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71First Person ThoughtIn Julien Dutant, Davide Fassio & Anne Meylan (eds.), Liber Amicorum Pascal Engel, University of Geneva. pp. 506-511. 2014.First person thoughts are the sort of thought one may express by using the first person ; they are also thoughts that are about the thinker of the thought. Neither characterization is ultimately satisfactory. A thought can be about the thinker of the thought by accident, without being a first person thought. The alternative characterization of first person thought in terms of first person sentences also fails, because it is circular : we need the notion of a first person thought to account for t…Read more
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62Transitive meanings for intransitive verbsIn Laurence Goldstein (ed.), Brevity, Oxford University Press. pp. 122-142. 2013.In their chapter, Bourmayan and Recanati discuss the intransitive use of 'eat' and cognate verbs which take (on such uses) an indefinite implicit argument. Sometimes, Recanati pointed out in early work, the implicit argument of intransitive 'eat' seems definite ; there are also seemingly anaphoric and bound uses. How to account for them ? Recanati's early account invoked free enrichment, but Marti's negation test provides counter-examples to that account. Bourmayan and Recanati offer a new, situ…Read more
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Cher Benoît, cher FrançoisIn Jean-Louis Aroui (ed.), Le sens et la mesure : de la pragmatique à la métrique (hommage à Benoît de Cornulier), Honore Champion. pp. 33-52. 2003.
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74De re and De seDialectica 63 (3): 249-269. 2009.For Perry and many authors, de se thoughts are a species of de re thought ; for Lewis, it is the other way round. To a large extent, the conflict between the two positions is merely apparent: it is due to insufficient appreciation of the crucial distinction between two types of de se thought. In view of this distinction, we can maintain both that de se thought is a special case of de re thought, and that de re thought is a special case of de se thought. Still, I argue, Lewis's position can be cr…Read more
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59‘That’-clauses as existential quantifiersAnalysis 64 (3): 229-235. 2004.Following Panaccio, 'John believes that p' is analysed as 'For some x such that x is true if and only if p, John believes x'. On this view the complement clause 'that p' acts as a restricted existential quantifier and it contributes a higher-order property.
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2La philosophie analytique est-elle dépassée? Note sur la philosophie "post-analytique"Philosophie 35 77-86. 1992.
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106The Alleged Priority of Literal InterpretationCognitive Science 19 (2): 207-232. 1995.In this paper I argue against a widely accepted model of utterance interpretation, namely the LS model, according to which the literal interpretation of an utterance (the proposition literally expressed by that utterance) must be computed before non-literal interpretations can be entertained. Alleged arguments in favor of this model are shown to be fallacious, counterexamples are provided, and alternative models are sketched.
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4Response to Pelletier's contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop
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6La conjecture de Ducrot, vingt ans aprèsIn Marion Carel (ed.), Les Facettes du dire : hommage à Oswald Ducrot, Kime. pp. 269-281. 2002.Réponse aux objections soulevées par Oswald Ducrot à l'encontre de mon approche "gricéenne" de la performativité.
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41Pragmatic EnrichmentIn Gillian Russell & Delia Graff Fara (eds.), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language, Routledge. pp. 67-78. 2011.It is commonly held that all truth-conditional effects of context result from a pragmatic process of value-assignment that is triggered (and made obligatory) by something in the sentence itself, namely a lexically context-sensitive expression (e.g. an indexical) or a free variable in logical form. Such a process has been dubbed ‘saturation'. It stands in contrast to so called ‘free' pragmatic processes, which are supposed to take place for purely pragmatic reasons — in order to make sense of wha…Read more
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5Response to Egré's contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop
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117Immunity to error through misidentification: What it is and where it comes fromIn Simon Prosser & François Recanati (eds.), Immunity to error through misidentification, Cambridge University Press. pp. 180--201. 2012.I argue that immunity to error through misidentification primarily characterizes thoughts that are 'implicitly' de se, as opposed to thoughts that involve an explicit self-identification. Thoughts that are implicitly de se involve no reference to the self at the level of content: what makes them de se is simply the fact that the content of the thought is evaluated with respect to the thinking subject. Or, to put it in familiar terms : the content of the thought is a property which the thinking s…Read more
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29PragmaticsIn Manuel García-Carpintero & Max Kölbel (eds.), The Continuum companion to the philosophy of language, Continuum International. pp. 620-633. 2012.An abridged and slightly updated version of "Pragmatics", in Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Routledge 620-633 (1998).
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119Contextualism: Some VarietiesIn Keith Allan & Kasia Jaszczolt (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press. pp. 135--149. 2012.A number of distinct (though related) issues are raised in the debate over Contextualism in the philosophy of language. My aim in this chapter for the Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics is to disentangle them, so as to get a clearer view of the positions available (where a 'position' consists of a particular take on each of the relevant issues simultaneously).
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Remarques sur les verbes parenthétiquesIn Pierre Attal & C. Muller (eds.), De la Syntaxe à la Pragmatiqu, . pp. 319-352. 1984.
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4Indexical Concepts and CompositionalityIn Manuel García-Carpintero & Josep Macià (eds.), Two-Dimensional Semantics, Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 249-257. 2006.In the first part of this paper I sketch a theory of indexical concepts within a broadly epistemic framework. In the second part I discuss and dismiss an argument due to Jerry Fodor, to the effect that any epistemic approach to concept individuation (including the theory of indexical concepts I will sketch) is doomed to failure.
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The Pragmatics of Performative UtterancesIn Asa Kasher (ed.), Pragmatics: Critical Concepts. Dawn and delineation. Vol. 1, Routledge. pp. 511-518. 1998.
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62Mental Files and IdentityIn Anne Reboul (ed.), Philosophical papers dedicated to Kevin Mulligan, . 2011.Mental files serve as individual or singular concepts. Like singular terms in the language, they refer, or are supposed to refer. What they refer to is not determined by properties which the subject takes the referent to have (i.e. by the information stored in the file), but through relations to various entities in the environment in which the file fulfills its function. Files are based on acquaintance relations, and the function of the file is to store whatever information is made available thr…Read more
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221Crazy minimalismMind and Language 21 (1). 2006.Review of Insensitive Semantics, by H. Cappelen and E. Lepore.