ' actions are goal-directed and arise from particular beliefs or desires.

In modern popular culture, the question of God's existence has been discussed in the negative by public intellectuals such as Stephen Hawking, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, and in the affirmative by such as Richard Swinburne, William Lane Craig, and Alvin Plantinga.

Dennett ( 1988 ) explains consciousness in terms of access consciousness alone, denying the independent existence of what Ned Block has labeled phenomenal consciousness.

Chalmers ( 1996 ) maintains that Dennett has produced no more than a theory of how subjects report events.

However as influential modern philosopher and former student Daniel Dennett has pointed out, recent trends in psychology such as embodied cognition, discursive psychology, situated cognition and others in the post-cognitivist tradition have provoked a renewed interest in Ryle's work.

According to Dennett, recent work has rendered the Baldwin effect " no longer a controversial wrinkle in orthodox Darwinism " ( p. 69 ).

He had briefly praised Mrs. Dennett ’ s book in the May 1926 issue of The American Mercury, and took a sympathetic interest in her legal troubles:

* John Symons ( 2000 ) On Dennett.

* Inside Jokes Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams, Jr at The MIT Press

* Dennett, D. C., Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology ( 1978 )

Two other books, How the Mind Works ( 1997 ) and The Blank Slate ( 2002 ), broadly surveyed the mind and defended the idea of a complex human nature which comprises many mental faculties that are adaptive ( and is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism ).

** Daniel Dennett, 1993, " Review of The Embodied Mind ," American Journal of Psychology 106: 121-26.

The article is included in the books Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind ( ISBN 0-631-19678-1 ) and A Devil's Chaplain.

In 1981 the MIT Press published its first book under the Bradford Books imprint, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology by Daniel C. Dennett.

Within philosophy familiar names include Daniel Dennett who writes from a computational systems perspective, John Searle known for his controversial Chinese room, Jerry Fodor who advocates functionalism, and Douglas Hofstadter, famous for writing Gödel, Escher, Bach, which questions the nature of words and thought.

Although some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, have disputed the validity of this distinction, others have broadly accepted it.

Theories proposed by neuroscientists such as Gerald Edelman and Antonio Damasio, and by philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, seek to explain consciousness in terms of neural events occurring within the brain.

Some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett in an essay titled The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies, argue that people who give this explanation do not really understand what they are saying.

For example, Daniel Dennett and Douglas Hofstadter argue that anything capable of passing the Turing test is necessarily conscious, while David Chalmers argues that a philosophical zombie could pass the test, yet fail to be conscious.

Daniel Dennett provides this extension to the " epiphenomena " argument.

Daniel Clement Dennett ( born March 28, 1942 ) is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.

Dennett is a firm atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement.

Dennett is referred to as one of the " Four Horsemen of New Atheism ", along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut.

Dennett attended Phillips Exeter Academy and spent one year at Wesleyan University before receiving his Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Harvard University in 1963, where he was a student of W. V. Quine.

Dennett's sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.

As of January 2012, Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, University Professor, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies ( with Ray Jackendoff ) at Tufts University.

Dennett describes 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.

While he is a confirmed compatibilist on free will, in " On Giving Libertarians What They Say They Want " – Chapter 15 of his 1978 book Brainstorms, Dennett articulated the case for a two-stage model of decision making in contrast to libertarian views.

Dennett admits, a causal indeterminist view of this deliberative kind does not give us everything libertarians have wanted from free will.

In his 2006 book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Dennett attempts to subject religious belief to the same treatment, explaining possible evolutionary reasons for the phenomenon of religious adherence.

In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett writes that evolution can account for the origin of morality.

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.