Daniel Laurier

Donald Davidson (1917-2003) est considéré comme l'un des plus grands philosophes américains du XXe siècle. Au cœur de sa doctrine se trouve une conception profondément originale de la nature du langage et de ses relations avec la pensée, qui a eu des répercussions dans tous les domaines de la philosophie et de nombreux secteurs des sciences humaines. Daniel Laurier offre ici une analyse et une évaluation des principales positions du philosophe américain sur la question de l'interprétation du langage et de la pensée, ouvrant celles-ci à une réflexion plus vaste sur des notions centrales en philosophie du langage et de l'esprit: le holisme, la nature des règles, celle de la rationalité, le caractère social du langage, enfin la possibilité d'une conception naturaliste de l'esprit. Ce livre captivera les philosophes du langage et de l'esprit et ceux qui souhaitent approfondir leur compréhension de la philosophie de Davidson. Il nourrira la réflexion de tous ceux qui se questionnent sur les fondements des sciences humaines.

I propose what seems a plausible interpretation of the suggestion that the fact that someone has or lacks the capacity to make inferences of certain kinds should be taken as evidence that the contents of the states involved in these inferences are conceptual/nonconceptual. I then argue that there is no obvious way in which this line of thought could be exploited to help draw the line separating conceptual from nonconceptual contents. This will lead me to clarify in what sense perceptual experiences can be taken as providing reasons for beliefs.

This paper asks whether Brandom has provided a sufficiently clear account of the basic normative concepts of commitment and entitlement, on which his normative inferentialism seems to rest, and of how they contribute to explain the inferential articulation of conceptual contents. I show that Brandom's claim that these concepts are analogous to the concepts of obligation and permission cannot be right, and argue that the normative character of the concept of commitment is dubious. This leads me to replace Brandom's conception of inferential relations as relations between deontic statuses with one according to which they are to be seen as relations between entitlements and acknowledgements of commitments.

In this paper, I will (i) introduce a distinction between a weaker and a stronger sense in which something (be it a proposition, a state of affairs, a concept or a property) may be said to be normative, (ii) distinguish between conceptual and metaphysical versions of what is known as “individual” supervenience (iii) explain why we should concentrate on the conceptual supervenience claims, (iv) discuss the plausibility of various conceptual supervenience claims concerning some specific kinds of normative concepts, namely, concepts that can be constructed out of the concept of a (normative) reason and (v) argue that reasons-concepts of a certain kind conceptually supervene on mental ones and that this is compatible with a form a realism with respect to reasons-propositions.

The aim of this article is to show that the prospects for intentional irreal-ism are much brighter than it is generally thought. In the first section, I provide a general characterization of some of the various forms that the realism/irrealism debates might take. In the second, I ask whether there is any defensible form of realism about intentional states. I show that most candidates are nearly trivially false, and that the only form of in-tentional realism which is not, is a restricted one which is prima facie no more plausible than the corresponding form of irrealism. In the third and last section, I defend my interpretation of what intentional irrealism amounts to against some possible misunderstandings, give some reasons why it should be taken seriously and argue that it could plausibly be at-tributed to Davidson.

This paper asks whether Brandom (1994) has provided a sufficiently clear account of the basic normative concepts of commitment and entitlement, on which his normative inferentialism seems to rest, and of how they contribute to explain the inferential articulation of conceptual contents. I show that Brandom's claim that these concepts are analogous to the concepts of obligation and permission cannot be right, and argue that the normative character of the concept of commitment is dubious. This leads me to replace Brandom's conception of inferential relations as relations between deontic statuses with one according to which they are to be seen as relations between entitlements and acknowledgements of commitments

ABSTRACT: I offer a refutation of the standard argument according to which we have no doxastic obligation because we do not have the kind of voluntary control over our beliefs required for having obligations. I then propose an interpretation of the distinction between epistemic and practical reasons for belief which can be generalised to other attitudes such as intention, and seems to imply that mental acts such as judgements and decisions never count as intentional actions, and that these two sorts of reasons are incommensurable

Depuis 1967, Donald Davidson defend l'idée qu'une théorie de la signification pour une langue naturelle doit prendre la forme d'une théorie tarskienne de la vérité. Je me propose ici d'exposer les grandes lignes de l a conception davidsonienne de la sémantique des langues naturelles et de chercher à préciser en quel sens une theorie tarskienne de la vérité pour une langue L constitue, selon Davidson, une théorié de la signification pour L. Je ferai pour cela abstraction des obstacles qu'il pourrait y avoir à la réalisation du programme de Davidson.

Having suggested that a salient feature of philosophical naturalism is to deny that there are non‐natural norms, I make a distinction between a moderate naturalism, which admits the existence of natural norms , and a radical naturalism which denies it . On the assumption that intentional facts are irreducibly normative, their existence would thus seem to raise a problem for moderate epistemological naturalism. I argue that no non‐trivial naturalistic explanation of conceptual intentionality is to be possible unless it is denied that norms of rationality are constitutive of intentional content. It follows that the only form of intentional naturalism that is not obviously untenable has to be radical. Other aspects of Quine's doctrine suggest that the introduction of epistemic norms into our “system of the world” is either dubiously coherent, or “merely programmatic”

The question to be discussed is whether the distinction between the conceptual and the nonconceptual is best understood as pertaining primarily to intentional contents or to intentional states or attitudes. Some authors have suggested that it must be understood in the second way, in order to make the claim that experiences are nonconceptual compatible with the idea that one can also believe what one experiences. I argue that there is no need to do so, and that a conceptual content can be understood as being simply one which is composed of concepts, without compromising this intuitive view of the relation between beliefs and experiences.

Je soutiens qu'il y a deux façons d'individuer les états intentionnels de créatures qui sont dépourvues de toute compétence linguistique, à savoir par leur rôle propositionnel ou par leurs conditions de vérité, mais que cette distinction ne vaut que pour les états intentionnels singuliers. L'examine ensuite différentes façons de spécifier, tout en restant dans le cadre d'une conception représentationnaliste de l'intentionnalité, les conditions de vérité des attributions d'états intentionnels privés du langage ordinaire selon le mode d'individuation considéré. Il s'avère qu'une attribution d'état intentionnel singulier ne peut identifier simultanément le rôle propositionnel et les conditions de vérité des états intentionnels attribués, et que la nécessité d'invoquer des états intentionnels de se pour expliquer les comportements menace de remettre en question la thèse représentationnaliste.I claim that there are two ways of individuating the intentional states of creatures without any kind of linguistic competence, namely, either by their propositional role or by their truth-conditions, but that this distinction holds only for singular intentional states. I then consider several ways of specifying, within the limits of a representational theory of intentionality, the truth-conditions of statements attributing private intentional states according to the mode of individuation chosen. It turns out that such statements cannot simultaneously identify both the propositional role and the truth-conditions of the intentional states attributed, and that the need to invoke de se intentional states in order to explain behavior seems to put the representational theory into difficulty

The purpose of this paper is to offer an account of what an agent's being rational to do or think something might amount to, which doesn't reduce to saying that it consists in this agent's doing or thinking something that is rational for him. In the first section, I call attention to the fact that such a distinction between agent rationality and action or belief rationality is widely admitted, I reject the idea that it could be interpreted as a distinction between the rationality of tokens and the rationality of types, and I suggest one natural way in which a notion of objective agent rationality could be informally characterized in terms of action or belief rationality. But this first, rough, characterization depends on further uses of the notion of rationality which I try to make sense of in the second section, at least in a preliminary way. The burden of this second section is then to determine whether the intuition behind the informal proposal introduced in the first can be substantiated, i.e., whether a substantial and coherent notion of agent rationality can be worked out, and at what cost. In the concluding section, I try to "deflate" some of the worries that could be raised by the account of agent rationality I end up with.

The theory of radical interpretation, as based on the principle of charity, sets a priori limits on the possibility that different agents have different beliefs, and on the possibility that one has false beliefs. David Papineau put forward a teleological approach to intentional states which, he claims, doesn’t have these unacceptable consequences. Having distinguished half a dozen of different forms that the problem of radical interpretation might take, I show that Papineau’s approach is not radically different from those based on the principle of charity. Finally, I suggest that the consequences of the principle of charity with respect to the problems of error and divergence are in fact both unavoidable and acceptable.

In a recent article (2011), Steglich-Petersen claims to be able to provide a teleological account of the nature of epistemic reasons which (i) avoids the standard objections to this kind of approach and (ii) is compatible with the evidentialist claim that epistemic reasons always trump non-epistemic reasons (assuming there are such reasons). I argue that his proposal is unable to do justice to the idea that epistemic reasons are constituted by the evidence, and more generally, that it is incoherent to hold at once that epistemic reasons are instrumental, that believing the true and not believing the false is what has epistemic value and that epistemic reasons are evidential in nature