Francois Recanati

For Perry and many authors, de se thoughts are a species of de re thought. In this paper, I argue that de se thoughts come in two varieties: explicit and implicit. While explicit de se thoughts can be construed as a variety of de re thought, implicit de se thoughts cannot: their content is thetic, while the content of de re thoughts is categoric. The notion of an implicit de se thought is claimed to play a central role in accounting for the phenomenon of immunity to error through misidentification. Lewis has attempted to unify de re and de se in the opposite direction: by reducing de re to de se . This, however, works only if we internalize the acquaintance relations. I criticize Lewis's internalization strategy on the grounds that it rests on Egocentrism (the view that every occurrent thought is ultimately about the thinker at the time of thinking). In the conclusion, I suggest another way of unifying de re and de se , by extending the implicit/explicit distinction to de re thoughts themselves.

Philosophie du langage et philosophie de l'esprit constituent désormais un tout indissociable. Les expressions linguistiques «signifient». Qu'est-ce que cela veut dire? François Recanati distingue trois réponses possibles. Selon la première, signifier c'est (pour une expression linguistique) être associée à des représentations mentales. Selon la deuxième, signifier c'est «faire référence» et renvoyer à quelque chose dans le monde – une réalité extralinguistique. Selon la troisième, enfin, signifier, c'est jouer un rôle distinctif dans cette activité sociale qu'est la parole. La première réponse renvoie aux représentations mentales. Mais qu'est-ce, pour une représentation mentale, que d'avoir un contenu? La vraie question, est-on tenté de penser, est plus générale : qu'est-ce que signifier ou avoir un contenu? Qu'est-ce qu'une représentation (linguistique ou mentale)? Les philosophes contemporains recherchent une théorie du contenu qui soit suffisamment générale pour s'appliquer à la pensée aussi bien qu'au langage. François Recanati nous introduit à leurs efforts, et conclut en faveur de l'approche «pragmatique» inspirée de Wittgenstein. Ce qui fait que la pensée et le langage représentent le monde, c'est avant tout le fait que la pensée et le langage sont dans le monde, qu'ils y ont leur place et y jouent leur rôle.

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.

I distinguish, and discuss the relations between, five types of context-shift involving indexicals. For 'intentional' indexicals - indexicals whose value depends upon the speaker's intention - we can shift the context more or less 'at will', by manifesting one's intention to do so. For other indexicals we can shift the context through pretense. Following a number of authors, I distinguish two types of context-shifting pretense, corresponding to two sets of linguistic phenomena. The fourth type of case is that of expressions which are not really indexical, but perspectival, and for which we do not need to appeal to the notion of context-shift in order to account for their shifty behaviour. The fifth category I introduce and discuss is that of 'shiftable indexicals'. Do we need it, given that we already have the other four categories? My answer is a qualified 'yes'.

Every statement represents a certain state of affairs as holding in a certain situation, which the statement concerns. The situation which a statement concerns is indicated by the context. It must be distinguished from whichever situation may be explicitly mentioned in the statement. In this framework, two cognitive processes are analysed: projection and reflection. Both involve two representations: one which concerns a situation s, and another one which explicitly mentions that situation. Through reflection we go from the representation concerning s to the representation mentioning s. Through projection we go from the representation mentioning s to the representation concerning s.

Mental files, in Recanati's framework, function as 'singular terms in the language of thought' ; they serve to think about objects in the world (and to store information about them). But they have a derived, metarepresentational function : they serve to represent how other subjects think about objects in the world. To account for the metarepresentational use of files, Recanati introduces the notion of an 'indexed file', i.e. a vicarious file that stands, in the subject's mind, for another subject's file about an object. Using that notion, he argues, one can provide an analysis of attitude ascriptions and the conniving use of empty singular terms.

Le sujet qui perçoit, ressent, se remémore, ou imagine a conscience de son activité mentale, et notamment du mode — perceptif, mnésique ou autre — de ses états. Le mode des états expérientiels va de pair avec une relation spécifique (variable selon le mode) du sujet à ce que l'état représente. Par exemple, le sujet qui se remémore se trouve (normalement) dans une certaine relation à la scène remémorée : il a perçu celle-ci dans le passé. La thèse principale de l'article est que le sujet conscient d'être dans un état donné s'auto-attribue implicitement cette relation avec ce que l'état représente. Cette auto-attribution implicite (immunisée aux erreurs d'identification) constitue la présence du sujet «comme sujet » dans le contenu de ses expériences, distincte de sa présence « comme objet » lorsqu'il fait lui-même partie de la scène représentée. [English abstract] The subject who perceives, feels, remembers or imagines is conscious of his or her experiential states and, in particular, of their ‘mode'. The mode is what enables us to classify experiential states into types such as perceptions, memories, etc., quite independent of the content of the state (what is perceived, remembered, etc.). It is argued that the mode M of an experience determines that (if all goes well) a certain relation RM holds between the subject of the experience and what the experience represents. For example, the subject who remembers a scene normally stands in a certain relation to the scene in question, that of having perceived it in the past. The article's main thesis is that the subject of an experiential state implicitly self-ascribes the relevant relation to what the state represents. This implicit self-ascription (which is immune to error through misidentification) corresponds to the presence of the subject « as subject » in the content of his or her experience.

In a recent paper (Linguistics and Philosophy 23, 4, June 2000), Jason Stanley argues that there are no `unarticulated constituents', contrary to what advocates of Truth-conditional pragmatics (TCP) have claimed. All truth-conditional effects of context can be traced to logical form, he says. In this paper I maintain that there are unarticulated constituents, and I defend TCP. Stanley's argument exploits the fact that the alleged unarticulated constituents can be `bound', that is, they can be made to vary with the values introduced by operators in the sentence. I show that Stanley's argument rests on a fallacy, and I provide alternative analyses of the data.