187 research outputs found
La conjecture de Ducrot, vingt ans aprĂšs
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 âcontext' 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 â 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
Singular Thought: In Defence of Acquaintance
This paper is about the Descriptivism/Singularism debate, which has loomed large in 20-century philosophy of language and mind. My aim is to defend Singularism by showing, first, that it is a better and more promising view than even the most sophisticated versions of Descriptivism, and second, that the recent objections to Singularism (based on a dismissal of the acquaintance constraint on singular thought) miss their target
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 â a sequel to my 'Open Quotation' (Mind 2001) â 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 âmode'. 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 remĂ©more, ou imagine a conscience de son activitĂ© mentale, et notamment du mode â perceptif, mnĂ©sique ou autre â de ses Ă©tats. Le mode des Ă©tats expĂ©rientiels va de pair avec une relation spĂ©cifique (variable selon le mode) du sujet Ă ce que l'Ă©tat reprĂ©sente. Par exemple, le sujet qui se remĂ©more se trouve (normalement) dans une certaine relation Ă la scĂšne remĂ©morĂ©e : il a perçu celle-ci dans le passĂ©. La thĂšse principale de l'article est que le sujet conscient d'ĂȘtre dans un Ă©tat donnĂ© s'auto-attribue implicitement cette relation avec ce que l'Ă©tat reprĂ©sente. Cette auto-attribution implicite (immunisĂ©e aux erreurs d'identification) constitue la prĂ©sence du sujet «comme sujet » dans le contenu de ses expĂ©riences, distincte de sa prĂ©sence « comme objet » lorsqu'il fait lui-mĂȘme partie de la scĂšne reprĂ©sentĂ©e
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
Reply to Dokic
Response to Dokic's contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop (13th Inter-University Workshop on Philosophy and Cognitive Science, 2003
Précis of *Truth-Conditional Pragmatics
Résumé de mon livre "Truth-Conditional Pragmatics" (Oxford University Press, 2010)
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