first two experiments showed that talking about lobsters as strongly emotional led to a much greater sentiment that lobsters deserved welfare protections than did talking about lobsters as highly intelligent. The third and fourth studies found that perceiving an agent as vulnerable led to greater attributions of phenomenal experience. Also, people who scored higher on the empathetic-concern subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index had generally higher absolute attributions of mental experience. Bryce Huebner (2010) performed two experimental philosophy studies to test students' ascriptions of various mental states to humans compared with cyborgs and robots. Experiment 1 showed that while students attributed both beliefs and pains most strongly to humans, they were more willing to attribute beliefs than pains to robots and cyborgs. "[T]hese data seem to confirm that commonsense psychology does draw a distinction between phenomenal and non-phenomenal states—and this distinction seems to be dependent on the structural properties of an entity in a way that ascriptions of non-phenomenal states are not." However, this conclusion is only tentative in view of the high variance among participants. Experiment 2 showed analogous results: Both beliefs and happiness were ascribed most strongly to biological humans, and ascriptions of happiness to robots or cyborgs were less common than ascriptions of beliefs. See also Four causes Telos Teleology Conceptual blending Folk psychology High- and low-level description Instrumentalism Intention Intentionality Level of analysis Life stance Marr's levels of analysis Naturalization of intentionality Operationalism Philosophical realism Philosophy of mind Stance (linguistics) Theory of mind The Philosophy of 'As if' Footnotes References Braddon-Mitchell, D., & Jackson, F. Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1996 Bolton, D. & Hill, J., Mind, Meaning, and Mental Disorder: The Nature of Causal Explanation in Psychology and Psychiatry, Oxford University Press, (Oxford), 1996. Brentano, F., (1973/1924) Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (Second Edition), Routledge & Kegan Paul, (London) 1973 (The German version of the Second Edition was published in 1924). Dennett, D.C., (1971) "Intentional Systems", The Journal of Philosophy, Vol.68, No. 4, (25 February 1971), pp.87-106. Dennett, D.C., (1971/1978) "Mechanism and Responsibility", reprinted in pp. 233–255 in Dennett, D.C., Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, Bradford Books, (Montgomery), 1978 (originally published in 1971). Dennett, D.C., (1975) "Brain Writing and Mind Reading", Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 7: 403-415. Dennett, D., (1987) "True Believers" in Dennett, D. The Intentional Stance, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1987 (First published 1987).