François Recanati

Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit

Collège de France

Année 2024-2025

Conférence - David Papineau - Thoughts and Things : Ecological Minds

David Papineau

Département de philosophie, King's College London

Résumé :

Humans and other animals have minds because reality is predictable. The world is full of items that behave in regular ways. Our minds lock onto these items so that we can anticipate events and act accordingly.

The central role of thoughts is thus to refer to items in the world. I shall argue on this basis that reference is the only notion of semantic content we need.

A long tradition of philosophical analysis holds we need a semantics for senses as well as referents. Frege held that we need senses to explain how subjects can erroneously disbelieve true identity claims like Hesperus = Phosphorous.

However, an alternative is simply to posit that such subjects have two distinct vehicles of thought that are semantically alike. We should view "Frege cases" (of disbelieved true identities) as no less breakdowns of rationality than "confused ideas" (that conflate two referents under a single mental name).

Not all cognition is directly relevant to practical action. Even so, the approach to semantic content that starts with action can be extended to all species of thought.

David Papineau :

David Papineau a occupé plusieurs postes académiques aux universités de Reading, Macquarie, Birkbeck London et Cambridge. Depuis 1990, il poursuit sa carrière à King's College London et, pendant la période allant de 2015 à 2020, il a enseigné un semestre de chaque année académique au Graduate Center de la City University de New York. Il a été président de la British Society for Philosophy of Science, la Mind Association et l'Aristotelian Society. Parmi ses ouvrages, on peut citer Theory and Meaning (1980), Philosophical Naturalism (1992), Thinking about Consciousness (2002), Philosophical Devices (2012), Knowing the Score (2017) et The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience (2021). À l'heure actuelle, il s'intéresse au concept de causalité.