Joëlle Proust

What are the propositional attitude(s) involved in collective epistemic agency? There are two opposing camps on this question: the ascribers have defended an extended notion of belief, while the rejectionists have claimed that groups form goal-sensitive acceptances. Addressing this question, however, requires providing responses to four preliminary queries. (1) Are group attitudes reducible to the participants’ attitudes? (2) Is epistemic evaluation sensitive to instrumental considerations? (3) Does accepting that _p_ entail believing that _p_? (4) Is there a unity of epistemic rationality across levels? Both “believing” and “accepting as true”, as applied to plural subjects, fail to provide satisfactory answers to these four queries. An alternative analysis for epistemic group attitude called “accepting under consensus” is proposed. This attitude is shown to reflect actual group agency, and to offer consistent and independently justified answers to the queries. On this analysis, an individualist epistemology cannot simply be transferred to collective agents.

This chapter examines whether, and in what sense, one can speak of agentive mental events. An adequate characterization of mental acts should respond to three main worries. First, mental acts cannot have prespecified intentional contents, for this would jeopardize the normative requirements attached to epistemic states. Second, mental acts seem to depend crucially on receptive attitudes. Third, it does not seem that intentions play any role in mental action. A careful analysis of the role of normative requirements allows us to clarify the distinction between mental and bodily forms of action. Two kinds of motives must be present for a mental act to develop – one instrumental and one normative. These two motives actually correspond to different phases of a single mental act. It is shown that, conceived in this way, a characterization of mental acts avoids the three difficulties mentioned above.

Cet article s'attaque au problème de l'indétermination fonctionnelle dans l'un de ses aspects, dit « intensif », celui où un indicateur interne peut répondre soit au stimulus proximal occasionné sur les récepteurs sensoriels par une propriété extérieure, soit au stimulus correspondant - cette propriété elle-même. Après avoir montré pourquoi la solution de Dretske ne permet pas de rendre compte principiellement de ce qui distingue les deux types de fonction représentationnelle d'un indicateur, cet article procède à une analyse de ce qui distingue un descripteur de stimulus proximal d'un descripteur de stimulus distal. Deux critères sont utilisés: 1) le graphe des fonctions de traitement de l'information d'entrée (soit un vecteur d'action neuronale dans l'aire cérébrale correspondante) est différent s'il s'agit d'un stimulus proximal-covariant ou distal-covariant; 2) en cas de conflit entre les informations proximales, des capacités de recalibration de l'information par le recours à une modalité sensorielle dominante sont mises en œuvre quand le système est capable de former des descripteurs distaux. La capacité de rectifier l'information proximale pour maintenir la covariation avec la source distale de l'information constitue ainsi une condition nécessaire et suffisante de l'existence d'une représentation distale contrôlant le comportement. Plusieurs conséquences de cette définition de la distalité sont examinées du point de vue de l'approche externaliste de l'intentionnalité.

The mechanisms of selection, assimilation and transmission at work in cultural accumulation need to include evaluative processes for detecting informational lacunae and repair mechanisms. Novelty, interest, learnability of alternative concepts and practices need to be permanently monitored at the individual and at the group level. It is proposed that the evaluative mechanisms that control cultural accumulation are themselves subject to cultural evolution. This article outlines a plausible sequence of evolutionary steps from curiosity-based exploration to inquisitive communication and to collective epistemic deliberation. Procedural metacognition, based on affective monitoring, regulates curiosity and early forms of inquisitive communication. Explicit metacognition, based on transmitted concepts, rules and practices regulates collective epistemic deliberation. It successively expands across cultures the epistemic sensitivity to a range of distinct norms such as evidentiality, consistency, explanatory power and consensuality.

Procedural metacognition is the set of affect-based mechanisms allowing agents to regulate cognitive actions like perceptual discrimination, memory retrieval or problem solving. This article proposes that procedural metacognition has had a major role in the evolution of communication. A plausible hypothesis is that, under pressure for maximizing signalling efficiency, the metacognitive abilities used by nonhumans to regulate their perception and their memory have been re-used to regulate their communication. On this view, detecting one’s production errors in signalling, or solving species-specific trade-offs between informativeness, processing effort, clarity, or urgency depend on a form of procedural metacognition, called “metacommunication”. How does this view relate to Gricean theories of human communication? A parallel between procedural trade-offs and conversational maxims is discussed for its evolutionary implications. Rather than accepting radically discontinuist interpretations, in which mindreading operates a full reorganization of pragmatics, it is proposed that procedural forms of regulation are entrenched in all forms of human communication. According to contextual demands, humans adopt and monitor more or less demanding informational goals, such as factual updating, clarifying, explaining, proving, and reaching consensus in collective matters. Under time pressure, only part of these goals require adopting others’ viewpoint. Efficiency in collective decision-making, in particular, might have been considerably raised by an ability to interpret others’ intentions and motivations.

This paper discusses the content of agency awareness. It contrast three elements in content: what the goal is, how it is to be reached, and who is having the goal/performing the action ? Marc Jeannerod's claim that goal representations are self-other neutral is discussed. If goal representations are essentially sharable, then we do not understand other people by projecting a piece of internal knowledge on to them, as often assumed. The problem which our brain has to solve is the converse problem : determining who the agent is, once a goal is identified. This view has interesting consequences on the theory of mentalization. One can plausibly speculate that observing action, with an additional simulatory component for action memory, form major building blocks in understanding other minds. Metarepresenting, in this perspective, would depend on additional executive capacities for maintaining distinct the inferences from diverse simulated contexts of action.

Perceiving an armchair prepares us to sit. Reading the first line in a text prepares us to read it. This article proposes that the affordance construct used to explain reactive potentiation of behavior similarly applies to reactive potentiation of cognitive actions. It defends furthermore that, in both cases, affordance-sensings do not only apply to selective (dis)engagement, but also to the revision and the termination of actions. In the first section, characteristics of environmental affordance-sensings such as directness, stability, action potentiation, valence, and phenomenology are reexamined in light of contemporary cognitive science. In the second section, it is proposed that cognitive affordance-sensings can also be characterized along these dimensions. Called “metacognitive feelings” in the metacognitive literature, their function is to select, engage, revise and post-evaluate cognitive actions. A third section discusses alternative views, and responds to objections.

Dans la psychose, les données cliniques montrent que dès l'apparition des premiers troubles aigus, une difficulté caractéristique se manifeste au niveau de l'attribution de la responsabilité causale des actions. Les patients se sentent poussés à agir par les autres tout en ayant aussi le sentiment de contrôler l'action d'autrui. Cette difficulté va souvent de pair chez les schizophrènes avec une modification du sentiment d'identité personnelle. Parmi les symptômes de l'autisme, on trouve des difficultés de contrôle de l'action, une réduction des centres d'intérêts, des stéréotypies comportementales et une difficulté à comprendre les événements d'ordre mental. Des résultats expérimentaux récents permettent d'orienter la réflexion théorique sur l'origine fonctionnelle commune de ces perturbations. Ils indiquent l'importance du suivi de l'action dans l'acquisition par l'enfant d'une " théorie de l'esprit ", c'est-à-dire des connaissances nécessaires à l'interprétation de ses propres états mentaux et de ceux d'autrui. Dans le cas de l'adulte, un mauvais suivi de l'action pourrait porter atteinte à la capacité de reconnaître ses propres intentions d'agir, et modifier ainsi le sens de sa propre identité. Subjectivité et conscience d'agir rassemble des travaux de clinique psychiatrique (Henri Grivois), de psychologie du développement (James Russell), de neuroscience cognitive (Marc Jeannerod, Pierre Fourneret) et de philosophie de l'esprit (John Campbell, Pascal Engel, Elisabeth Pacherie, Joëlle Proust). Le point commun est d'élucider le rôle qui revient aux fonctions exécutives dans la compréhension de soi-même et d'autrui. L'ouvrage s'adresse aux étudiants, aux enseignants et aux chercheurs en psychologie, en neuroscience et en philosophie, mais aussi aux psychiatres et aux cliniciens, ainsi qu'à tous ceux qui s'intéressent aux progrès de la psychopathologie cognitive.

Procedural metacognition is the set of affect-based mechanisms allowing agents to regulate cognitive actions like perceptual discrimination, memory retrieval or problem solving. This article proposes that procedural metacognition has had a major role in the evolution of communication. A plausible hypothesis is that, under pressure for maximizing signalling efficiency, the metacognitive abilities used by nonhumans to regulate their perception and their memory have been re-used to regulate their communication. On this view, detecting one’s production errors in signalling, or solving species-specific trade-offs between informativeness, processing effort, clarity, or urgency depend on a form of procedural metacognition, called “metacommunication”. How does this view relate to Gricean theories of human communication? A parallel between procedural trade-offs and conversational maxims is discussed for its evolutionary implications. Rather than accepting radically discontinuist interpretations, in which mindreading operates a full reorganization of pragmatics, it is proposed that procedural forms of regulation are entrenched in all forms of human communication. According to contextual demands, humans adopt and monitor more or less demanding informational goals, such as factual updating, clarifying, explaining, proving, and reaching consensus in collective matters. Under time pressure, only part of these goals require adopting others’ viewpoint. Efficiency in collective decision-making, in particular, might have been considerably raised by an ability to interpret others’ intentions and motivations.

Metacognitive abilities are considered as a hallmark of advanced human cognition. Existing empirical studies have exclusively focused on populations from Western and industrialized societies. Little is known about young children’s metacognitive abilities in other societal and cultural contexts. Here we tested 4-year-old Yucatec Mayan by adopting a metacognitive task in which children’s explicit assessment of their own knowledge states about the hidden content of a container and their informing judgments were assessed. Similar to previous studies, we found that Yucatec Mayan children overestimated their knowledge states in the explicit metacognitive task. However, in contrast with studies on Western children, we did not find the facilitating effect of the implicit informing task over the explicit task. These findings suggest that the early development of metacognition combines universal and culture-sensitive features.

Controlling one's mental agency encompasses two forms of metacognitive operations, self-probing and post-evaluating. Metacognition so defined might seem to fuel an internalist view of epistemic norms, where rational feelings are available to instruct a thinker of what she can do, and allow her to be responsible for her mental agency. Such a view, however, ignores the dynamics of the mind–world interactions that calibrate the epistemic sentiments as reliable indicators of epistemic norms. A 'brain in the lab' thought experiment suggests that an internalist view of epistemic feelings is unable to account for the contrast between norm-tracking, educated sentiments, and illusory feelings.