Perspectival Thought: A Plea for Moderate Relativism

by François Recanati

Our thought and talk are situated. They do not take place in a vacuum but always in a context, and they always concern an external situation relative to which they are to be evaluated. Since that is so, François Recanati argues, our linguistic and mental representations alike must be assigned two layers of the explicit content, or lekton , is relative and perspectival, while the complete content, which is absolute, involves contextual factors in addition to what is explicitly represented. Far from reducing to the context-independent meaning of the sentence-type or, in the psychological realm, to the "narrow" content of mental representations, the lekton is a level intermediate between context-invariant meaning and full propositional content. Recognition of that intermediate level is the key to a proper understanding of context-dependence in language and thought.

Going beyond the usual discussions of indexicality and unarticulated constituents in the philosophy of language, Recanati turns to the philosophy of mind for decisive arguments in favour of his approach. He shows, first, that the lekton is the notion of content we need if we are to properly understand the relations between perception, memory, and the imagination, and second, that the psychological 'mode' is what determines the situation the lekton is relative to. In this framework he provides a detailed account of de se thought and the first person point of view. In the last part of the book, Recanati discusses the special freedom we have, in discourse and thought, to shift the situation of evaluation. He traces that freedom to a special mode--the anaphoric mode--which enables us to go beyond the egocentric stage of pre-human thought.

Genres: Philosophy

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 27, 2007

About the author

François Recanati is a French analytic philosopher and research fellow at the College de France, and at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Many of his works focus on the philosophy of language and mind.

Reviews

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m so jealous of this guy. FR defends a 3-stage view of content including a lekton, broadly or narrowly individuated, which is roughly the psychological content, which FR calls the explicit content, and which factors everything that is, well, explicitly articulated in the thinkers thought, and, on the other hand, a complete content, or Austinian proposition, which includes the elements (Perry’s unarticulated constituents) which determine the content, but, FR argues, are no part of it. The unarticulated constituent determine the content either externally (by picking up on salient aspects of the context) or internally (by anaphora on other parts of the thinkers cognitive life). FR further uses Searles notion of mode to qualify the way the content is presented (again, not a part of the content itself), explains how it shifts differently from the articulated constituents of the content. In the final pages of the book, FR explains beautifully how cross-modal ways of anaphorically picking up on a contextually (but not indexically) determined reference inhibits its cognitive significance: if I hang up the phone after a discussion with someone X knows about the weather at some place I’m not, and tell X “it’s raining”, without articulating “where he is”, I anaphorically pick up on an unarticulated constituent that is determined externally.

This is a good book, which really takes off in the final chapters. Some of the discussion of Lewisian possible worlds semantics flew a bit over my head. And as usual with FR, even if you don’t like the book, you’ll like the bibliography