Colloques du Collège de France - Collège de France

François Recanati

Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit

Collège de France

Année 2024-2025

Colloque - Discourse Files

Variables Keep Them(selves) separate

Gabor Brody

Yale University

Résumé

Discourse referents are "mental files" insofar as they are mental representations that function like variables: they architecturally separate addresses from contents. I argue for a construal of discourse referents in which they are not mental files in other respects. First, discourse referents are not addressed by sortal, kind, or noun-type descriptive information; consequently, they cannot account for developmental phenomena such as Mutual Exclusivity. Second, unlike mental files, discourse referents are components of the grammatical system rather than the general belief system. Third, unlike mental files, discourse referents cannot be merged or linked via identity statements.

Gabor Brody

Gabor Brody is a Research Scientist and Lecturer at Yale University, working at the the Department of Psychology, affiliated with the Department of Linguistics and the Program in Cognitive Science. His work explores infants', children's, and adults' ability to keep track of and communicate about objects, concepts, and agents.

François Recanati

Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit

Collège de France

Année 2024-2025

Colloque - Discourse Files

Discourse Referents as Mental Files

Karen Lewis

Barnard College, Columbia University

Résumé

In previous work, I argue that discourse referents—devices for tracking objects under discussion in discourse—are best understood as mental files: vehicles for tracking the same object in cognition independently of any particular descriptive content. Mental files are private by nature; I treat discourse referents in the public, shared conversational context as intersubjective, coordinated, temporary files. On the proposed view, discourse referents are ways of cognizing content rather than contents themselves. Discourse referent mental files are (among other things) characterized by their role in non-satisfactional or pseudo-singular way of thinking. However, unlike the mental files of singular thought, discourse referents are not typically satisfied by a single, specific object (though they can be). Accordingly, I treat the contents of indefinite sentences and sentences containing expressions anaphoric on indefinites as having existential content. In this talk, I address the question of how to make sense of treating existential, descriptive content as being cognized in a pseudo-singular fashion. I argue that while sentences containing indefinite descriptions typically trigger the creation of a discourse referent, they are not themselves cognized in a pseudo-singular way. By contrast, sentences containing anaphoric expressions (definites and pronouns) contain pseudo-singular restrictors that bridge the gap between the pseudo-singular form and the descriptive content.

Karen Lewis

Karen Lewis is an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Barnard College, Columbia University. She works primarily in the philosophy of language, on topics such as context-sensitivity, discourse referents, anaphora, dynamic pragmatics, counterfactual conditionals, and the pragmatics of non-paradigmatic conversations, among other things.

François Recanati

Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit

Collège de France

Année 2024-2025

Colloque - Discourse Files

Types of Entity Representations in MSDRT

Hans Kamp

University of Stuttgart

Résumé

MSDRT (Mental State Discourse Representation Theory) has developed a number of different Types of Entity Representations (its term for what is referred to by others as Mental Files). The different ER Types are for different kinds of entities, e.g. fictional entities as opposed to entities in the real world, or for events, states and actions of various kinds as distinct from physical objects. The talk will be primarily concerned with the different forms of these different Types of ERs and the motivations for them.

Hans Kamp

Hans Kamp was born, and got his education up to and including the MA, in the Netherlands. After a PhD in Philosophy at UCLA on formal properties of Priorean Tense Logic, his work turned increasingly to model-theoretic semantics of natural language, following his Ph.D. supervisor Richard Montague. In the late seventies and early eighties Kamp developed Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), which, together with Heim's File Change Semantics, was the first formally worked out approach to the semantics of discourse. A primary current interest is the development of Mental State DRT, an extension of DRT in which files play a central part.

François Recanati

Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit

Collège de France

Année 2024-2025

Colloque - Discourse Files

Discourse Files and Human Memory Systems

Ellen Lau

University of Maryland

Résumé

Two ideas characterize many discussions of discourse files or discourse referents. One is that they are only temporary, serving as mental proxies for individuals only across some segment of discourse. Dissociations observed in many forms of amnesia are consistent with the idea that distinct circuits support indexing of individual representations within the current context vs. long-term. Neighboring regions of the inferior parietal cortex show fMRI responses during both visual working memory tasks and language comprehension tasks, and might support a common structured representation of the current scene or situation, to which individual object representations are temporarily indexed. Solving the different problems of long-term indexing requires different regions, including the hippocampus. The second idea is that discourse referents are in some way not actually referential, and that this explains certain linguistic patterns observed with common nouns, as well as their use in discussing hypothetical or fictional objects. I will dispute this second idea. Many classic puzzles of common noun reference disappear if nouns are taken to function as nonsingular names, rather than predicates (Geach, 1962). And the theory of instance-of-kind conceptual structure (Prasada 2016, in press) suggests that an instance-of-kind concept affords reference to the (potentially infinite) instances of a kind, independent of physical acquaintance with them, or whether they are hypothetical vs. actual. With such a non-predicative theory of noun meaning, we can therefore adopt a view where the way in which individual representations are indexed differs from the current context to long-term knowledge, but where the logic of reference is the same throughout.

Ellen Lau

Ellen Lau is an Associate Professor in Linguistics and Neuroscience and Cognitive Science at the University of Maryland, where she has been on the faculty since 2011. She co-directs the KIT-UMD Magnetoencephalography lab, and her research uses behavioral and neurophysiological measures to investigate language processes and representations. In recent years her work has explored the architecture of lexical knowledge, and mental representations of individuals, in psychological and neural models of language.

François Recanati

Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit

Collège de France

Année 2024-2025

Colloque - Discourse Files

François Recanati : Introduction

Dario Mantovani

Droit, culture et société de la Rome antique

Collège de France

Année 2025-2026

Colloque - In Margine. La philologie des paratextes et ses enjeux. Droit, littératures, religion : Dario Mantovani

Conclusion

Dario Mantovani

Droit, culture et société de la Rome antique

Collège de France

Année 2025-2026

Colloque - In Margine. La philologie des paratextes et ses enjeux. Droit, littératures, religion : « Il nome suo nessun saprà… ». Mais personne n'en mourra

Session 3 : Religion

Présidente de séance : Muriel Debié (École pratique des hautes études)

François Déroche

Professeur du Collège de France

Dario Mantovani

Droit, culture et société de la Rome antique

Collège de France

Année 2025-2026

Colloque - In Margine. La philologie des paratextes et ses enjeux. Droit, littératures, religion : Paratexts in the Caucasian Albanian Palimpsests of Mt Sinai: Forms and Functions

Session 3 : Religion

Présidente de séance : Muriel Debié (École pratique des hautes études)

Jost Gippert

Universität Hamburg

Dario Mantovani

Droit, culture et société de la Rome antique

Collège de France

Année 2025-2026

Colloque - In Margine. La philologie des paratextes et ses enjeux. Droit, littératures, religion : La mise en scène des Évangiles. Remarques sur les rapports entre sacralisation et paratextualité

Session 3 : Religion

Présidente de séance : Muriel Debié (École pratique des hautes études)

Martin Wallraff

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Dario Mantovani

Droit, culture et société de la Rome antique

Collège de France

Année 2025-2026

Colloque - In Margine. La philologie des paratextes et ses enjeux. Droit, littératures, religion : Les notes marginales de Proclus aux commentaires de Syrianus sur les orphica

Session 3 : Religion

Présidente de séance : Muriel Debié (École pratique des hautes études)

Philippe Hoffmann

EPHE, Membre de l'Institut