•  34
    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
  •  17
    Le Matérialisme au conditionnel
    Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 85 (1). 1980.
  •  654
    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.
  •  78
    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
  •  67
    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.
  •  56
    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
  •  59
    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
  •  66
    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
  •  19
    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
  •  83
    Simulation and Knowledge of Action (edited book)
    John Benjamins. 2002.
    CHAPTER Simulation theory and mental concepts Alvin I. Goldman Rutgers University. Folk psychology and the TT-ST debate The study of folk psychology, ...
  •  66
    Epistemic action, extended knowledge, and metacognition
    Philosophical Issues 24 (1): 364-392. 2014.
    How should one attribute epistemic credit to an agent, and hence, knowledge, when cognitive processes include an extensive use of human or mechanical enhancers, informational tools, and devices which allow one to complement or modify one's own cognitive system? The concept of integration of a cognitive system has been used to address this question. For true belief to be creditable to a person's ability, it is claimed, the relevant informational processes must be or become part of the cognitive c…Read more
  • Perception et intermodalité. Approches actuelles de la question de Molyneux
    Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 187 (3): 358-359. 1997.
  •  41
    Conversational metacognition
    In Ipke Wachsmuth, Manuela Lenzen & Günther Knoblich (eds.), Embodied Communication in Humans and Machines, Oxford University Press. pp. 329. 2008.
    This chapter aims to relate two fields of research that have been rarely – if ever – associated, namely embodied communication and metacognition. Exploring this relationship offers a new perspective for understanding the relationship between self-knowledge and mindreading. "Embodied communication" refers to the process of conveying information to one or several interlocutors through speech and associated bodily gestures, or through gestures only. It is prima facie plausible that embodied commun…Read more
  •  5
    On Indicative conditionals and Rationality in the Wason Task
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 15 (1). 2009.
    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…Read more
  •  89
    Thinking of oneself as the same
    Consciousness and Cognition 12 (4): 495-509. 2003.
    What is a person, and how can a person come to know that she is a person identical to herself over time ? The article defends the view that the sense of being oneself in this sense consists in the ability to consciously affect oneself : in the memory of having affected oneself, joint to the consciousness of being able to affect oneself again. In other words, being a self requires a capacity for metacognition (control and monitoring of one's own internal states). This view is compatible with the …Read more
  •  26
    Experience of agency in patients with schizophrenia involves an interesting dissociation; these patients demonstrate that one can have a thought or perform an action consciously without being conscious of thinking or acting as the motivated agent, author of that thought or of that action. This chapter examines several interesting accounts of this dissociation, and aims at showing how they can be generalized to thought insertion phenomena. It is argued that control theory allows such a generaliza…Read more
  •  180
    Metacognition
    Philosophy Compass 5 (11): 989-998. 2010.
    Given disagreement about the architecture of the mind, the nature of self‐knowledge, and its epistemology, the question of how to understand the function and the scope of metacognition – the control of one’s cognition – is still a matter of hot debate. A dominant view, the self‐ascriptive 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 mind. The main claims of this view are…Read more
  •  22
    Réponses à mes critiques
    Philosophiques 35 (1): 139-159. 2008.