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.

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.

It is often claimed that, because of semantic underdetermination, one can determine the content of an utterance only by appealing to pragmatic considerations concerning what the speaker means, what his intentions are. This supports ‘inferentialism' : the view that, in contrast to perceptual content, communicational content is accessed indirectly, via an inference. As against this view, I argue that primary pragmatic processes (the pragmatic processes that are involved in the determination of truth-conditional content) need not involve an inference from premisses concerning what the speaker can possibly intend by his utterance. Indeed, they need not involve any inference at all : communication, I argue, is as direct as perception.

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.

In a series of papers, Sperber provides the following analysis of the phenomenon of ill-understood belief (or 'quasi-belief', as I call it): (i) the quasi-believer has a validating meta-belief, to the effect that a certain representation is true; yet (ii) that representation does not give rise to a plain belief, because it is 'semi-propositional'. In this paper I discuss several aspects of this treatment. In particular, I deny that the representation accepted by the quasi-believer is semantically indeterminate, and I reject Sperber's claim that quasi-belief is a credal attitude distinct from plain belief.

The received view about meteorological predicates like ‘rain’ is that they carry an argument slot for a location which can be filled explicitly or implicitly. The view assumes that ‘rain’, in the absence of an explicit location, demands that the context provide a specific location. In an earlier article in this journal, I provided a counter-example, viz. a context in which ‘it is raining’ receives a location-indefinite interpretation. On the basis of that example, I argued that when there is tacit references to a location, it takes place for pragmatic reasons and casts no light on the semantics of meteorological predicates. Since then, several authors have reanalysed the counter-example, so as to make it compatible with the standard view. I discuss those attempts and argue that my account is superior.