Michael Murez

Le présent article esquisse un modèle cognitif de « l’intuition de différence » entre le phénoménal et le physique. Mettant à profit un modèle élaboré conjointement par des philosophes et chercheurs en sciences cognitives, celui des « fichiers mentaux », qui décrit la manière dont l’esprit représente les individus et leur identité, nous défendons la thèse selon laquelle l’intuition s’explique par l’impossibilité de lier des « fichiers matériels » à des « fichiers phénoménaux ». Ces derniers représentent les expériences à travers des relations « d’accointance forte », et obéissent à une contrainte de « super-transparence ». Nous nous efforçons de répondre aux objections que ce modèle soulève, en nous inspirant des recherches récentes sur les fichiers mentaux.

Equative sentences like Hesperus is Phosphorus are interesting not only because they convey information about identity but also because of the atypical linguistic means they employ to do so. An equative sentence appears to be composed of a pair of referential singular terms (grammatical arguments) and to lack a logical predicate. Yet in the absence of such a predicate, how can equatives constitute well-formed, meaningful sentences? This rarely acknowledged “problem of symmetry” is assumed to have an obvious predicativist solution, according to which equatives would actually contain some predicative constituent(s). We expose the problem of symmetry, critically review various predicativist solutions, and outline an alternative hypothesis according to which equatives are distinctive both syntactically, by virtue of their symmetrical [DP DP] structure, and semantically, by virtue of their meaning corresponding to an instruction to perform a mental act of identification rather than to a traditional predication (the ascription of a property or relation).

Il y a deux François Recanati : l’un est philosophe du langage, l’autre philosophe de l’esprit. Tous deux sont contextualistes. Mais il y a une différence entre leurs formes respectives de contextualisme. En philosophie du langage, le contextualisme radical de Recanati repose sur une double généralisation de la dépendance contextuelle – celle de l’indexicalité à tous les termes référentiels, et celle de la polysémie à toutes les expressions de classe ouverte. En philosophie de l’esprit, l’indexicalité est aussi quasi-généralisée, à travers l’identification des concepts singuliers à des fichiers mentaux, qui sont eux-mêmes conçus comme des indexicaux. Mais la polysémie ne fait pas l’objet d’une généralisation parallèle au niveau des concepts. Le présent article vise à encourager les deux Recanati à harmoniser leurs positions. Il invite à postuler des concepts/fichiers polysémiques, et vise à montrer qu’une telle postulation, contrairement à ce qu’on pourrait croire, ne remet en cause ni le contextualisme radical en philosophie du langage, ni les principes fondamentaux du modèle des fichiers mentaux.

Modes of presentation (MOPs) are often said to have to be transparent, usually in the sense that thinkers can know solely via introspection whether or not they are deploying the same one. While there has been much discussion of threats to transparency stemming from externalism, another threat to transparency has garnered less attention. This novel threat arises if MOPs are robust, as I argue they should be according to internalist views of MOPs which identify them with representational vehicles, such as mental files. I explain how identifying MOPs with vehicles/files threatens transparency, provide empirical illustrations, and critically examine some attempts to dispel the threat. Rather than abandoning transparency, I outline a way of reconciling it with a robust view of mental files which takes seriously the idea that they are targets for investigation in cognitive science. Transparency does not require introspective access, and rather than as an incontrovertible principle for individuating MOPs, we can view it more modestly, as an open empirical hypothesis.

Although we encounter objects from a particular perspective, what we perceive and remember are typically whole objects. In ‘amodal completion’ our mind automatically fills in objects’ spatially occluded parts, and our memory then often discards information about the orientation from which the objects were perceived. An analogous phenomenon of ‘event completion’ has been demonstrated, which may be understood as the mind automatically filling in temporally occluded parts of events. Exemplifying typical experiments in this paradigm, Strickland and Keil (Strickland and Keil, Cognition 121:409–415, 2011) showed participants videos depicting a causal event (e.g., someone kicking a ball), which was edited so that a crucial part was missing (e.g., the moment of contact between foot and ball). Subjects were more likely to falsely remember having seen the moment of contact if (and only if) it was strongly implied by subsequent footage. We use this phenomenon of event completion as a test case for comparing different theories of reference in memory. We argue that event completion puts pressure on both pure causal and pure descriptive theories of reference, and favors more nuanced hybrids of causal and descriptive theories, which integrate insights from cognitive and epistemic approaches.

Le présent article esquisse un modèle cognitif de « l’intuition de différence » entre le phénoménal et le physique. Mettant à profit un modèle élaboré conjointement par des philosophes et chercheurs en sciences cognitives, celui des « fichiers mentaux », qui décrit la manière dont l’esprit représente les individus et leur identité, nous défendons la thèse selon laquelle l’intuition s’explique par l’impossibilité de lier des « fichiers matériels » à des « fichiers phénoménaux ». Ces derniers représentent les expériences à travers des relations « d’accointance forte », et obéissent à une contrainte de « super-transparence ». Nous nous efforçons de répondre aux objections que ce modèle soulève, en nous inspirant des recherches récentes sur les fichiers mentaux.

Belief fragments and mental files are based on the same idea: that information in people’s minds is compartmentalized rather than lumped all together. Philosophers mostly use the two notions differently, though the exact relationship between fragments and files has yet to be examined in detail. This chapter has three main goals. The first is to argue that fragments and files, properly understood, play distinct yet complementary explanatory roles; the second is to defend a model of belief that includes them both; and the third is to raise and address a shared dilemma that confronts them: that they threaten to be either explanatorily lightweight or empirically refuted. This chapter contends that it is better to embrace the horn of this dilemma that opens up files and fragments to empirical refutation or confirmation, by adopting a psychofunctionalist approach.

Le but principal de cet article est de défendre Putnam contre McDowell – ou du moins de défendre certaines thèses et certains arguments du premier dans Raison, vérité et histoire contre certaines objections du second dans son influent article « Putnam on Mind and Meaning. Puisque par la suite Putnam s’est pour l’essentiel rangé aux positions de McDowell en adoptant le « réalisme naturel », il s’agit aussi de défendre Putnam contre lui-même. L'article se focalise sur l’échange entre Putnam et McDowell dans les textes susmentionnés, et plus spécifiquement sur un débat qui peut au premier abord sembler étroit, mais qui soulève en fait des enjeux importants concernant la nature de la pensée : le débat sur les objets de l’introspection.

Many debates in philosophy focus on whether folk or scientific psychological notions pick out cognitive natural kinds. Examples include memory, emotions and concepts. A potentially interesting type of kind is: kinds of mental representations (as opposed, for example, to kinds of psychological faculties). In this chapter we outline a proposal for a theory of representational kinds in cognitive science. We argue that the explanatory role of representational kinds in scientific theories, in conjunction with a mainstream approach to explanation in cognitive science, suggest that representational kinds are multi-level. This is to say that representational kinds’ properties cluster at different levels of explanation and allow for intra- and inter-level projections.

According to the perceptual view of language comprehension, listeners typically recover high-level linguistic properties such as utterance meaning without inferential work. The perceptual view is subject to the Objection from Context: since utterance meaning is massively context-sensitive, and context-sensitivity requires cognitive inference, the perceptual view is false. In recent work, Berit Brogaard provides a challenging reply to this objection. She argues that in language comprehension context-sensitivity is typically exercised not through inferences, but rather through top-down perceptual modulations or perceptual learning. This paper provides a complete formulation of the Objection from Context and evaluates Brogaards reply to it. Drawing on conceptual considerations and empirical examples, we argue that the exercise of context-sensitivity in language comprehension does, in fact, typically involve inference.

Selon le russellianisme, nous avons des pensées singulières faisant directement référence aux objets, fondées sur des relations d’accointance (1 re partie). Selon le frégéanisme, toute pensée est médiatisée par un concept (2 e partie). Le fressellianisme anti-descriptiviste cherche à réconcilier ces thèses apparemment opposées, et à éviter les objections auxquelles chacune s’expose, en postulant des concepts singuliers, individués par des relations d’accointance (3 e partie). Mais le fressellianisme rencontre un dilemme : s’il conçoit l’accointance en termes causaux, il rencontre les mêmes objections que le russellianisme ; mais s’il conçoit l’accointance en termes épistémiques, il rencontre les mêmes objections que le frégéanisme (4 e partie). Le but principal de cet article est ainsi essentiellement négatif : il s’agit de montrer que le fressellianisme anti-descriptif, qui prétend constituer une avancée significative par rapport au russellianisme et au frégéanisme, hérite en fait des faiblesses des deux approches.

In philosophy, “singular thought” refers to our capacity to represent entities as individuals, rather than as possessors of properties. Philosophers who defend singularism argue that perception allows us to mentally latch onto objects and persons directly, without conceptualizing them as being of a certain sort. Singularists assume that singular thought forms a unified psychological kind, regardless of the nature of the individuals represented. Empirical findings on the special psychological role of persons as opposed to inanimates threaten singularism. They raise the possibility that tracking individuals specifically as persons might require conceptualizing them in certain ways, for example, as persons. In this paper, we take such a possibility seriously but ultimately reject it. Instead, we propose to revise a prominent singularist theory, the theory of mental files, in order to accommodate data on the psychological distinctiveness of persons: We advocate the postulation of perceptual person-files. Perceptual tracking via person-files is different from object-tracking but also from descriptive classification under the sortal concept PERSON

We argue that the most ambitious version of the mental files theory of singular thought, according to which mental files are a wide-ranging psychological natural kind underlying all and only singular thinking, is unsupported by the available psychological data. Nevertheless, critical examination of the theory from a psychological perspective opens up promising avenues for research, especially concerning the relationship between our perceptual capacity to individuate and track basic individuals, and our higher level capacities for singular thought.