•  394
    A plea for mental acts
    Synthese 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
  •  374
    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
  • Action
    In Barry Smith (ed.), John Searle, Cambridge University Press. pp. 102--127. 2003.
  • » L'esprit des bêtes «
    Revue Internationale de Philosophie 46 418-434. 1992.
  •  34
    Replies to Langland‐Hassan, Nagel, and Smith
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (3): 736-755. 2014.
  •  29
    This 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.
  • Interpréter Diderot aujourd'hui, Colloque de Cerisy
    with E. de Fontenay
    Diderot Studies 23 204-206. 1988.
  •  134
    Does 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.
  •  20
    Précis de La nature de la volonté
    Philosophiques 35 (1): 109. 2008.
  •  17
    Le Matérialisme au conditionnel
    Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 85 (1). 1980.
  •  42
    The Evolution of Primate Communication and Metacommunication
    Mind 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
  •  685
    Exploring the informational sources of metaperception: The case of Change Blindness Blindness
    with Anna Loussouarn and Damien Gabriel
    Consciousness 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
  • Is there a sense of agency for thought?
    In Lucy O'Brien & Matthew Soteriou (eds.), Mental actions, Oxford University Press. 2009.
  •  87
    The norms of acceptance
    Philosophical 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
  •  72
    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.
  • Problèmes d'Histoire de la Philosophie: L'idée de topique comparative
    Société Française de Philosophie, Bulletin 82 (3): 73. 1988.
  •  61
    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
  •  66
    Bolzano’s Analytic Revisited
    The 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
  •  77
    Metacognition and mindreading: one or two functions?
    In Michael Beran, Johannes Brandl, Josef Perner & Joëlle Proust (eds.), The foundations of metacognition, Oxford University Press. pp. 234. 2012.
    Given disagreements about the architecture of the mind, the nature of self-knowledge, and its epistemology, the question of how to understand the function and scope of metacognition – the control of one's cognition - is still a matter of hot debate. A dominant view, the self-ascriptive view (or one-function view), has been that metacognition necessarily requires representing one's own mental states as mental states, and, therefore, necessarily involves an ability to read one's own mind. The sel…Read more
  •  21
    Response to Phil Gerrans
    Consciousness and Cognition 12 (4): 513-514. 2003.
    Phil Gerrans comments on Proust's paper entitled 'Thinking of oneself as the same' raise two points; one has to do with the value of sceptical arguments about self-knowledge, the other with what a self can know of him/herself. These two comments are discussed. It is shown first that metacognition operates on content as well as on vehicles, which leaves every replica with her own numerical identity. Second, the homuncular fallacy is discussed as part of a response to the second point