Has Daniel Dennett got a screw loose?

Many atheists appear to put great stock in the ideas of philosopher Daniel Dennett.

Though I've yet to read one of his books, I've read quite a few opinions regarding his ideas and I've sought out his own comments. And his comments make him look like a crackpot.

So, what am I talking about? Check out some comments Dennett made to Reason Magazine, for example.

Reason: A response might be that you're just positing a more complicated form of determinism. A bird may be more "determined" than we are, but we nevertheless are determined.

Dennett: So what? Determinism is not a problem. What you want is freedom, and freedom and determinism are entirely compatible. In fact, we have more freedom if determinism is true than if it isn't.

(Reason Magazine)

The interviewer seems to use "determined" to mean 100% causally determined. If Dennett takes the term the same way then his last statement requires a good amount of justification.

The next exchange:

Reason: Why?

Dennett: Because if determinism is true, then there's less randomness. There's less unpredictability. To have freedom, you need the capacity to make reliable judgments about what's going to happen next, so you can base your action on it.

If determinism is true in the way the interviewer meant it then there is effectively zero randomness. Dennett appears to have equivocated. When he goes on to talk about the "capacity" for reliable judgments he trades in a term loaded with indeterministic connotations. A causally determined thinker has only one accessible future (in a causally determined universe).

Dennett had gone on from that point to use an illustration about running across a field with the possibility of being struck by lightning. Without causal determinism, Dennett offers, the lightning is completely random so there's no planning for it. And that's true. In an indeterministic world you wouldn't be able to count on the field being there to run across, either. But that seems to be Dennett distracting from the issue, whether intentionally or otherwise. The issue, from what I could tell, was deterministic vs. indeterministic thought. So let's put a deterministic thinker before the lightning field. He is causally determined to choose either a good strategy to cross the field or a bad strategy. If preceding states of matter dictated that he would choose a bad strategy for crossing the field, did that field-crosser have the type of freedom Dennett talks about? Did he have the capacity to make a reliable judgment about what happens next?

If he had that capacity, then why the bad strategy?

What "capacity" did the field-crosser with the good strategy possess other than the same ability the poor-strategy field-crosser had (to do as preceding states of matter dictated)?

Dennett's own words make him look like he judges freedom based on outcomes.

It wouldn't surprise me if Dennett drew some withering criticism in the professional literature ...

In section 3 we discuss Dennett's resolution of this dilemma. The key to his current view, we suggest, is the illata-abstracta distinction. Dennett holds that both illata and abstracta are real and have causal powers, even though only illata are genuine scientific posits. He suggests that beliefs etc. are abstracta, and are the subject matter of what he calls intentional system theory. The subject matter of another theory, what Dennett calls subpersonal cognitive psychology, are illata, which are subpersonal intentional states. The important point is that this distinction lets Dennett have it both ways: (i) Since beliefs are mere abstracta, we need not commit ourselves to the thesis that beliefs will turn out to be posits of an adequate scientific psychology. (ii) Since beliefs have causal power, we are assured of moral and rational agency. We shall argue that Dennett's current view is untenable.
(Synthese)

Note: I went with a slightly less inflammatory title after a moment of reflection. Even in question form connecting Dennett with "crackpot" was a bit rude.

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