•  48
    À la défense du déontologisme doxastique
    Dialogue 48 (1): 37. 2009.
    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 s…Read more
  •  27
    Pangloss, L’Erreur et La Divergence
    Journal of Philosophical Research 19 345-372. 1994.
    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 rad…Read more
  •  1
    François Récanati, Les énoncés performatifs Reviewed by
    Philosophy in Review 2 (4): 187-190. 1982.
  •  66
    Names and beliefs: A puzzle lost
    Philosophical Quarterly 36 (142): 37-49. 1986.
  • Essais sur le langage et l'intentionnalité, coll. « Analytiques »
    Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 184 (4): 525-527. 1994.
  •  4
  • Le langage. Une approche philosophique
    Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 184 (4): 533-536. 1994.
  •  26
    Le paradoxe de Wittgenstein et le communautarisme
    Dialogue 39 (2): 263-. 2000.
    The solution to the paradox which Kripke attibutes to Wittgenstein is supposed to lead to the conclusion that there is a sense in which thought and language are essentially social phenomena. In the following, I argue that both the and the character of this solution can be questioned, though without having to agree with Davidson, according to whom the solution to this paradox does not depend on any notion of a common language
  • Qu'est-ce qui est non-conceptuel, l'etat ou son contenu?
    Facta Philosophica: Internazionale Zeitschrift für Gegenwartsphilosophie: International Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 6 77-9. 2004.
  •  188
    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 t…Read more
  •  41
    Essential Dependence and Realism
    Sorites 19 41-50. 2007.
    It has recently been suggested that realism about some subject matter is best construed as the claim that the facts pertaining to this subject matter are essentially independent from the mind, in a sense to be explained, and not as the admittedly weaker claim that they are modally independent from the mind. In this paper, I argue that this proposal is liable to trivialize the realist's position and is biased against his irrealist opponent
  •  74
    The Publicity of Thought and Language
    The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy 32 54-61. 1998.
    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 eve…Read more
  •  4
    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 d…Read more
  •  2
    Pangloss, L’Erreur et La Divergence
    Journal of Philosophical Research 19 345-372. 1994.
    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 rad…Read more
  • François Récanati, Les énoncés performatifs (review)
    Philosophy in Review 2 187-190. 1982.
  •  56
    Non-conceptually contentful attitudes in interpretation
    Sorites 13 (October): 6-22. 2001.
    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-conceptual…Read more
  •  21
    Les états intentionnels des créatures solitaires
    Philosophiques 14 (2): 229-359. 1987.
    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 pri…Read more
  •  7
    Le paradoxe de Wittgenstein et le communautarisme
    Dialogue 39 (2): 263-278. 2000.
    The “sceptical” solution to the paradox which Kripke attibutes to Wittgenstein is supposed to lead to the conclusion that there is a sense in which thought and language are essentially social phenomena. In the following, I argue that both the “sceptical” and the “communautarian” character of this solution can be questioned, though without having to agree with Davidson, according to whom the solution to this paradox does not depend on any notion of a common language.
  •  17
    Remarques sur la sémiotique
    Philosophiques 11 (1): 91-109. 1984.
    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 notio…Read more
  •  22
    Que sera sera
    Dialectica 54 (4). 2000.
    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 t…Read more