Avsnitt
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Transparency, Indexicality and Consciousness : Problems with Revelation
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
David Papineau, King's College, London
Various anti-physicalist arguments hinge on the idea that phenomenal concepts reveal the nature of their referents to us. I shall consider various models for this kind of phenomenal revelation and argue that none can bear the necessary argumentative weight.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Transparency, Indexicality and Consciousness : The Argument from Understanding for Dualism about Experiential Properties
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Martine Nida-Rümelin, Université de Fribourg
The argument from understanding defends a dualist view about experiential properties: their nature is non-physical. The premises of the argument are (a) phenomenal essentialism (that phenomenal concepts reveal the nature of certain experiential properties), (b) that physical concepts and certain phenomenal concepts are cognitively independent, (c) that two property concepts revealing the nature of the same property cannot be cognitively independent and that (d) a property having a nature which can be revealed by a phenomenal concept but by no physical concept cannot count as a physical property.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Ideology and Propaganda
Conférence - Robert May : The Semantics of Ideological Words
Robert May
Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Linguistics, University of California, Davis
Résumé
In the second lecture, we turn to an application of the account of propaganda, ideological words that abstractly encapsulate core values of an ideology as their meaning. The focus will be on pejorative words – racist, sexist, homophobic, religious epithets, and so on. These words, we argue, are expressions of a type of defective ideology; they express a norm that people are morally unworthy just because they are black, female, gay, Jewish, etc, and thus tolerating oppression and discrimination. But such norms are unjustified: No one is morally unworthy solely on the basis of their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. The norms justifying racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism, and the like are irrevocably morally flawed; they fail to accurately represent the moral fabric of the world, and accordingly, pejorative words are a failed form of language: Given that they express these norms as their meanings, they will, by necessity, have no reference.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Transparency, Indexicality and Consciousness : Externalism, Transparency, and the (In)transitivity of Coordination
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Aidan Gray, University of Illinois, Chicago
Following recent usage, I use 'coordination' to refer to the relation that Fregeans have conceived of as sameness of sense. To a first approximation, representations are coordinated when the fact they are about the same object is transparent to their subject. Coordination is the relation that must hold between representations for it to be rational to 'trade on the identity' of their referents.
In this talk, I examine the interaction between two questions:
- Is coordination transitive?
- What features of attitude states are shared between qualitative duplicates?
My focus is Boghossian's discussion of slow-switching. The crux of Boghossian's argument is that content externalism entails that we cannot attribute coordination in certain confusion cases in which a subject is intuitively rational in trading on identity. I show that this conclusion is only forced on us if coordination is transitive. If coordination is intransitive, we can describe confused subjects in a way that respects the reference of their thoughts and the rationality of their inferences.
The challenge for developing a view of this kind is to characterize the rational upshot of intransitive coordination. I develop a logical system that models this. It follows from this account that when coordination is (de facto) transitive, rational relations are classical. But when coordination is intransitive, rational relations break down in a particular way: individually valid rational transitions do not always sum to globally valid transitions.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Transparency, Indexicality and Consciousness : Transparency and Solipsism
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Giovanni Merlo, Université de Genève
According to Phenomenal Transparency, experiencing a phenomenal property puts one is in a position to acquire knowledge of its essence. In this paper, I will argue that Phenomenal Transparency risks forcing upon us a species of solipsism according to which one is, necessarily, the sole bearer of phenomenal properties. If Phenomenal Transparency holds, having a painful experience puts one in a position to know that pain is THIS (where 'THIS' is a phenomenal concept that captures the essence of pain). The solipsist who endorses Phenomenal Transparency claims to be entitled to a reading of 'THIS' whereby THIS does not occur unless one is pain oneself. By their lights, then, it turns out to belong to the essence of pain that pain never occurs in others. After examining some unsuccessful attempts to delegitimize the solipsist's reading of 'THIS', I will suggest that – unless we are willing to deny Phenomenal Transparency altogether – we may want to come to terms with the solipsist's conclusion in the framework of a more general rethinking of the metaphysics of the phenomenal.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Transparency, Indexicality and Consciousness : A Conceivability Argument for Atheism
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Philip Goff, Durham University
If God exists necessarily and is essentially conscious, then there is a conscious being in every possible world. However, it is conceivable that nothing is conscious, which perhaps gives us reason to think that it's possible that nothing is conscious and hence that there are no necessarily existent essentially conscious beings. On the other hand, God's existence seems conceivable, which perhaps gives us reason to think that God is possible, which seems to entail that God exist in all possible worlds (given that God by definition does not exist contingently). I will argue that reflection on these arguments has important lessons for modal rationalism – the view that conceivability and possibility are linked in interesting ways – in particular the form of modal rationalism which links conceivability to possibility via transparent concepts. Ultimately, I will argue there could be a necessary being, but that if there is one, then its nature is beyond human understanding, because everything we can conceive of is possibly non-existent.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Transparency, Indexicality and Consciousness : A Moderate Proposal for Privileged Access
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Katalin Farkas, Central European University
I argue that there is good reason to deny that first person access to our conscious states is omniscient, infallible, incorrigible, or reveals their essence. Yet first person access is still privileged compared to third person access. In this talk, I explore the sense of this moderate privilege.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Transparency, Indexicality and Consciousness : Transparency and Phenomenal Structure in Phenomenological Reflection
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Julien Bugnon, Université de Fribourg & LOGOS
Let a property concept be transparent if and only if a thinker who has acquired such a concept is in a position to fully understand the nature of the property it is a concept of. Proponents of phenomenal transparency contend that at least some phenomenal concepts are transparent concepts. Yet they also typically make use of an additional claim when arguing against physicalism: two distinct transparent concepts of one and the same property will not be cognitively independent – that is, a thinker possessing two such concepts should in principle be able to discover a priori that they pick out the same property. This has a straightforward implication for the phenomenal concepts we form: we should be in a position to know a priori whether two of our transparent phenomenal concepts are coextensive or not. I discuss the consequences of that last claim for the view that we can form structural transparent phenomenal concepts by understanding how a given phenomenal property is embedded into a particular phenomenal structure. Moreover, this discussion has wider implications for the nature and a priori status of phenomenological reflection, conceived as a form of reflection on our own conscious experiences in order to achieve knowledge about the structure of human consciousness in general.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Transparency, Indexicality and Consciousness : Inserted Thought and the Phenomenal-Concept Approach to De Se Thoughts
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Marie Guillot, Université de Nanterre
I will use the clinical phenomenon of thought insertion as a test case for a comparison between some of the available accounts of the concept of self we use in de se thoughts, namely those thoughts we would most naturally express using the word "I". According to token-reflexive accounts, which are in some respects the most straightforward approach, de se thoughts involve a certain type of descriptive concept referring to the subject as, roughly, "the thinker of this very thought" (Higginbotham 2003, Howell 2006, García-Carpintero 2016). Inserted thoughts, I claim, are evidence against this approach. Patients with thought insertion report thoughts occurring in their stream of consciousness, but which they don't recognize as their own. On the reasonable assumption that a certain kind of epistemic transparency about the content of our own thoughts applies, this phenomenon (in subjects who are otherwise rational) warrants treating "the thinker of this very thought is thinking P" and "I am thinking P" as involving different (although co-referential) semantic contents, pace the token-reflexivist. I will suggest that thought insertion might also prove a problem case for what may be called non-egological accounts, according to which (at least some) de se thoughts do not involve an explicit representation of the self at all, but stem instead from a distinctive kind of cognitive architecture (Lewis 1979, Ninan 2013, Recanati 2007, Musholt 2013). I'll go on to argue that inserted thoughts are more easily accommodated within a third type of account. According to phenomenal accounts, (at least some) de se thoughts are anchored in phenomenal experience (Grünbaum 2012; Kapitan 2015) or, more specifically, involve a dedicated phenomenal concept (Guillot 2023). This approach is better placed to explain the difference between genuine de se thinking, and accidentally reflexive thoughts associated with thought insertion, thanks to the appeal to a substantive and distinctive source of awareness of the self which there is reason to think delusional patients may lack.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Transparency, Indexicality and Consciousness : Transparency and A Posteriori Physicalism
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Gregory Bochner, Collège de France
According to a posteriori physicalism, the apparent gap between consciousness and the physical world has its source not in the nature of consciousness (ontological gap), but only in features of the concepts we use to think about our conscious experiences (epistemic gap). It would be true that phenomenal consciousness is physical, but this would be knowable only a posteriori, due to the semantics of phenomenal concepts. While a posteriori physicalism thus postulates that the link between phenomenal and physical knowledge is in some sense opaque, Kripke had argued that phenomenal knowledge should in some sense be transparent, and recent objections to a posteriori physicalism draw on the Kripkean thesis of transparency. In this talk, I seek to disentangle two relevant transparency theses on behalf of the a posteriori physicalist: the comparative transparency of mental content ("Boghossian's transparency") (Frege, Boghossian) and the thesis that phenomenal concepts reveal the essence of the experience they denote ("revelation") (Kripke, Chalmers, Nida-Rümelin, Goff). In a first part, I present my own compatibilist response to the conflict between externalism and Boghossian's transparency. The "pragmatic two-dimensionalism" it involves – which combines ideas from Lewis, Stalnaker, and Recanati – rejects the (Fregean) claim, common to all brands of what I call "classical two-dimensionalism," that what plays the role of mode of presentation is also what fixes reference. In a second part, I compare the roles of the two transparency theses in the knowledge argument and related cases. I argue that Boghossian's transparency plays a neglected yet essential role in epistemic arguments against physicalism. The most fundamental conflict these arguments highlight is really one between Boghossian's transparency, classical two-dimensionalism, and a posteriori physicalism. In the third and final part, I argue that classical two-dimensionalism (and the way it forces us to pose the problems) is the culprit. It becomes possible to maintain Boghossian's transparency and a posteriori physicalism once we endorse the pragmatic sort of two-dimensionalism I advertize.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Transparency, Indexicality and Consciousness : Transparency Principles
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Paul Boghossian, New York University
I will look at the transparency principles that have been proposed, at the relations between them, and at the role that they play in arguments for and against various weighty philosophical positions.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Transparency, Indexicality and Consciousness : Introduction
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Cette conférence, organisée en partenariat avec l'université de Fribourg dans le cadre du projet ANR-FNS « Essential Indexicality and Thoughts about Experience » (ANR-22-CE93-0004), interrogera les relations entre trois grands thèmes de la philosophie contemporaine du langage et de l'esprit : le problème que l'indexicalité mentale pose dans une théorie de la pensée, le problème que la conscience phénoménale crée pour le matérialisme, et les différentes thèses de transparence sur la connaissance de soi et sur l'accès en première personne aux contenus mentaux.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Indexical Dynamics : Now and Then: The Dynamics of Self-Locating Beliefs
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Matheus Valente, University of Barcelona (LOGOS) & University of Valencia
It's often said within epistemology circles that self-locating beliefs about now and then change in peculiar ways incompatible with traditional Bayesian update rules, and so, that these beliefs are epistemically exceptional. The point is clear enough when we consider subjects who lose track of time - e.g. Rip van Winkle (Kaplan 1989) - and even clearer when some funny business with their memories are added to the equation, as in the famous story of Sleeping Beauty (Elga 2000). But that's like killing a fly with a bulldozer, after all, the dynamics of self-locating beliefs seems exceptional even when attention is restricted to idealised agents that are assumed to never forget any information nor to lose track of time. Such is the case of Chronos, an omniscient god in a deterministic world who not only knows the complete history of her universe but is never uncertain about what time it is. Since Chronos is de dicto omniscient, her beliefs are always entirely concentrated on one possible world. Since she's self-locating omniscient, her self-locating beliefs are, at any given time, concentrated on a single temporal location. Though Chronos is never uncertain about anything, it appears that she must be constantly shifting her self-locating beliefs just to keep up with time: when the present time is n, she believes 'now is n', a moment later when it's n+1, she instead believes 'now is n+1' etc. To use Evans' (1982) metaphor, self-locating beliefs seem to require us to run to keep still. Call the peculiar type of dynamics that even omniscient gods must subject their self-locating beliefs to Shifting (Arntzenius 2003; Bradley (2011) calls it 'Belief Mutation'; Recanati (2016) calls it 'conversion').
To account for Shifting we need to explain why Chronos knows at n that she'll believe 'now is n+1' at n+1 but still refrains from presently believing it. In other words, we need to explain why self- locating beliefs violate van Frassen's (1984) Reflection Principle which holds that we ought to defer to our future selves as experts (under the assumption that their epistemic standing is at least as good as our current one). One way to do so favoured by the majority of epistemologist is to countenance tensed propositions whose truth-values change with time (Titelbaum 2013, p. 171-278). Another way is to hold that the passage of time changes what times/events subjects are acquainted with, which then changes which de re beliefs they can hold at each time. The first camp holds that self-locating beliefs are epistemically special because their truth is tensed. The second camp holds that they so are because their accessibility is tensed. Given how easily this argument seems to roll off the tongue, one wonders whether the last decade of debates with sceptics like Cappelen & Dever (2013) and Magidor (2015) would have taken a different shape if more focus had been given to self-locating beliefs involving instead of to de se beliefs involving 'I'.
But there's an issue. Some epistemologists hold that Shifting is a particularly type of sterile belief update: when the only change in a subject's belief across times is due to Shifting, it's never rational for that subject to revise her de dicto beliefs. As Titelbaum (2013, 233) remarks, it's intuitive that "finding oneself passing through the world in exactly the way one was certain one was going to shouldn't change one's opinions about what that world is like". This suggests a different view where Shifting is not taken to be a type of belief change but instead of belief retention, a view which Prosser (2005) calls 'the
Frege-Evans dynamic theory'. On that approach, Chronos never changes any of her beliefs, and the permutations of indexicals which arise in virtue of the passage of time - now 'now', then 'then' - are really just ways of expressing a single persisting dynamic belief. If the Frege-Evans dynamic theory is tenable, we'd lose one important reason to think that self-locating beliefs are epistemically exceptional. This is so because, as I'll argue, the only puzzling cases that they would still give rise to would be ones where subjects' epistemic states become deteriorated across time due to cognitive mishaps like failures of memory or of one's tracking/discriminatory capacities. Since nobody doubts that weird things happen when our cognitive powers deteriorate, the problem of cognitive dynamics turns out to pertain less about self-locating beliefs per se than about the unsurprising fact that cognitively deteriorated subjects are epistemically exceptional.
If the Frege-Evans dynamic view can be upheld would thus have significant implications. Whether this can be done ultimately depends on what we should say about the interplay between self- location and rational action. Consider a temporal variant of Perry's famous bear attack case: Chronos intends to whistle once at all odd times and twice at all even times. Since Chronos acts differently as time passes, it seems that we must conclude that doxastic states coordinated by nothing but Shifting really change. Can the Frege-Evans dynamic view accommodate the fact that a single persisting dynamic belief might lead to distinct actions at distinct times?
My main objective in this talk is to motivate an affirmative answer. My hypothesis is that rational "changes" due only to Shifting are just as questionably a real type of change as corresponding "changes" in self-locating beliefs, and so, that the Frege-Evans dynamic view can be applied to the realm of reasons, intentions, and decision theory, just as well as it can be applied to the realm of belief and confirmation. The outcome is that when a subject's epistemic state changes only by Shifting, both their beliefs and their reasons/intentions can be said to remain stable regardless of their distinct (respective) linguistic and practical manifestations. To cash this out, I first defuse a set of cases which have taken some to think that Shifting can by itself require a revision of de dicto beliefs (Arntzenius' (2003) Prisoner, Elga's (2000) Sleeping Beauty, Shaw's (2019) forgetful god Lethe, and Topey's (forthcoming) hypoxia-affected Aisha), and argue that Shifting isn't the culprit of these cases' peculiar features. Then, I'll draw a parallel between the Frege-Evans dynamic view and recent work in the philosophy of action which holds that the distinction between intentions for the future and intentions for the present is ill-motivated (McDowell 2011, Brozzo 2021). These two philosophical debates bear promising structural analogies that have only recently started to be acknowledged. I'll deploy this analogy to argue that (1) the Frege-Evans dynamic view allows us to demystify the cognitive dynamics of self-locating beliefs, and so, that the epistemic exceptionality of self-locating beliefs must reside elsewhere (if it resides anywhere at all) and (2) that this view's credentials can be defended by showing how it fits with an independently plausible picture of how rational agents act on the basis of intentions formed at times prior to the action's execution.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Indexical Dynamics : An Occasion-Sensitive Account of the Indexical Dynamics
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Carlos Mario Márquez Sosa, Federal University of ABC/UFABC
Ludovic Soutif, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
As is well-known, Travis and his followers have argued that the individuation of thoughts is an occasion-sensitive matter (Travis 2000, 2017; Dobler 2020; see also Putnam 2002). This means that the semantic and cognitive individuation of thought-contents varies across occasions of use, the number of thought-contents expressed being relative to what is deemed more rational to understand on such and such occasions (that is, ultimately, to the agent's plans and interests). The thesis is more radical than it seems, though. It is not just a thesis about the variable (semantic or cognitive) availability of thoughts at a time or over time. It claims, more importantly, that there is no principled reason to favor one way to count thought-contents over the other (as one and the same or as two different thought-contents), because what is deemed more rational to understand on one occasion of use need not be what is deemed more rational to understand on another occasion of use.
An obvious consequence of the thesis is that the way the problem of cognitive dynamics is usually put in the literature (see Kaplan 1989: 537-8) fails to capture the phenomenon in its full complexity, for its very formulation assumes that there is a principled way to individuate indexical thoughts (beliefs) over time either semantically (via a function from contexts to contents and from contents to extensions) or cognitively (via Kaplanian characters), or both. It also assumes (wrongly, in our view) that a solution to the problem of cognitive dynamics can be provided in general terms, regardless of what is deemed more rational to understand in the specific occasions appealed to in the standard formulation of the problem.
Our talk is an attempt not only to unearth unwarranted assumptions made in the literature regarding the problem of the cognitive dynamics of indexical thoughts, but also to sketch an occasion-sensitive local solution to the problem understood in its full complexity. In our view, indexical thoughts are individuated locally, given the subject's ability to relate (at least two) occasions of use with respect to her plans and interests. Such thoughts are the outcome of dynamic and situated abilities exercised through a series of occasions that are or aren't part of the subject's rational plan. Our account will be, accordingly, sketched along the following lines: the subject's sensibility to the relation between occasions of use can give rise to the individuation of a single indexical thought, when the occasions are understood (by her) as part of a single rational plan. Otherwise, when the occasions are not related in this way, it gives rise to the individuation of different thoughts.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Indexical Dynamics : Cognitive Dynamics as Mental Vehicle Identity: A Parity Argument from Polysemy
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Michael Murez, Université de Nantes
According to Fregean theories, thinking the same thought requires thinking not only about the same referent, but also thinking about it in the same way, under the same concept. Fregean theories face 'Schiffer's Puzzle' (Schiffer, 2005; Buchanan, 2016), i.e., some thoughts have what Schiffer calls "the relativity feature": "[their] entertainment requires different people, or the same person at different times, to think of [the same referent] in different ways" (Schiffer, 2005: 138). Paradigmatic examples are provided by 'cognitive dynamics' (Kaplan, 1989): A thinker thinks of some day as "today", a day passes, and the same thinker, keeping track of time, now thinks of the same day as "yesterday". The thinker is disposed to reason diachronically according to a pattern known as 'trading on coreference' (Campbell, 1988), which is often taken to indicate redeployment of the same concept. Yet it is tempting to say that the concepts expressed by "today" and "yesterday" are different, since they play different cognitive roles. According to Schiffer (2005: 149), "[i]t's clear the Fregean theory can't accommodate the relativity feature", because contra (e.g.,) Frege (1956 [1918]) and Evans (1981), there is no plausible account of what the concept which remains the same cross-contextually, and is expressed by different indexicals, is supposed to be.
Against Schiffer and others, I defend a broadly Fregean position, which allows for diachronic identity between concepts, despite changes in (many aspects of) cognitive role and means of linguistic expression. I argue that such a position is independently motivated if, unlike traditional Fregeans, we identify concepts not with elements of content, but with 'robust' mental vehicles (Reference omitted for review). Concepts so construed are not individuated by the thinker's conception of their referent (the properties and relations they represent it as instantiating). My basic strategy for responding to Schiffer's puzzle is Fodorian in spirit (Fodor, 1990: 167): changes in a thinker's global inferential/behavioral dispositions across contexts trace back to aspects of their broader psychological state, which are not individuative of their concepts. They correspond to conceptional rather than conceptual change.
This reply to Schiffer's Puzzle faces at least three objections: i) it seems to require conceptual atomism, which is unpopular; ii) it takes at face value the possibility of diachronic trading on coreference, which is controversial (e.g., Recanati, 2021); iii) it conflicts with the plausible principle that concepts themselves change along with modes of reference determination.
In response, I will argue that i) my position is compatible with a plausible molecularist view of concepts; ii) diachronic trading on coreference based on enduring concepts, even granting it is unnecessary for assessments of rationality, is required for psychological explanation, and non-negotiable for vehicularists about concepts; iii) the empirical hypothesis that cognitive dynamics involves mere conceptional change is supported by a parity argument from cases which, I argue, analogously involve 'trading on coreference' despite change in modes of reference determination. The relevant cases, which to my knowledge have yet to be brought to bear on issues surrounding cognitive dynamics, involve regularly polysemous expressions, such as "bottle", which can mean a container or its contents. These expressions support cross-meaning anaphora, such as "Haddock gulped down the bottlei and tossed iti overboard" (Ortega-Andrés & Vicente, 2019; Quilty-Dunn, 2021). The overall shape of my argument is that there are strong benefits to analyzing such cases as involving the relativity feature and conceptual identity, and there are strong costs to rejecting a parallel treatment of prototypical cases of cognitive dynamics involving indexicals. Thus, we should adopt a unified treatment of all such cases in terms of concept/mental vehicle identity.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Indexical Dynamics : Indexical Dynamics : Belief Retention and Cognitive Significance
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Vojislav Bozickovic, University of Belgrade
In relation to Frege's claim that one can express the same thought today by means of 'yesterday' that one expressed yesterday by means of 'today', Perry remarks:
But should the Thought be the same? The belief expressed by "The midterm elections be today" on Tuesday motivates responsible citizens to go to the polls. The belief expressed by "The midterm elections be yesterday" on Wednesday will not motivate responsible voters to go to the polls. It seems the cognitive significance of the beliefs are different (Perry, J., Revisiting the Essential Indexical, 2020, 51-52).
In contrast with this, Kaplan, who once held a similar view claims:
I may be tracking the passing days very carefully. I became acquainted with the day yesterday and expressed that way of being acquainted in my use of 'today'. Assuming no recognition or tracking failures and no memory failures, I should be able to continue to have the day in mind in the same way today, though of course I will refer to it as 'yesterday'. Here we see, …, that the cognitive significance of an utterance should not be identified with linguistic meaning… We need to leave linguistic meaning and turn to industrial-strength ways of having in mind to give a proper analysis of the notions in this area. (Kaplan, 'An idea of Donnellan', 2012, 138).
In following Kaplan in that we need to turn to industrial-strength ways of having in mind since, inter alia, it is not obvious what relation between the utterances of 'today' and 'yesterday' must obtain in order to ensure the internal continuity that constitutes retaining the original belief (Kaplan, Demonstratives 1989, 537, n. 64), I argue that ways of having in mind are best spelt out in terms of (neo-)Fregean persisting modes of presentation. True, this makes them short of being explanatory of the subject's behaviour as something they are supposed to do. But, neither are, or so I shall argue, the linguistic meanings of 'today' as 'yesterday' – as alternative contenders for being the bearers of cognitive significance – fit for this role, so much emphasized by Perry. As a result, the thought that is expressed stays the same through the change of context, "despite lower-level differences" (Evans, G., The Varieties of Reference, 196).
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Indexical Dynamics : Indexical Dynamics and Composite Modes of Presentation
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Víctor M. Verdejo, Pompeu Fabra University
With roots in Frege's famous remarks (1956, 296), reflection on Rip van Winkle's fantastic story has played a key role in the philosophical study of indexical dynamics (Kaplan 1989, Perry 1997, Branquinho 2008, Ludlow 2019). Consider now the Reverse van Winkle case: Rip van Winkle falls asleep at time t and, while he feels like it's been a very long slumber, only a few seconds have actually passed when he wakes up at time t'. Suppose Rip van Winkle utters "Today is fine" both at t and t' but, while he fully accepts the associated thought at t, he hesitates at t'.
The Reverse van Winkle case shows that, if we accept the 'Intuitive Criterion of Difference' (Evans 1982), a particular understanding of the relation between indexicality and thought is wrongheaded. According to this 'linguistic' view, indexicality is a property of linguistic terms only and these terms express thoughts relative to a particular context. If this view were correct, sameness of context of utterance, indexical expression and reference should guarantee sameness of thought. However, the target case shows that the same (day-based) indexical term – "today" – and the same relevant context to refer to the same day may involve conflicting rational attitudes, and hence different thoughts. The case can be raised even if one doesn't accept (contra Perry 1997: 35-38 or Ludlow 2019: 72-75) that the first "today"-thought at t is remembered at t'. One only requires that Rip, at t', doesn't change his mind with respect to the thought expressed at t (cf. Kaplan 1989: 537-538).
We should not however haste to embrace the view that indexicality is an essential aspect of thought. If this were so, it should be possible for thoughts to be indexically individuated. Yet sometimes, as the (Reverse) van Winkle case illustrates, thoughts expressed with (same or different) indexicals change with contexts and sometimes they don't. What should be done? To analyse the target case, I will invoke a "composite mode of presentation", i.e. "a mode of presentation that, although 'static', i.e. deployed at a given time in thinking of the object, rests on distinct simultaneous relations to the object, and on distinct ways of gaining information (distinct information channels) based on these relations" (Recanati, forthcoming; see also Dickie & Rattan 2010, Recanati 2016).
Thus, in the Reverse van Winkle scenario, at t', Rip takes recourse to two different modes of presentation (MOPs) of a particular day, one based on memory or awareness of it before falling asleep, and one based on his direct awareness of the day in question. While one would typically merge these MOPs into one composite MOP to think and reason, indexically, about a day, Rip van Winkle fails to do so because of his especial predicament. Rip van Winkle has different thoughts, based on different MOPs. But these MOPs would typically constitute one and the same composite MOP in normal circumstances.
More needs to be said, however, to fully characterize the cases in which composite MOPs based on different primitive MOPs of a referent are indeed available. My proposal is that this happens when the thinker is aware of the co-referentiality of primitive MOPs. Such awareness – which can be spelled out in a number of ways – may link very different indexical and demonstrative MOPs (perceptual, testimonial, memory-based...). However, composite MOPs need not be restricted to thought expressible with indexicals or demonstratives, and may carry over to any co-referential singular and general terms. This suggests a view in which the MOPs associated with indexicals are correctly attributed to the thought itself, but where such MOPs are not so different from conventional, non-indexical MOPs. Finally, while the awareness of co-reference signals the presence of a composite MOP, there is a sense in which composite MOPs may be acknowledged whether or not a thinker – such as Rip van Winkel – is aware of the co-referentiality of their constituent MOPs. This is also the sense in which different subjects unaware of one another may express the very same thought via different utterances of "Today is fine" on the same day.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Indexical Dynamics : Indexicality's Minor Role in Thought
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
David Papineau, King's College, London
I shall appeal to teleological considerations to argue that there are no elements in thought that are simultaneously indexical and file-like. So-called perceptual demonstratives are particularly interesting in this respect.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Indexical Dynamics : Can Thoughts Point?
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
David Zapero, University of Bonn
We frequently rely on the circumstances of our utterance when making recognisable to others what object our utterance is about. We rely, for instance, on spatial proximity to an object. A suitably close object can be referred to in a way that exploits that spatial relation: it can be referred to with the help of demonstratives. The purpose of such expressions is precisely to accomplish that feat: they allow the speaker to exploit the circumstances of her utterance when making recognisable to others what she is talking about. Our ways of expressing content thus draw – in such, and other, ways – on the circumstances in which that expressing occurs. But does that mean that what one thereby expresses also draws on, and has a similar connection to, those circumstances? Is it only we speakers who point to objects when making recognisable what we are talking about – or does what we make recognisable also point to an object?
Affirmative answers to this last question have been particularly popular in recent decades. And, yet, there are reasons to think that the answer had better not be affirmative. This will, at any rate, be my first contention. If truth is to be public, thoughts cannot be the kind of thing that has a location – and cannot therefore be the kind of thing that points. They can, that is, contain no 'essentially indexical' components. My second contention will be about one of the main reasons for appealing to such thought components. This appeal has widely been taken to be required to account for certain transitions between thought and action. Nothing short of such thought components can – it is widely held – account for the way in which recognition of particular situations bear on a subject's conduct. Nothing short of a certain 'I-thought' can, for instance, account for the realization that not just anyone, but I am spilling sugar – and nothing short of such a thought can thereby move me to inspect the sugar package in my trolley. But appeal to such kinds of thoughts is only required on a certain view of the individuation of thought. It is required on a view according to which the mere conceivability of a difference between thoughts is sufficient to (always) establish such a difference. This is, however, a mistake. Or so I shall argue.
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François Recanati
Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Collège de France
Année 2023-2024
Colloque - Indexical Dynamics : Content-Bearers and Indexicality
Colloque organisé par François Recanati, Professeur du Collège de France, chaire Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit
Intervenant(s)
Tadeusz Ciecierski, University of Warsaw
One potential conservative reaction to the concept of indexicality of content involves a theory that treats indexicality as a property inherent to content-bearers. While this view aligns intuitively with linguistic cases, as indexicality is commonly seen as a property of expressions, it requires further elucidation when applied to intentional (mental) states as content-bearers. In this paper, I aim to present a theory that elucidates the indexicality of attitudes and other mental states by examining the properties of the bearers or vehicles of content.
The theory I shall present departs from an account of indexicality rooted in Frege's philosophy, specifically a hybrid expression view (cf. Frege, 1956). Various versions of this view (cf. Künne, 1992; Künne, 2010; Textor, 2007, 2015; Kripke, 2008; Penco, 2013; Ciecierski, 2019) share the common feature of conceiving content-bearers as complex objects. These objects, in addition to narrowly conceived components (linguistic expressions in the case of utterances or mental representations/forms in the case of mental states), consist of contextual elements such as the speaker, time of utterance, or place of utterance. Recognizing the differences in these content-bearers allows for the expression of a single standard and non-indexical content through appropriately contextually coordinated bearers, while different non-indexical contents are expressible by uncoordinated bearers. One potential advantage of this theory is its uniform treatment of linguistic and mental indexicality.
However, the theory is not immune to objections (cf. Perry, 1977, 491; Kaplan, 1989, 538). A notable challenge arises in explaining the intuition that an individual who loses track of time, like Rip van Winkle, shares the same thought when considering that today is sunny (on a day d in 1789) and when thinking that yesterday was sunny (on a day d' in 1800). One response to this challenge (cf. Tichy, 1986, 40; Textor, 2011, 168) suggests that a person who loses track of time fails to accurately capture the content of the thought that yesterday was sunny (on a day d' in 1800). While successful in addressing the challenge, this response rejects the initial intuition entirely and contradicts the idea of the transparency of mental content.
To address this problem, I propose the internalistic version of the hybrid expression view of indexicality. While the standard hybrid expression view adopts an externalistic perspective, claiming that a hybrid expression (content-bearer) consists of a vehicle and an aspect of the relevant externally existing context of utterance (Externalistic Hybridity Claim), the internalistic version posits that a hybrid expression consists of a vehicle and an aspect of the relevant mental representation of a possible context of utterance (Internalistic Hybridity Claim). Accepting Internalistic Hybridity allows for a nuanced treatment of cases where individuals are "lost in time." For instance, Rip van Winkle, while entertaining the thought that yesterday was sunny, grasps the content of the hybrid representation consisting of a vehicle (the mental counterpart of "yesterday") and the representation of the time of utterance corresponding to d+1 1789. Consequently, he fails to grasp the content that it was sunny on d'-1 1800, but he apprehends a different yet related content. His mistake in content attribution is a result of a factual error—selecting the wrong context as actual. This analysis aligns with the intuitive transparency of mental content: Rip van Winkle grasps the appropriate content and maintains a disposition to differentiate between it and the content expressed had the time of utterance been located on a specific day in 1800.
After presenting the view, in the final sections of the paper, I will argue that Internalistic Hybridity is consistent with direct reference.
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