Daniel Laurier

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.

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.

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”.

I try to clarify the ways in which one would seek to hold that language and/or thought are public. For each of these theses, I distinguish four forms in which they can be framed, and two ways of establishing them. The first will try to make the publicity of thought follow from that of language; the second will try to make the publicity of language follow from that of thought. I show that none of these strategies can do without the thesis that language and thought are interdependent, and that even while admitting this thesis, the second strategy presents more difficulties than the first.

Dans quelle mesure les caractéristiques fondamentales des êtres humains, telles que leur capacité de penser, de raisonner, de vouloir et de communiquer, peuvent-elles être complètement expliquées à l'aide des seules ressources des sciences naturelles? En s'appuyant sur l'analyse rigoureuse de quelques-uns des travaux les plus significatifs de la philosophie de l'esprit, en particulier ceux de R. Millikan, F. Dretske, W. Quine et D. Davidson, Daniel Laurier révèle les limites d'un tel programme de naturalisation de l'esprit et soutient qu'il n'y a pas de position stable entre le naturalisme radical et ce qu'il faut bien appeler le surnaturalisme. Ce livre s'adresse principalement aux philosophes professionnels et aux chercheurs et étudiants en sciences humaines qui s'intéressent à l'épistémologie et aux fondements philosophiques des sciences cognitives.

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.

Brandom's book Making It Explicit defends Davidson's claim that conceptual thought can arise only on the background of a practice of mutual interpretation, without endorsing the further view that one can be a thinker only if one has the concept of a concept. This involves giving an account of conceptual content in terms of what Brandom calls practical deontic attitudes. In this paper, I make a plea for the conclusion that these practical attitudes are best seen as intentional, but non-conceptually contentful. In particular, I argue that the hypothesis that Brandom's practical deontic attitudes are non-conceptually contentful wouldn't conflict with his view that non-conceptual intentionality is merely derivative. I then explore some of the implications which this hypothesis might have with respect to various forms of «intentional ascent»

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

Je défends la classification carnapienne des disciplines sémiotiques en montrant qu'elle permet de caractériser adéquatement la nature de la pragmatique. J'indique, en particulier, comment une notion de système pragmatique pourrait être développée par analogie avec celles de système syntaxique et de système sémantique.I defend Carnap's classification of semiotic disciplines by showing that it leads to an adequate characterization of the nature of pragmatics. In particular, I indicate how a notion of pregmatic system could be constructed on the analogy with those of syntactic system and semantic system

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”

Je soutiens que Kripke n'a pas réussi à montrer que certains principes plausibles gouvernant l'attribution de croyances, tels que les principes de décitation et de traduction, pouvaient nous conduire à attribuer des croyances de dicto contradictoires à un sujet réfléchi et linguistiquement compétent sans présupposer une théorie descriptive des noms propres ou des termes désignant des espèces naturelles. Les cas décrits par Kripke se réduisent à des variantes du problème de Quine concernant les croyances de re ou à des variantes du puzzle de Mates concernant l'intersubstiruabilité des synonymes dans les contextes de croyance.I claim that Kripke failed to show that certain plausible principles governing belief ascription, such as the disquotation and translation principles, could lead one to ascribe contradictory de dicto beliefs to a reflexive and linguistically competent agent without presupposing a descriptive theory of names or natural kind terms. Kripke's examples are nothing but variants either of Quine's problem about de re beliefs, or of Mates' puzzle concerning the interchangeability of synonyms in belief contexts