Joëlle Proust

The abilities to attribute an action to its proper agent and to understand its meaning when it is produced by someone else are basic aspects of human social communication. Several psychiatric syndromes, such as schizophrenia, seem to lead to a dysfunction of the awareness of one’s own action as well as of recognition of actions performed by other. Such syndromes offer a framework for studying the determinants of agency, the ability to correctly attribute actions to their veridical source. Thirty normal subjects and 30 schizophrenic patients with and without hallucinations and/or delusional experiences were required to execute simple finger and wrist movements, without direct visual control of their hand. The image of either their own hand or an alien hand executing the same or a different movement was presented on a TV-screen in real time. The task for the subjects was to discriminate whether the hand presented on the screen was their own or not. Hallucinating and deluded schizophrenic patients were more impaired in discriminating their own hand from the alien one than the non-hallucinating ones, and tended to misattribute the alien hand to themselves. Results are discussed according to a model of action control. A tentative description of the mechanisms leading to action consciousness is proposed.

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.

This book deals with the experience of externality, i.e. an experience, common in schizophrenia, present both in verbal hallucination and in thought insertion. The view defended is that thought insertion is a case of failed agency, experienced by the agent at the personal level as an intelligible thought with which she cannot identify. Such a case in which sense of agency and sense of subjectivity come apart reveals the existence of two dimensions in self-consciousness. Several difficulties of the solution offered are discussed, in connection with the causal-explanatory role of the phenomenological features of the experience and with the view that thinking is a variety of acting.

The project of understanding rationality in non-human animals faces a number of conceptual and methodological difficulties. The present chapter defends the view that it is counterproductive to rely on the human folk psychological idiom in animal cognition studies. Instead, it approaches the subject on the basis of dynamic- evolutionary considerations. Concepts from control theory can be used to frame the problem in the most general terms. The specific selective pressures exerted on agents endowed with information-processing capacities are analysed. It is hypothesized that metacognition offers an evolutionary stable response to the various demands of the internal and external flows of information in a competitive environment. Metacognition provides a form of process-reflexivity that can, but does not have to be redeployed through metarepresentations. Finally the claim that rationality so conceived involves normativity is discussed.

Granted that a given species is able to entertain beliefs and desires, i.e. to have (epistemic and motivational) internal states with semantically evaluable contents, one can raise the question of whether the species under investigation is, in addition, able to represent properties and events that are not only perceptual or physical, but mental, and use the latter to guide their actions, not only as reliable cues for achieving some output, but as mental cues (that is: whether it can 'read minds'). The main aim of this article is to suggest that mindreading depends on two prior capacities : exercising simulation, as when one actively disengages from the present environment to imagine a counterfactual situation, and exploiting simulation, which implies that an imaginary situation is relocated within the real world. It is claimed that although apes have the first capacity, they don't have the second one, and therefore do not have access to mental attribution

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

This article is a summary of two chapters of a book published in French in 1997, entitled Comment L'esprit vient aux Bêtes, Paris, Gallimard. The core idea is that the crucial distinction between internal and external states, often used uncritically by theorists of intentionality, needs to be made on a non-circular basis. The proposal is that objectivity - the capacity to reidentify individuals as the same across places and times depends on the capacity to extract spatial crossmodal invariants, which in turn presupposes a capacity to (re)calibrate perceptual inputs across modalities in a principled way