Jérôme Dokic

Situation theorists such as Jon Barwise, John Etchemendy, and John Perry have advanced the hypothesis that linguistic and mental representations are ‘situated' in the sense that they are true or false only relative to partial situations. François Recanati has done an important task in reviving and in many respects deepening situation theory. In this chapter, I explore some aspects of Recanati's own account. I focus on situated mental representations, and stress the connection between them and ad hoc or temporary concepts.

Dans cet article, je me demande ce qui distingue la conscience 'externe' du monde (par exemple, la perception visuelle) et la conscience 'interne' du corps propre (par exemple, l'expérience de la douleur). Je rejette les théories analytiques récentes qui assimilent l'expérience de la douleur à une forme de perception externe, à savoir la perception d'un dommage physique relatif au corps du sujet. Mais je ne souscris pas pour autant à la thèse phénoménologique selon laquelle il y a un 'espace douloureux', et plus généralement un espace corporel, distinct de l'espace de la perception externe. Selon moi, la différence entre la conscience 'à l'extérieur' et la conscience 'de l'intérieur' ne réside ni dans la forme de la perception, ni dans la nature de l'espace perçu, mais dans l'objet intentionnel lui-même, indépendant de l'expérience dans le premier cas, mais dépendant de celle-ci dans le second.

This essay is about our perceptual ability to recognize familiar persons. The question is whether and to what extent our ordinary recognition judgments rely on perceptual experience as opposed to background beliefs. It argues that in order to give a proper answer to this question, we need to introduce a third character into the picture, namely the feeling of presence. Ordinary person recognition involves qualitative recognitional abilities, which (in the visual case) enable us to see that a particular person looks just like a familiar person, but also an independent causal mechanism which generates the feeling that the familiar person herself is present. When we recognize someone, we identify her (general) visual appearance, but we also feel her presence. Feelings of presence are essential contributions to the phenomenology of person recognition, but they do not supervene on perceptual content proper.