Joëlle Proust

Le déterminisme implique que le libre arbitre n’existe pas, que nous ne pouvons pas faire autrement ; réciproquement, avoir la possibilité de faire autrement implique que le déterminisme ne s’applique pas à l’instant, s’il existe, où on l’exerce. Cependant, la question de la responsabilité rend difficile d’accepter que les agents ne puissent pas faire autrement et motive fortement à rendre compatibles déterminisme et libre arbitre ou à soutenir, dans une veine « incompatibiliste », que le cerveau humain n’est pas soumis à la loi du déterminisme. Le libertarianisme, c’est-à-dire l’idée que, chez l’agent humain, il existe des exceptions au déterminisme causal lors de l’activité cérébrale, n’est pas défendable à la lumière des découvertes récentes sur la cognition humaine. Selon le compatibilisme, un agent n’ayant pas la possibilité de faire autrement jouit encore de son Libre Arbitre. La théorie de Harry Frankfurt d’une volonté à plusieurs niveaux est étudiée de manière critique. On présente la preuve neuroscientifique d’un modèle de volonté en cascade, dans l’esprit de Frankfurt. Ce modèle permet l’émergence d’une forme de comptabilisme dans lequel l’agent peut plus ou moins contrôler ce qu’elle fait, dépendre plus ou moins de son environnement et dispose donc plus ou moins de son libre arbitre

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 logical truth by W. V. Quine. Bar-Hillel’s interpretation has been uncritically accepted by commentators, although the historical issue has been rightly challenged by J. Berg. What I want to show is that, in spite of a surface analogy between Bolzano’s phrasing of the definition of ‘logical analytic’ and Quine’s definition, certain considerations should lead us to call that parallel into question. Attractive as it may be for a Quinian, such a view of Bolzano’s analytic can be shown as incompatible with the leading ideas of his philosophy of logic. Furthermore, there is enough evidence in other sections of the Theory of Science to show that Bolzano’s criterion of analyticity is grounded on purely semantical properties and is part of a general account of logical properties in terms of the mapping of propositions to corresponding models.

Dans la psychose, les données cliniques montrent que dès l'apparition des premiers troubles aigus, une difficulté caractéristique se manifeste au niveau de l'attribution de la responsabilité causale des actions. Les patients se sentent poussés à agir par les autres tout en ayant aussi le sentiment de contrôler l'action d'autrui. Cette difficulté va souvent de pair chez les schizophrènes avec une modification du sentiment d'identité personnelle. Parmi les symptômes de l'autisme, on trouve des difficultés de contrôle de l'action, une réduction des centres d'intérêts, des stéréotypies comportementales et une difficulté à comprendre les événements d'ordre mental. Des résultats expérimentaux récents permettent d'orienter la réflexion théorique sur l'origine fonctionnelle commune de ces perturbations. Ils indiquent l'importance du suivi de l'action dans l'acquisition par l'enfant d'une " théorie de l'esprit ", c'est-à-dire des connaissances nécessaires à l'interprétation de ses propres états mentaux et de ceux d'autrui. Dans le cas de l'adulte, un mauvais suivi de l'action pourrait porter atteinte à la capacité de reconnaître ses propres intentions d'agir, et modifier ainsi le sens de sa propre identité. Subjectivité et conscience d'agir rassemble des travaux de clinique psychiatrique (Henri Grivois), de psychologie du développement (James Russell), de neuroscience cognitive (Marc Jeannerod, Pierre Fourneret) et de philosophie de l'esprit (John Campbell, Pascal Engel, Elisabeth Pacherie, Joëlle Proust). Le point commun est d'élucider le rôle qui revient aux fonctions exécutives dans la compréhension de soi-même et d'autrui. L'ouvrage s'adresse aux étudiants, aux enseignants et aux chercheurs en psychologie, en neuroscience et en philosophie, mais aussi aux psychiatres et aux cliniciens, ainsi qu'à tous ceux qui s'intéressent aux progrès de la psychopathologie cognitive.

In his interesting paper, Duca argues that even though people don't apply a logical rule of inference – contraposition- when they try to solve the Wason task, they may be using another kind of formal strategy in terms of probabilistic relations between the antecedent and the consequent. It is suggested that there are two ways of intepreting this task – one logical and apriori, the other hypothetical and data driven. Taking a probabilistic interpretation of the conditional rule for subjects' card selections in the Wason task seems much more justified in this second reading. If this is true, new questions arise: how does a subject recognize which method is contextually appropriate, and what makes a solution contextually rational?

Metacognitive abilities are considered as a hallmark of advanced human cognition. Existing empirical studies have exclusively focused on populations from Western and industrialized societies. Little is known about young children’s metacognitive abilities in other societal and cultural contexts. Here we tested 4-year-old Yucatec Mayan by adopting a metacognitive task in which children’s explicit assessment of their own knowledge states about the hidden content of a container and their informing judgments were assessed. Similar to previous studies, we found that Yucatec Mayan children overestimated their knowledge states in the explicit metacognitive task. However, in contrast with studies on Western children, we did not find the facilitating effect of the implicit informing task over the explicit task. These findings suggest that the early development of metacognition combines universal and culture-sensitive features.

This chapter examines whether, and in what sense, one can speak of agentive mental events. An adequate characterization of mental acts should respond to three main worries. First, mental acts cannot have pre-specified goal contents. For example, one cannot prespecify the content of a judgment or of a deliberation. Second, mental acts seem to depend crucially on receptive attitudes. Third, it does not seem that intentions play any role in mental actions. Given these three constraints, mental and bodily actions appear to have a significantly different structure. A careful analysis of the role of normative requirements, distinguishing them from instrumental reasons, allows the distinction between mental and bodily forms of action to be clarified. Two kinds of motives must be present for a mental act to develop. The first kind is instrumental: a mental act is performed because of some basic informational need, such as the need to "remember the name of that play". The second kind is normative: given the specific type of mental action performed, there is a specific epistemic norm relevant to that act. These two motives actually correspond to different phases of a single mental act. The first motivates the mental act, i.e. makes salient the corresponding goal. The second offers an evaluation of the feasibility of the act, on the basis of its constitutive normative requirement. Conceived in this way, a characterization of mental acts avoids the three difficulties mentioned above. The possibility of pre-specifying the outcome of epistemic mental acts is blocked by the fact that such acts are constituted by strict normative requirements. That mental acts include receptive features is shown to be a necessary architectural constraint for mental agents to be sensitive to epistemic requirements. Finally, the phenomenology of intending is shown to be absent in most mental acts; the motivational structure of mental acts is, rather, associated with error- signals and self-directed doubtings. Mental acts need to be recognized as a natural kind of action meant to normatively control and enhance cognitive efficiency according to current processing needs