•  89
    Dretske has recently offered a representational theory of perceptual experience - considered as paradigmatic of the qualitative and phenomenal aspects of our mental life. This theory belongs, as do his previous works, to a naturalistic approach to mental representation
  •  1
    Monothematic delusions, empiricism, and framework beliefs
    with Tim Bayne
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 11 (1): 1. 2004.
  •  153
    Levels of perceptual content
    Philsophical Studies 100 (3): 237-54. 2000.
    My main thesis is this paper is that, although Dretske's distinction between simple perception and cognitive perception constitutes an important milestone in contemporary theorizing on perception, it remains too coarse to account for a number of phenomena that do not seem to fall squarely on either side of the divide. I argue that what is needed in order to give a more accurate account of perceptual phenomena is not a twofold distinction of the kind advocated by Dretske but a threefold distincti…Read more
  •  25
    Holophobia
    Acta Analytica 12 105-112. 1997.
    Holophobia can be defined as the 'neurotic' fear that semantic holism, if not instantly extirpated by the most radical means, might be a deadly threat to intentional realism. I contend that Fodor exaggerates the threat that meaning holism poses to intentional realism and to a viable account of narrow content in terms of conceptual roles. He particular, he overestimates the relevance for intentional psychology of Quine's demonstration that a substantial analytic/synthetic distinction is out of re…Read more
  •  40
    Attitudes propositionnelles, intentionnalité et évolution
    Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 100 (3). 1995.
    La question du statut ontologique des attitudes propositionnelles et, corrélativement, celle de l'efficacité causale des contenus mentaux sont parmi les principaux problèmes actuellement débattus en philosophie de la psychologie. La théorie des systèmes intentionnels de Dennett, tout en accordant une valeur prédictive aux attributions d'attitudes propositionnelles, refuse aux croyances et désirs droit d'entrée dans une ontologie scientifique. Le but de cet article est de proposer une analyse cri…Read more
  •  322
    Out of nowhere: Thought insertion, ownership and context-integration
    with Jean-Remy Martin
    Consciousness and Cognition 22 (1): 111-122. 2013.
    We argue that thought insertion primarily involves a disruption of the sense of ownership for thoughts and that the lack of a sense of agency is but a consequence of this disruption. We defend the hypothesis that this disruption of the sense of ownership stems from a fail- ure in the online integration of the contextual information related to a thought, in partic- ular contextual information concerning the different causal factors that may be implicated in their production. Loss of unity of cons…Read more
  •  672
    Two main approaches can be discerned in the literature on agentive self-awareness: a top-down approach, according to which agentive self-awareness is fundamentally holistic in nature and involves the operations of a central-systems narrator, and a bottom-up approach that sees agentive self-awareness as produced by lowlevel processes grounded in the very machinery responsible for motor production and control. Neither approach is entirely satisfactory if taken in isolation; however, the question o…Read more
  •  69
    It is widely assumed, both in philosophy and in the cognitive sciences, that perception essentially involves a relative or egocentric frame of reference. Levinson has explicitly challenged this assumption, arguing instead in favour of the 'neo-Whorfian' hypothesis that the frame of reference dominant in a given language infiltrates spatial representations in non-linguistic, and in particular perceptual, modalities. Our aim in this paper is to assess Levinson's neo-Whorfian hypothesis at the phil…Read more
  •  142
    In this paper I argue that, to make intentional actions fully intelligible, we need to posit representations of action the content of which is nonconceptual. I further argue that an analysis of the properties of these nonconceptual representations, and of their relation- ships to action representations at higher levels, sheds light on the limits of intentional control. On the one hand, the capacity to form nonconceptual representations of goal-directed movements underscores the capacity to acqui…Read more
  •  21
    This paper offers a critical discussion of Searle's account of collective intentionality. It argues Bratman's alternative account avoids some of the shortcomings of Searle's account, over-intellectualizes collective intentionality and imposes an excessive cognitive burden on participating agents.Tthe capacities needed to sustain collective intentionality are examined in an attempt to show that we can preserve the gist of Bratman's account in a cognitively more parsimonious way.
  •  75
    Emotion and Action
    European Review of Philosophy 5 55-90. 2002.
    The purpose of this paper is to explore the question whether and in what sense emotions might be said to provide reasons for actions or to rationalize them. This requires that one have a picture of the causal structure of actions that is sufficiently detailed for one to see how emotions can impinge on the proc-ess of action production. I present a two-tiered model of action explanation and try to exploit this model in a tentative account of the modes of in-volvement of emotions in the explanatio…Read more
  •  474
    Intentions and Motor Representations: the Interface Challenge
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (2): 317-336. 2017.
    A full account of purposive action must appeal not only to propositional attitude states like beliefs, desires, and intentions, but also to motor representations, i.e., non-propositional states that are thought to represent, among other things, action outcomes as well as detailed kinematic features of bodily movements. This raises the puzzle of how it is that these two distinct types of state successfully coordinate. We examine this so-called “Interface Problem”. First, we clarify and expand on …Read more
  •  356
    This paper contrasts two approaches to agentive self-awareness: a high-level, narrative-based account, and a low-level comparator-based account. We argue that an agent's narrative self-conception has a role to play in explaining their agentive judgments, but that agentive experiences are explained by low-level comparator mechanisms that are grounded in the very machinery responsible for action-production
  •  40
    Modest Sociality: Continuities and Discontinuities
    Journal of Social Ontology 1 (1): 17-26. 2014.
    A central claim in Michael Bratman’s account of shared agency is that there need be no radical conceptual, metaphysical or normative discontinuity between robust forms of small-scale shared intentional agency, i.e., modest sociality, and individual planning agency. What I propose to do is consider another potential discontinuity, whose existence would throw doubt on his contention that the structure of a robust form of modest sociality is entirely continuous with structures at work in individual…Read more
  •  170
    How does it feel to act together?
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (1): 25-46. 2014.
    This paper on the phenomenology of joint agency proposes a foray into a little explored territory at the intersection of two very active domains of research: joint action and sense of agency. I explore two ways in which our experience of joint agency may differ from our experience of individual agency. First, the mechanisms of action specification and control involved in joint action are typically more complex than those present in individual actions, since it is crucial for joint action that pe…Read more
  •  299
    Can Conscious Agency Be Saved?
    Topoi 33 (1): 33-45. 2014.
    This paper is concerned with the role of conscious agency in human action. On a folk-psychological view of the structure of agency, intentions, conceived as conscious mental states, are the causes of actions. In the last decades, the development of new psychological and neuroscientific methods has made conscious agency an object of empirical investigation and yielded results that challenge the received wisdom. Most famously, the results of Libet’s studies on the ‘readiness potential’ have been i…Read more
  •  45
    Perceptual hysteresis as a marker of perceptual inflexibility in schizophrenia
    with Jean-Rémy Martin, Guillaume Dezecache, Daniel Pressnitzer, Philippe Nuss, Jérôme Dokic, Nicolas Bruno, and Nicolas Franck
    Consciousness and Cognition 30 (C): 62-72. 2014.
  •  365
    The content of intentions
    Mind and Language 15 (4): 400-432. 2000.
    I argue that in order to solve the main difficulties confronted by the classical versions of the causal theory of action, it is necessary no just to make room for intentions, considered as irreducible to complexes of beliefs and desires, but also to distinguish among several types of intentions. I present a three-tiered theory of intentions that distinguishes among future-directed intentions, present-directed intentions and motor intentions. I characterize each kind of intention in terms of its …Read more
  •  347
    Shades and concepts
    with J. Dokic
    Analysis 61 (3): 193-202. 2001.
    In this paper, we criticise the claim, made by J. McDowell and B. Brewer, that the contents of perceptual experience are purely conceptual
  •  368
    Phenomenology and delusions: Who put the 'alien' in alien control?
    with Melissa Green and Tim Bayne
    Consciousness and Cognition 15 (3): 566-577. 2006.
    Current models of delusion converge in proposing that delusional beliefs are based on unusual experiences of various kinds. For example, it is argued that the Capgras delusion (the belief that a known person has been replaced by an impostor) is triggered by an abnormal affective experience in response to seeing a known person; loss of the affective response to a familiar person’s face may lead to the belief that the person has been replaced by an impostor (Ellis & Young, 1990). Similarly, the Co…Read more
  •  240
    Experience, belief, and the interpretive fold
    with Tim Bayne
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 11 (1): 81-86. 2004.
    Elisabeth Pacherie is a research fellow in philosophy at Institut Jean Nicod, Paris. Her main research and publications are in the areas of philosophy of mind, psychopathology and action theory. Her publications include a book on intentionality (_Naturaliser_ _l'intentionnalité_, Paris, PUF, 1993) and she is currently preparing a book on action and agency
  •  5
    Ipast EVENTS I
    Dialectica 51 (4). 1997.
  •  325
    Framing Joint Action
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (2): 173-192. 2011.
    Many philosophers have offered accounts of shared actions aimed at capturing what makes joint actions intentionally joint. I first discuss two leading accounts of shared intentions, proposed by Michael Bratman and Margaret Gilbert. I argue that Gilbert’s account imposes more normativity on shared intentions than is strictly needed and that Bratman’s account requires too much cognitive sophistication on the part of agents. I then turn to the team-agency theory developed by economists that I see a…Read more
  •  109
    Action
    In Keith Frankish & William Ramsey (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science, Cambridge University Press. pp. 92--111. 2012.
    In recent years, the integration of philosophical with scientific theorizing has started to yield new insights. This chapter surveys some recent philosophical and empirical work on the nature and structure of action, on conscious agency, and on our knowledge of actions.
  •  283
    The Sense of Control and the Sense of Agency
    PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 13. 2007.
    The now growing literature on the content and sources of the phenomenology of first-person agency highlights the multi-faceted character of the phenomenology of agency and makes it clear that the experience of agency includes many other experiences as components. This paper examines the possible relations between these components of our experience of acting and the processes involved in action specification and action control. After a brief discussion of our awareness of our goals and means of a…Read more
  •  274
    Agency, simulation and self-identification
    with Marc Jeannerod
    Mind and Language 19 (2): 113-146. 2004.
    This paper is concerned with the problem of selfidentification in the domain of action. We claim that this problem can arise not just for the self as object, but also for the self as subject in the ascription of agency. We discuss and evaluate some proposals concerning the mechanisms involved in selfidentification and in agencyascription, and their possible impairments in pathological cases. We argue in favor of a simulation hypothesis that claims that actions, whether overt or covert, are centr…Read more