Daniel Laurier

In section 1, I explain why a specifically Dummettian conception of realism will be relevant only in a restricted range of cases. In section 2, I suggest that Crispin Wright could be read as holding that the truth of certain judgements depends on our capacity to know it (if and) only if their being true consists in their being superassertible. In section 3, I point out that insisting on knowability, as both Dummett and Wright do, prevents one from seeing that their are other legitimate forms of realism. I argue against the claim attributed to Wright in section 2, which leads me to suggest that it is a mistake to construe the realism debates as being essentially concerned with the nature of truth.

ABSTRACT: I clarify in what sense one might want to claim that thought or language are public. I distinguish among four forms that each of these claims might take, and two general ways of establishing them that might be contemplated. The first infers the public character of thought from the public character of language, and the second infers the latter from the former. I show that neither of these stategies seems to be able to dispense with the claim that thought and language are interdependent, and that the second strategy raises more difficulties than the first. I then examine the reasoning by which Davidson means to establish that thought depends on language. I claim that this reasoning is not conclusive, and that it can be adapted in such a way as to establish aversion of the thesis that thought is public which does not presuppose that language is public, and aversion of the thesis that language is public which does not imply that thought depends on language. I conclude with the suggestion that despite appearances to the contrary Davidson’s doctrine is defensible only if it implies at least the conceivability of intentional systems that would lack language altogether.

RésuméLe sens intentionnel ?une énonciation comprend selon Grice un acte illocutoire principal et des actes illocutoires secondaires, qui peuvent être soit des implicatures conventionnelles soit des implkatures non‐conventionnelles. Je montre que cette analyse, sous ľnterprétation visée par Grice, est défectueuse en ceci que i) elle exclut que ľacte illocutoire principal puisse être non littéral, ii) elle ne rend pas compte de ce que les implicatures conventionnelles sont annulables et iii) elle confond sous ľappellation ?implicature non conventionnelle deux types de phénomènes qui doivent être distingués. Je suis ainsi amenéà proposer un nouveau découpage du sens intentionnel qui paraît mieux rendre compte de la diversité des effets de sens possibles

This paper asks whether Brandom (1994) 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

Depuis 1967, Donald Davidson defend l'idée qu'une théorie de la signification pour une langue naturelle doit prendre la forme d'une théorie tarskienne de la vérité. Je me propose ici d'exposer les grandes lignes de l a conception davidsonienne de la sémantique des langues naturelles et de chercher à préciser en quel sens une theorie tarskienne de la vérité pour une langue L constitue, selon Davidson, une théorié de la signification pour L. Je ferai pour cela abstraction des obstacles qu'il pourrait y avoir à la réalisation du programme de Davidson.

ABSTRACT: I offer a refutation of the standard argument according to which we have no doxastic obligation because we do not have the kind of voluntary control over our beliefs required for having obligations. I then propose an interpretation of the distinction between epistemic and practical reasons for belief which can be generalised to other attitudes such as intention, and seems to imply that mental acts such as judgements and decisions never count as intentional actions, and that these two sorts of reasons are incommensurable

Having suggested that a salient feature of philosophical naturalism is to deny that there are non‐natural norms, I make a distinction between a moderate naturalism, which admits the existence of natural norms , and a radical naturalism which denies it . On the assumption that intentional facts are irreducibly normative, their existence would thus seem to raise a problem for moderate epistemological naturalism. I argue that no non‐trivial naturalistic explanation of conceptual intentionality is to be possible unless it is denied that norms of rationality are constitutive of intentional content. It follows that the only form of intentional naturalism that is not obviously untenable has to be radical. Other aspects of Quine's doctrine suggest that the introduction of epistemic norms into our “system of the world” is either dubiously coherent, or “merely programmatic”

The question to be discussed is whether the distinction between the conceptual and the nonconceptual is best understood as pertaining primarily to intentional contents or to intentional states or attitudes. Some authors have suggested that it must be understood in the second way, in order to make the claim that experiences are nonconceptual compatible with the idea that one can also believe what one experiences. I argue that there is no need to do so, and that a conceptual content can be understood as being simply one which is composed of concepts, without compromising this intuitive view of the relation between beliefs and experiences.

Je soutiens qu'il y a deux façons d'individuer les états intentionnels de créatures qui sont dépourvues de toute compétence linguistique, à savoir par leur rôle propositionnel ou par leurs conditions de vérité, mais que cette distinction ne vaut que pour les états intentionnels singuliers. L'examine ensuite différentes façons de spécifier, tout en restant dans le cadre d'une conception représentationnaliste de l'intentionnalité, les conditions de vérité des attributions d'états intentionnels privés du langage ordinaire selon le mode d'individuation considéré. Il s'avère qu'une attribution d'état intentionnel singulier ne peut identifier simultanément le rôle propositionnel et les conditions de vérité des états intentionnels attribués, et que la nécessité d'invoquer des états intentionnels de se pour expliquer les comportements menace de remettre en question la thèse représentationnaliste.I claim that there are two ways of individuating the intentional states of creatures without any kind of linguistic competence, namely, either by their propositional role or by their truth-conditions, but that this distinction holds only for singular intentional states. I then consider several ways of specifying, within the limits of a representational theory of intentionality, the truth-conditions of statements attributing private intentional states according to the mode of individuation chosen. It turns out that such statements cannot simultaneously identify both the propositional role and the truth-conditions of the intentional states attributed, and that the need to invoke de se intentional states in order to explain behavior seems to put the representational theory into difficulty

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.