Daniel Laurier

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.

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.

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.