Daniel Laurier

Donald Davidson (1917-2003) est considéré comme l'un des plus grands philosophes américains du XXe siècle. Au cœur de sa doctrine se trouve une conception profondément originale de la nature du langage et de ses relations avec la pensée, qui a eu des répercussions dans tous les domaines de la philosophie et de nombreux secteurs des sciences humaines. Daniel Laurier offre ici une analyse et une évaluation des principales positions du philosophe américain sur la question de l'interprétation du langage et de la pensée, ouvrant celles-ci à une réflexion plus vaste sur des notions centrales en philosophie du langage et de l'esprit: le holisme, la nature des règles, celle de la rationalité, le caractère social du langage, enfin la possibilité d'une conception naturaliste de l'esprit. Ce livre captivera les philosophes du langage et de l'esprit et ceux qui souhaitent approfondir leur compréhension de la philosophie de Davidson. Il nourrira la réflexion de tous ceux qui se questionnent sur les fondements des sciences humaines.

I propose what seems a plausible interpretation of the suggestion that the fact that someone has or lacks the capacity to make inferences of certain kinds should be taken as evidence that the contents of the states involved in these inferences are conceptual/nonconceptual. I then argue that there is no obvious way in which this line of thought could be exploited to help draw the line separating conceptual from nonconceptual contents. This will lead me to clarify in what sense perceptual experiences can be taken as providing reasons for beliefs.

This paper asks whether Brandom has provided a sufficiently clear account of the basic normative concepts of commitment and entitlement, on which his normative inferentialism seems to rest, and of how they contribute to explain the inferential articulation of conceptual contents. I show that Brandom's claim that these concepts are analogous to the concepts of obligation and permission cannot be right, and argue that the normative character of the concept of commitment is dubious. This leads me to replace Brandom's conception of inferential relations as relations between deontic statuses with one according to which they are to be seen as relations between entitlements and acknowledgements of commitments.

In this paper, I will (i) introduce a distinction between a weaker and a stronger sense in which something (be it a proposition, a state of affairs, a concept or a property) may be said to be normative, (ii) distinguish between conceptual and metaphysical versions of what is known as “individual” supervenience (iii) explain why we should concentrate on the conceptual supervenience claims, (iv) discuss the plausibility of various conceptual supervenience claims concerning some specific kinds of normative concepts, namely, concepts that can be constructed out of the concept of a (normative) reason and (v) argue that reasons-concepts of a certain kind conceptually supervene on mental ones and that this is compatible with a form a realism with respect to reasons-propositions.

The aim of this article is to show that the prospects for intentional irreal-ism are much brighter than it is generally thought. In the first section, I provide a general characterization of some of the various forms that the realism/irrealism debates might take. In the second, I ask whether there is any defensible form of realism about intentional states. I show that most candidates are nearly trivially false, and that the only form of in-tentional realism which is not, is a restricted one which is prima facie no more plausible than the corresponding form of irrealism. In the third and last section, I defend my interpretation of what intentional irrealism amounts to against some possible misunderstandings, give some reasons why it should be taken seriously and argue that it could plausibly be at-tributed to Davidson.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an account of what an agent's being rational to do or think something might amount to, which doesn't reduce to saying that it consists in this agent's doing or thinking something that is rational for him. In the first section, I call attention to the fact that such a distinction between agent rationality and action or belief rationality is widely admitted, I reject the idea that it could be interpreted as a distinction between the rationality of tokens and the rationality of types, and I suggest one natural way in which a notion of objective agent rationality could be informally characterized in terms of action or belief rationality. But this first, rough, characterization depends on further uses of the notion of rationality which I try to make sense of in the second section, at least in a preliminary way. The burden of this second section is then to determine whether the intuition behind the informal proposal introduced in the first can be substantiated, i.e., whether a substantial and coherent notion of agent rationality can be worked out, and at what cost. In the concluding section, I try to "deflate" some of the worries that could be raised by the account of agent rationality I end up with.

The theory of radical interpretation, as based on the principle of charity, sets a priori limits on the possibility that different agents have different beliefs, and on the possibility that one has false beliefs. David Papineau put forward a teleological approach to intentional states which, he claims, doesn’t have these unacceptable consequences. Having distinguished half a dozen of different forms that the problem of radical interpretation might take, I show that Papineau’s approach is not radically different from those based on the principle of charity. Finally, I suggest that the consequences of the principle of charity with respect to the problems of error and divergence are in fact both unavoidable and acceptable.

In a recent article (2011), Steglich-Petersen claims to be able to provide a teleological account of the nature of epistemic reasons which (i) avoids the standard objections to this kind of approach and (ii) is compatible with the evidentialist claim that epistemic reasons always trump non-epistemic reasons (assuming there are such reasons). I argue that his proposal is unable to do justice to the idea that epistemic reasons are constituted by the evidence, and more generally, that it is incoherent to hold at once that epistemic reasons are instrumental, that believing the true and not believing the false is what has epistemic value and that epistemic reasons are evidential in nature

Dans quelle mesure les caractéristiques fondamentales des êtres humains, telles que leur capacité de penser, de raisonner, de vouloir et de communiquer, peuvent-elles être complètement expliquées à l'aide des seules ressources des sciences naturelles? En s'appuyant sur l'analyse rigoureuse de quelques-uns des travaux les plus significatifs de la philosophie de l'esprit, en particulier ceux de R. Millikan, F. Dretske, W. Quine et D. Davidson, Daniel Laurier révèle les limites d'un tel programme de naturalisation de l'esprit et soutient qu'il n'y a pas de position stable entre le naturalisme radical et ce qu'il faut bien appeler le surnaturalisme. Ce livre s'adresse principalement aux philosophes professionnels et aux chercheurs et étudiants en sciences humaines qui s'intéressent à l'épistémologie et aux fondements philosophiques des sciences cognitives.

I try to clarify the ways in which one would seek to hold that language and/or thought are public. For each of these theses, I distinguish four forms in which they can be framed, and two ways of establishing them. The first will try to make the publicity of thought follow from that of language; the second will try to make the publicity of language follow from that of thought. I show that none of these strategies can do without the thesis that language and thought are interdependent, and that even while admitting this thesis, the second strategy presents more difficulties than the first.

The view that in radical interpretation, the interpreter should aim at optimizing the rationality of agents is defended. A distinction and a parallel is drawn between linguistic interpretation and psychological interpretation. Both can be taken to be governed, in part, and in somewhat different ways, by a principle of rationality. Such approaches have been criticised on the ground that they make it impossible for a speaker or an agent to have wildly irrational or false beliefs. It is argued that the so-called principle of simulation isn't a serious altemative, and that the counter-intuitiveness of the optimization-based approaches has been exaggerated.

The aim of this article is to show that the prospects for intentional irrealism are much brighter than it is generally thought. In the first section, I provide a general haracterization of some of the various forms that the realism/irrealism debates might take. In the second, I ask whether there is any defensible form of realism about intentional states. I show that most candidates are nearly trivially false, and that the only form of intentional realism which is not, is a restricted one which is prima facie no more plausible than the corresponding form of irrealism. In the third and last section, I defend my interpretation of what intentional irrealism amounts to against some possible misunderstandings, give some reasons why it should be taken seriously and argue that it could plausibly be attributed to Davidson

Une théorie davidsonienne de la signification pour une langue L prend la forme d'une theorie tarskienne de la véeritée-dans-L. Une telle théeorie sera absolument radicale s'il est possible d'éetablir qu'elle est tarskienne, c'est-à-dire conforme à la convention T de Tarski, en n'utilisant que des donnéees empiriques dont la description ne fait intervenir aucun concept linguistique, tandis qu'elle sera relativement radicale s'il est possible d'éetablir qu'elle est tarskienne en n'utilisant que des donnéees empiriques dont la description ne fait intervenir aucun concept linguistique propre à L.

Je défends la classification carnapienne des disciplines sémiotiques en montrant qu'elle permet de caractériser adéquatement la nature de la pragmatique. J'indique, en particulier, comment une notion de système pragmatique pourrait être développée par analogie avec celles de système syntaxique et de système sémantique.I defend Carnap's classification of semiotic disciplines by showing that it leads to an adequate characterization of the nature of pragmatics. In particular, I indicate how a notion of pregmatic system could be constructed on the analogy with those of syntactic system and semantic system

Brandom's book Making It Explicit defends Davidson's claim that conceptual thought can arise only on the background of a practice of mutual interpretation, without endorsing the further view that one can be a thinker only if one has the concept of a concept. This involves giving an account of conceptual content in terms of what Brandom calls practical deontic attitudes. In this paper, I make a plea for the conclusion that these practical attitudes are best seen as intentional, but non-conceptually contentful. In particular, I argue that the hypothesis that Brandom's practical deontic attitudes are non-conceptually contentful wouldn't conflict with his view that non-conceptual intentionality is merely derivative. I then explore some of the implications which this hypothesis might have with respect to various forms of «intentional ascent»