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13How Narrow is Narrow Content?Dialectica 48 (3-4): 209-229. 1994.SummaryIn this paper I discuss two influential views in the philosophy of mind: the two‐component picture draws a distinction between ‘narrow content’ and ‘broad content’, while radical externalism denies that there is such a thing as narrow content. I argue that ‘narrow content’ is ambiguous, and that the two views can be reconciled. Instead of considering that there is only one question and three possible answers corresponding to Cartesian internalism, the two‐component picture, and radical ex…Read more
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134Millikan’s Theory of Signs (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (3). 2007.Review of Millikan's book Varieties of Meaning (MIT Press/Bradford Books, 2004).
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57Réponse a mes critiquesPhilosophiques 33 (1): 275-288. 2006.Réponse à trois études critiques de mon livre Literal Meaning à paraître dans la revue Philosophiques (Montréal).
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163Force cancellationSynthese 196 (4): 1403-1424. 2019.Peter Hanks and Scott Soames both defend pragmatic solutions to the problem of the unity of the proposition. According to them, what ties together Tim and baldness in the singular proposition expressed by ‘Tim is bald’ is an act of the speaker : the act of predicating baldness of Tim. But Soames construes that act as force neutral and noncommittal while, for Hanks, it is inherently assertive and committal. Hanks answers the Frege–Geach challenge by arguing that, in complex sentences, the force i…Read more
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16The limits of expressibilityIn Barry Smith (ed.), John Searle, Cambridge University Press. pp. 189-213. 2002.
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49Local pragmatics: reply to Mandy SimonsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (5): 493-508. 2017.In response to Mandy Simons’ defence of a classical Gricean approach to pragmatic enrichment in terms of conversational implicature, I emphasize the following contrast. Conversational implicatures are generated by a global inference which uses as a premise the fact that the speaker has said that p, but only the triggering inference is global in cases of pragmatic enrichment. What generates the correct interpretation is a process of reconstrual, which locally maps the literal meaning of a constit…Read more
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Contextualism and CompositionalityIn Luisa Mora-Millan (ed.), Cognicion & Lenguaje, . pp. 201-217. 2008.
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Primary Pragmatic ProcessesIn Asa Kasher (ed.), Pragmatics: Critical Concepts, Routledge. pp. 512-531. 1998.
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394De re and De seDialectica 63 (3): 249-269. 2009.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 misidentificati…Read more
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115Singular Thought: In Defense of AcquaintanceIn Robin Jeshion (ed.), New Essays on Singular Thought, Oxford University Press. pp. 141. 2009.This paper is about the Descriptivism/Singularism debate, which has loomed large in 20-century philosophy of language and mind. My aim is to defend Singularism by showing, first, that it is a better and more promising view than even the most sophisticated versions of Descriptivism, and second, that the recent objections to Singularism (based on a dismissal of the acquaintance constraint on singular thought) miss their target.
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712Quasi-Singular Propositions: The Semantics of Belief ReportsAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 69 (1). 1995.
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10What is said and the Semantics/Pragmatics DistinctionIn Claudia Bianchi (ed.), The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction, Csli Stanford. pp. 45-64. 2002.A critique of pragmatic Minimalism.
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3D'un contexte a l'autreCahiers Chronos 20 1-14. 2008.On distingue différents types de "contextes" à l'oeuvre dans l'interprétation des expressions indexicales, de façon à rendre compte du style indirect libre et de phénomènes apparentés.
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7Response to Predelli's contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop
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11Philosophie du langage (et de l’esprit)Editions Gallimard. 2008.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, signi…Read more
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17It 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 p…Read more
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69Reply to Romero and SoriaTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 32 (2): 175-178. 2013.Response to Romero's and Soria's paper in the Symposium on *Truth-Conditional Pragmatics* (OUP 2010).
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111Open quotation revisitedPhilosophical Perspectives 22 (1): 443-471. 2008.This paper — a sequel to my 'Open Quotation' (Mind 2001) — is my reaction to the articles discussing open quotation in the special issue of the Belgian Journal of Linguistics edited by P. De Brabanter in 2005
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8I 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 o…Read more
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35Truth-conditional pragmatics: an overviewIn Richmond Thomason, Paolo Bouquet & Luciano Serafini (eds.), Perspectives on Context, Csli Stanford. pp. 171-188. 2008.
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242Mental Files: Replies to my CriticsDisputatio 5 (36): 207-242. 2013.My responses to seven critical reviews of my book *Mental Files* published in a special issue of the journal Disputatio, edited by F. Salis. The reviewers are: Keith Hall, David Papineau, Annalisa Coliva and Delia Belleri, Peter Pagin, Thea Goodsell, Krista Lawlor and Manuel Garcia-Carpintero.
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96Replies to the papers in the issue "Recanati on Mental Files"Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (4): 408-437. 2015.
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60Empty Singular Terms in the Mental-File FrameworkIn Manuel García-Carpintero & Genoveva Martí (eds.), Empty Representations: Reference and Non-Existence, Oxford University Press. pp. 162-185. 2014.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 subjec…Read more