La classification de Vendler revue et corrigée

17 pages, initialement paru comme rapport n°9718 du CREA, Polytechnique, Paris, en Oct 97International audienceDans cet article, nous commentons la classification des verbes de Vendler, l'amendons quelque peu, et tentons d'établir sa légitimité en isolant les principes qui la fondent

La conjecture de Ducrot, vingt ans après

Réponse aux objections soulevées par Oswald Ducrot à l'encontre de mon approche "gricéenne" de la performativité

Indexicality, context, and pretense: a speech-act theoretic account

In this paper, I argue that the notion of ‘context' that has to be used in the study of indexicals is far from univocal. A first distinction has to be made between the real context of speech and the context in which the speech act is supposed to take place — only the latter notion being relevant when it comes to determining the semantic values of indexicals. Second, we need to draw a distinction between the context of the locutionary act and the context of the illocutionary act : contrary to a standard assumption of speech act theory, they can diverge, and their possible divergence explains a number of puzzling phenomena involving indexicals

Cognitive Dynamics: A New Look at an Old Problem

To appear in K. Korta and M. Ponte (eds.) Reference and Representation in Language and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.In this paper in defense of the mental-file approach to singular thought, I argue that we need to distinguish static, fine-grained files based on specific acquaintance relations, and the dynamic, coarser-grained files resulting from operations on them : conversion, fusion, fission etc

Immunity to Error Through Misidentification : What It Is and Where It Comes From

I argue that immunity to error through misidentification primarily characterizes thoughts that are 'implicitly' de se, as opposed to thoughts that involve an explicit self-identification. Thoughts that are implicitly de se involve no reference to the self at the level of content: what makes them de se is simply the fact that the content of the thought is evaluated with respect to the thinking subject. Or, to put it in familiar terms : the content of the thought is a property which the thinking subject self-ascribes (as in the Loar/Lewis/Chisholm analysis). After answering an objection (to the effect that immunity can affect explicit de se thoughts), I extend the analysis to demonstrative thoughts, which also exhibit the property of immunity to error through misidentification

De re and de se [FINAL VERSION -- DISREGARD THE PREVIOUS VERSION]

For Perry and many authors, de se thoughts are a species of de re thought. In this paper, I argue that de se thoughts come in two varieties : explicit and implicit. While explicit de se thoughts can be construed as a variety of de re thought, implicit de se thoughts cannot : their content is thetic, while the content of de re thoughts is categoric. The notion of an implicit de se thought is claimed to play a central role in accounting for the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. Lewis has attempted to unify de re and de se in the opposite direction : by reducing de re to de se. This, however, works only if we internalize the acquaintance relations. I criticize Lewis's internalization strategy on the grounds that it rests on Egocentrism (the view that every occurrent thought is ultimately about the thinker at the time of thinking). In the conclusion, I suggest another way of unifying de re and de se, by extending the implicit/explicit distinction to de re thoughts themselves

Open Quotation Revisited

This paper — a sequel to my 'Open Quotation' (Mind 2001) — is my reaction to the articles discussing open quotation in the special issue of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics edited by P. De Brabanter in 2005

Empty Singular Terms in the Mental-File Framework

Mental files, in Recanati's framework, function as 'singular terms in the language of thought' ; they serve to think about objects in the world (and to store information about them). But they have a derived, metarepresentational function : they serve to represent how other subjects think about objects in the world. To account for the metarepresentational use of files, Recanati introduces the notion of an 'indexed file', i.e. a vicarious file that stands, in the subject's mind, for another subject's file about an object. Using that notion, he argues, one can provide an analysis of attitude ascriptions and the conniving use of empty singular terms

Le soi implicite

The subject who perceives, feels, remembers or imagines is conscious of his or her experiential states and, in particular, of their ‘mode'. The mode is what enables us to classify experiential states into types such as perceptions, memories, etc., quite independent of the content of the state (what is perceived, remembered, etc.). It is argued that the mode M of an experience determines that (if all goes well) a certain relation RM holds between the subject of the experience and what the experience represents. For example, the subject who remembers a scene normally stands in a certain relation to the scene in question, that of having perceived it in the past. The article's main thesis is that the subject of an experiential state implicitly self-ascribes the relevant relation to what the state represents. This implicit self-ascription (which is immune to error through misidentification) corresponds to the presence of the subject « as subject » in the content of his or her experience.Le sujet qui perçoit, ressent, se remémore, ou imagine a conscience de son activité mentale, et notamment du mode — perceptif, mnésique ou autre — de ses états. Le mode des états expérientiels va de pair avec une relation spécifique (variable selon le mode) du sujet à ce que l'état représente. Par exemple, le sujet qui se remémore se trouve (normalement) dans une certaine relation à la scène remémorée : il a perçu celle-ci dans le passé. La thèse principale de l'article est que le sujet conscient d'être dans un état donné s'auto-attribue implicitement cette relation avec ce que l'état représente. Cette auto-attribution implicite (immunisée aux erreurs d'identification) constitue la présence du sujet «comme sujet » dans le contenu de ses expériences, distincte de sa présence « comme objet » lorsqu'il fait lui-même partie de la scène représentée

Reply to Brabanter

Response to Brabanter's contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop (13th Inter-University Workshop on Philosophy and Cognitive Science, 2003