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”.

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.

RésuméLe sens intentionnel ?une énonciation comprend selon Grice un acte illocutoire principal et des actes illocutoires secondaires, qui peuvent être soit des implicatures conventionnelles soit des implkatures non‐conventionnelles. Je montre que cette analyse, sous ľnterprétation visée par Grice, est défectueuse en ceci que i) elle exclut que ľacte illocutoire principal puisse être non littéral, ii) elle ne rend pas compte de ce que les implicatures conventionnelles sont annulables et iii) elle confond sous ľappellation ?implicature non conventionnelle deux types de phénomènes qui doivent être distingués. Je suis ainsi amenéà proposer un nouveau découpage du sens intentionnel qui paraît mieux rendre compte de la diversité des effets de sens possibles

The aim of this article is to show that the prospects for intentional irrealism are much brighter than it is generally thought. In the first section, I provide a general haracterization 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 intentional 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 attributed to Davidson

Une théorie davidsonienne de la signification pour une langue L prend la forme d'une theorie tarskienne de la véeritée-dans-L. Une telle théeorie sera absolument radicale s'il est possible d'éetablir qu'elle est tarskienne, c'est-à-dire conforme à la convention T de Tarski, en n'utilisant que des donnéees empiriques dont la description ne fait intervenir aucun concept linguistique, tandis qu'elle sera relativement radicale s'il est possible d'éetablir qu'elle est tarskienne en n'utilisant que des donnéees empiriques dont la description ne fait intervenir aucun concept linguistique propre à L.

The view that in radical interpretation, the interpreter should aim at optimizing the rationality of agents is defended. A distinction and a parallel is drawn between linguistic interpretation and psychological interpretation. Both can be taken to be governed, in part, and in somewhat different ways, by a principle of rationality. Such approaches have been criticised on the ground that they make it impossible for a speaker or an agent to have wildly irrational or false beliefs. It is argued that the so-called principle of simulation isn't a serious altemative, and that the counter-intuitiveness of the optimization-based approaches has been exaggerated.

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

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.