Alexandre Billon

We examine how Frege’s contrast between identity judgments of the forms “a=a” vs. “a=b” would fare in the special case where ‘a’ and ‘b’ are complex mental representations, and ‘a’ stands for an introspected ‘I’-thought. We first argue that the Fregean treatment of I-thoughts entails that they are what we call “one-shot thoughts”: they can only be thought once. This has the surprising consequence that no instance of the “a=a” form of judgment in this specific case comes out true, let alone a priori true. This further reinforces Glezakos’s objections against the set-up of Frege’s puzzle, while also raising what we think is an acute problem for Fregeans, insofar as I-thought (and indexical thinking more generally), understood in their way, turns out to be incompatible with some basic features of rationality.

Patients suffering from the Cotard syndrome can deny being alive, having guts, thinking or even existing. They can also complain that the world or time have ceased to exist. In this article, I argue that even though the leading neurocognitive accounts have difficulties meeting that task, we should, and we can, make sense of these bizarre delusions. To that effect, I draw on the close connection between the Cotard syndrome and a more common condition known as depersonalisation. Even though they are not delusional, depersonalised patients seem to have experiences that are quite similar to those of Cotard patients. I argue that these experiences are essentially characterised by a lack of subjective character and of two other structural features of experience, which I call ‘the present character’ and ‘the actual character’. Cotard's nihilistic delusions simply consist in taking these anomalous experiences at face value.

Cet article aborde le problème de la justification des attributions d'expérience à autrui (problem of other minds). Je compare ce problème à d'autres problèmes sceptiques contemporains dus à Nelson Goodman et Saoül Kripke et je montre qu'il constitue un défi plus pressant et auquel il est plus difficile de répondre de manière modeste. Je propose une solution radicale à ce problème, qui repose sur l'idée, avérée empiriquement, selon laquelle nous disposons de deux formes d'empathie distinctes pour accéder à autrui. Très sommairement, lorsque je m'interroge sur autrui de manière objective et désengagée, je ne peux accéder à son esprit que par empathie cognitive, et le problème des autres esprits est alors insoluble. Lorsqu'autrui m'est présenté en personne, par contre, j'accède à son esprit par une forme d'empathie affective et le problème de l'esprit autrui est alors littéralement dépourvu de sens.