Francois Recanati

Résumé Dans cette communication, qui reprend en partie les idées exposées il y a trente ans dans un article de Critique, François Recanati entreprend de caractériser la philosophie analytique en discutant une demi-douzaine de traits supposés distinctifs de la discipline : l’usage de la logique, l’importance de la philosophie du langage considérée comme philosophie première, le refus de réduire la philosophie à l’histoire de la philosophie, l’idée que la philosophie est une discipline de second niveau, l’idée qu’un progrès est possible en philosophie, ou encore – trait fondamental selon l’auteur – le caractère intersubjectif de la pratique analytique, qui rappelle la pratique scientifique et constitue ce que François Recanati appelle « l’esprit scientifique » de la philosophie analytique. A chaque étape du parcours, l’auteur s’interroge sur les aspects de cette philosophie qui pouvaient susciter des réserves de la part de Jules Vuillemin, malgré son admiration globale pour ce courant.

Several authors have noted the proximity of Marty’s and Grice’s ideas. Both Marty and Grice distinguish natural meaning and the sort of meaning involved in human communication; and they both attempt to provide a characterization of human communication that does not essentially appeal to the conventional nature of its linguistic devices. In this contribution, I single out what I take to be a main difference between Marty and Grice. Marty views linguistic communication as continuous with natural meaning while Grice insists on their irreducible difference. I argue that Marty is better positioned than Grice to account for intermediate cases like Grice’s Salome example, and that this can be done without losing the benefits of Grice’s reflexive analysis of communicative intentions.

Because reference is not transparent, coreference is not transparent either: it is possible for the subject to refer to the same individual twice without knowing that the two acts of reference target the same individual. That happens whenever the subject associates two distinct yet coreferential files with two token singular terms. The subject may not know that the two files corefer, so her ascribing contradictory properties to the same object does not threaten her rationality. But if the subject deploys the same file twice, in association with both of the singular terms, she is bound to know that she is referring to the same entity twice.

In this paper, I argue that that polysemy is a two-sided phenomenon. It can be reduced neither to pragmatic modulation nor to ambiguity, for it is a mixture of both. The senses of a polysemous expression result from pragmatic modulation but they are stored in memory, as the senses of an ambiguous expression are. The difference with straightforward ambiguity is that the modulation relations between the senses are transparent to the language users: the senses are felt as related – they form a family of senses. In other words, whereas two homonymous expressions are different expressions, with the same phonological realization but distinct meanings, a polyseme is a single expression, i.e. a semantic as well as a phonological unit. It has one meaning, which should not be confused with the separate senses which it contributes in context. Different ways of thinking of that unitary meaning will be discussed, and consequences drawn for the debate between more or less radical versions of Contextualism.

This book argues against the traditional understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide and puts forward a radical alternative. Through half a dozen case studies, it shows that what an utterance says cannot be neatly separated from what the speaker means. In particular, the speaker's meaning endows words with senses that are tailored to the situation of utterance and depart from the conventional meanings carried by the words in isolation. This phenomenon of ‘pragmatic modulation’ must be taken into account in theorizing about semantic content, for it interacts with the grammar-driven process of semantic composition. Because of that interaction, the book argues, the content of a sentence always depends upon the context in which it is used. This claim defines Contextualism, a view which has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and of which the author of this book is one of the main proponents.

Francois Recanati presents the basic features of the *indexical model* of mental files, and defends it against several interrelated objections. According to this model, mental files refer to objects in a way that is analogous to that of indexicals in language: a file refers to an object in virtue of a contextual relation between them. For instance, perception and attention provide the basis for demonstrative files. Several objections, some of them from David Papineau, concern the possibility of files to preserve and add information about objects across contexts. How is it possible to think about the same object when the subject no longer is in the original context? How is it possible to think of a perceived object as already known? Can this be done without an explicit identity judgment? Recanati answers these questions by invoking mental files of non-basic kinds and by describing the cognitive dynamics in which they take part.

It has often been observed that the meaning of a word may be affected by the other words which occur in the same sentence. How are we to account for this phenomenon of 'semantic flexibility'? It is argued that semantic flexibility reduces to context-sensitivity and does not raise unsurmountable problems for standard compositional accounts. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to assume too simple a view of context-sensitivity. Two basic forms of context-sensitivity are distinguished in the paper. The second form — sense modulation — shows that, in a sense, there is more in the meaning of the whole than can be derived from the meanings of the parts.