Jérôme Dokic

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

The European Review of Philosophy aims at restoring the tradition of rigorous philosophical discussion by bringing together new philosophers from various parts of Europe and by making their works on a wide range of topics available to the philosophical community. The theme of this volume is cognitive dynamics, a term coined by David Kaplan in his classical work 'Demonstratives'. The contributors touch on important requirements in the theory of cognitive dynamics such as the presence of change of mind, the question of the relative priority of the theories of thought and language and changes in context and content.

Situation theorists such as John Barwise, John Etchemendy, John Perry and François Recanati have put forward the hypothesis that linguistic representations are situated in the sense that they are true or false only relative to partial situations which are not explicitly represented as such. Following Recanati's lead, I explore this hypothesis with respect to mental representations. First, I introduce the notion of unarticulated constituent, due to John Perry. I suggest that the question of whether there really are such constituents should divide in two issues, one concerning language and the other concerning thought. Then I formulate a dilemma that any friend of cognitive unarticulated constituents must face: alleged unarticulated constituents seem to be either articulated or non-constituents after all. The dilemma is strengthened by the fact that unarticulated constituents cannot be inferentially relevant. In §4, three constraints on entertaining situated representations are spelled out. First, although the situation within which one is immersed is not represented as such, there must be cognitive facts that make immersion possible, and explain why one is implicitly related to a particular situation as opposed to another. Second, the move from a given representation to one which articulates the situation requires the capacity to contrast the latter with others in the same range. Third, I suggest that conceptual representations differ from non-conceptual ones in the permanent possibility of detachment that they allow. I then illustrate how these constraints work in three sorts of cases. In the first, thoughts like It's raining and It's over are implicitly related to their situations via some practical capacity of keeping track of particular places or times. In the second sort of cases, the relevant situations are not given, but stipulated, like in In Constance, it's raining. Cases of the third sort are those in which an unarticulated constituent is relevant to a whole system of representations, for instance the perceptual system. In the last section, I use the notion of ad hoc representation to defend the cognitive application of situation semantics against an important objection.

When we remember a past situation, the emotional import of the latter often transpires in a modified form at the phenomenological level of our present memory. When it does, we experience what is sometimes called an “affective memory.” Theorists of memories have disagreed about the status of affective memories. Sceptics claim that the relationship between memory and emotion can only be of two types: either the memory is about a past emotion (the emotion is part of what is remembered), or it causes a present emotion (the emotion is a separable effect of the memory). We argue that there is a third option, which points to an emotional way of representing the past situation. Drawing from Peter Goldie’s account of mental narratives, we show that three levels of mental perspective are involved in memories: the perspective of the represented subject (the character, if there is one), the perspective of the representing subject (the author), and the intermediary perspective of the narrator (who may remain virtual). Affective memories are cases in which the narrator’s emotional perspective has direct implications for the author’s emotional perspective, even if the former typically differs from the latter.