 Dennett (1987a) grants that the generalizations of commonsense psychology are true and indispensable, but denies that this is sufficient reason to believe in the entities they appear to refer to. He argues that to give an intentional explanation of a system’s behavior is merely to adopt the “intentional stance” toward it. If the strategy of assigning contentful states to a system and predicting and explaining its behavior (on the assumption that it is rational – i.e., that it behaves as it should, given the propositional attitudes it should have, given its environment) is successful, then the system is intentional, and the propositional-attitude generalizations we apply to it are true. But there is nothing more to having a propositional attitude than this. (See Dennett 1987a: 29.)