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128Indexical Thought: The Communication ProblemIn Manuel Garcia-Carpintero & Stehpan Torre (eds.), About Oneself, . pp. 141-178. 2015.What characterizes indexical thinking is the fact that the modes of presentation through which one thinks of objects are context-bound and perspectival. Such modes of presentation, I claim, are mental files presupposing that we stand in certain relations to the reference : the role of the file is to store information one can gain in virtue of standing in that relation to the object. This raises the communication problem, first raised by Frege : if indexical thoughts are context-bound and relatio…Read more
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19Meaning and Force: The Pragmatics of Performative UtterancesPhilosophical Review 100 (2): 297. 1991.
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29PragmaticsIn Manuel García-Carpintero & Max Kölbel (eds.), The Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Continuum International. pp. 620-633. 1998.An abridged and slightly updated version of "Pragmatics", in Edward Craig (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Routledge 620-633 (1998).
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1Deference and IndexicalityIn Stephen Kosslyn, Albert Galaburda & Yves Christen (eds.), Languages of the Brain, Harvard University Press. pp. 102-109. 2001.
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34Indexicality, Context, and PretenseIn Noel Burton-Roberts (ed.), Pragmatics, Palgrave. pp. 213-229. 2005.In this paper, I argue that the notion of ‘context' that has to be used in the study of indexicals is far from univocal. A first distinction has to be made between the real context of speech and the context in which the speech act is supposed to take place — only the latter notion being relevant when it comes to determining the semantic values of indexicals. Second, we need to draw a distinction between the context of the locutionary act and the context of the illocutionary act: contrary to a st…Read more
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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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49This response was written for the Vth Online Consciousness Conference.
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The Paradox of the First PersonIn Daniel Andler, Parthasarati Banerjee, Mahasweta Chaudhury & Oliver Guillaume (eds.), Facets of Rationality, Sage. pp. 300-311. 1995.
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71The dynamics of situationsEuropean Review of Philosophy 2 41-75. 1997.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. Throu…Read more
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Le potentiel illocutionnaire des phrases déclarativesCahiers de Linguistique Française 2 23-39. 1981.
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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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78Replies 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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50De 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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81Varieties of SimulationIn Jerome Dokic & Joelle Proust (eds.), Simulation and Knowledge of Action, John Benjamins. pp. 151-171. 2002.
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84The 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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Processing models for non-literal discourseIn Roberto Casati, Barry Smith & Graham Whiteca (eds.), Philosophy and the Cognitive Sciences, Proceedings of the 16th International Wittgenstein Symposium, . pp. 277-290. 1994.
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50Reply to GaukerTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 32 (2): 81-84. 2013.Response to Gauker's paper in the Symposium on *Truth-Conditional Pragmatics* (OUP 2010).
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27Literalism and Contextualism: Some VarietiesIn Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning, and Truth, Clarendon Press. pp. 171--196. 2003.Both Literalism and Contextualism come in many varieties. There are radical, and less radical, versions of both Literalism and Contextualism. Some intermediate positions are mixtures of Literalism and Contextualism. In this paper I describe several literalist positions, several contextualist positions, and a couple of intermediate positions. My aim is to convince the reader that the Literalism/Contextualism controversy is far from being settled. In the first section, I look at the historical dev…Read more
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276Perceptual concepts: in defence of the indexical modelSynthese 190 (10): 1841-1855. 2013.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 …Read more
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104Reply to DevittTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 32 (2): 103-107. 2013.Response to Devitt's paper in the symposium on *Truth-Conditional Pragmatics* (OUP 2010).
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5The 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, I have provided a counter-example to that claim, viz. a context in which ‘it is raining' receives a location-indefinite interpretation. On the basis of that example, I have argued that when ther…Read more
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26On Kripke on DonnellanIn Herman Parret, Marina Sbisa & Jef Verschueren (eds.), Possibilities and Limitations of Pragmatics, John Benjamins. pp. 593-660. 1981.
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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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433What is saidSynthese 128 (1-2): 75--91. 2001.A critique of the purely semantic, minimalist notion of 'what is said'.