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41Epistemic normativity from the reasoner's viewpointBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5): 265-265. 2011.Elqayam & Evans (E&E) are focused on the normative judgments used by theorists to characterize subjects' performances (e.g. in terms of logic or probability theory). They ignore the fact, however, that subjects themselves have an independent ability to evaluate their own reasoning performance, and that this ability plays a major role in controlling their first-order reasoning tasks
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45Précis of The Philosophy of MetacognitionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (3): 703-709. 2014.
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81Criticial Review of: When self-consciousness breaks, by G. Lynn Stephens & G. GrahamPhilosophical Psychology 15 (4): 543-550. 2002.The book under review offers two important contributions. One is a valuable discussion of the various ways of addressing the paradoxical experience of externality. The other is an emphasis on a distinction between the experience of subjectivity and the experience of agency. This review tries to show that this distinction is indeed a crucial feature in any solution to the question of externality, but that it is associated with a view of thinking as acting that is questionable
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11The representational basis of brute metacognition: a proposalIn Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds, Cambridge University Press. pp. 165--183. 2009.
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394A plea for mental actsSynthese 129 (1): 105-128. 2001.A prominent but poorly understood domain of human agency is mental action, i.e., thecapacity for reaching specific desirable mental statesthrough an appropriate monitoring of one's own mentalprocesses. The present paper aims to define mentalacts, and to defend their explanatory role againsttwo objections. One is Gilbert Ryle's contention thatpostulating mental acts leads to an infinite regress.The other is a different although related difficulty,here called the access puzzle: How can the mindalr…Read more
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374Metacognition and metarepresentation: Is a self-directed theory of mind a precondition for metacognition? (review)Synthese 159 (2). 2007.Metacognition is often defined as thinking about thinking. It is exemplified in all the activities through which one tries to predict and evaluate one’s own mental dispositions, states and properties for their cognitive adequacy. This article discusses the view that metacognition has metarepresentational structure. Properties such as causal contiguity, epistemic transparency and procedural reflexivity are present in metacognition but missing in metarepresentation, while open-ended recursivity an…Read more
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34Replies to Langland‐Hassan, Nagel, and SmithPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (3): 736-755. 2014.
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29This book chapter aims at exploring how intentional a piece of behavior should be to count as an action, and how a minimal view on action, not requiring a richly intentional causation, may still qualify such a behavior as voluntary.
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50Questions of Form: Logic and Analytic Proposition From Kant to CarnapUniv of Minnesota Press. 1989.Hence, this book's provocative claim: today's so-called logical empiricism owes much more to Kant's notion of science than to Hume's.
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134Does metacognition necessarily involve metarepresentation?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (3): 352-352. 2003.Against the view that metacognition is a capacity that parallels theory of mind, it is argued that metacognition need involve neither metarepresentation nor semantic forms of reflexivity, but only process-reflexivity, through which a task-specific system monitors its own internal feedback by using quantitative cues. Metacognitive activities, however, may be redescribed in metarepresentational, mentalistic terms in species endowed with a theory of mind.
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Natural descriptors and externalism+ the definition of distality and externalist approach to intentionalityDialectica 48 (3-4): 249-265. 1994.
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42The Evolution of Primate Communication and MetacommunicationMind and Language 31 (2): 177-203. 2016.Against the prior view that primate communication is based only on signal decoding, comparative evidence suggests that primates are able, no less than humans, to intentionally perform or understand impulsive or habitual communicational actions with a structured evaluative nonconceptual content. These signals convey an affordance-sensing that immediately motivates conspecifics to act. Although humans have access to a strategic form of propositional communication adapted to teaching and persuasion…Read more
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24Réponse à Édouard Machery. Pour une pensée évolutionniste des répresentationsDialogue 44 (1): 161-166. 2005.
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685Exploring the informational sources of metaperception: The case of Change Blindness BlindnessConsciousness and Cognition 20 (4): 1489-1501. 2011.Perceivers generally show a poor ability to detect changes, a condition referred to as “Change Blindness” . They are, in addition, “blind to their own blindness”. A common explanation of this “Change Blindness Blindness” is that it derives from an inadequate, “photographical” folk-theory about perception. This explanation, however, does not account for intra-individual variations of CBB across trials. Our study aims to explore an alternative theory, according to which participants base their sel…Read more
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Is there a sense of agency for thought?In Lucy O'Brien & Matthew Soteriou (eds.), Mental actions, Oxford University Press. 2009.
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87The norms of acceptancePhilosophical Issues 22 (1): 316-333. 2012.An area in the theory of action that has received little attention is how mental agency and world-directed agency interact. The purpose of the present contribution is to clarify the rational conditions of such interaction, through an analysis of the central case of acceptance. There are several problems with the literature about acceptance. First, it remains unclear how a context of acceptance is to be construed. Second, the possibility of conjoining, in acceptance, an epistemic component, which…Read more
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72Can 'radical' simulation theories explain psychological concept acquisition?In Jérôme Dokic & Joëlle Proust (eds.), Simulation and Knowledge of Action, John Benjamins. 2002.This paper examines the response offered by Robert Gordon to the question how an interpreter can reach the correct content of others'psychological states. It exposes the main problems raised by Gordon's proposal, and provides a tentative solution that emphasizes the structuring role of counterfactual reasoning in embedding simulations and deriving facts that are holding across them.
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Problèmes d'Histoire de la Philosophie: L'idée de topique comparativeSociété Française de Philosophie, Bulletin 82 (3): 73. 1988.
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61Why Evolution Has to Matter to Cognitive Psychology and to Philosophy of MindBiological Theory 1 (4): 346-348. 2006.Growing suspicions were raised however that an exclusively language-oriented view of the mind, focussing on the characterization of anhistorical, static mental states through their propositional contents, was hardly compatible with what is currently known of brain architecture and did not fare well when confronted with results from many behavioral studies of mental functions. My aim in what follows is to show that these forms of dissatisfaction stem from the fact that brain evolution and develop…Read more
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66Bolzano’s Analytic RevisitedThe Monist 64 (2): 214-230. 1981.What I propose is to reconsider the interpretation of Bolzano’s concept of analytic propositions which was offered thirty years ago by Bar-Hillel. The claim of Bar-Hillel was that, in a late addition to his book, The Theory of Science, Bolzano actually had been radically improving his concept of analyticity, thus creating some inconsistencies with the previous, uncorrected version. This allows us to equate the new Bolzanian definition of analytic with what was to be defined, a century later, as …Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Biology |