Pierre Jacob – författare

Ways of seeing is a book about human vision. It results from the collaboration between a world famous cognitive neuroscientist and an eminent philosopher. In the past forty years, cognitive neuroscience has made many startling discoveries about the human brain, and about the human visual system in particular. This book brings many recent empirical findings, from electrophysiological recordings in animals, the neuropsychological examination of human patients, psychophysics, and developmental cognitive psychology, to bear on questions traditionally addressed by philosophers. What is the meaning of the English verb 'to see'? How does visual perception yield knowledge of the world? How does visual perception relate to thought? What is the role of conscious visual experience in visually guided actions? How does seeing actions relate to seeing objects? In the process the book provides a new assessment of the 'two visual systems' hypothesis, according to which the human visual system comprises two anatomical pathways with separable visual functions. The first truly interdisciplinary book about human vision, it will be of interest to students and researchers in many areas of cognitive science and the philosophy of mind.

The main function of mentalizing is to provide human adults with intuitive higher-order beliefs about others' mental states. Behavioral evidence for false-belief attribution has been widely regarded as the hallmark of an attributor's mentalistic expectations about an agent's instrumental action. As it turns out, the developmental investigation of children's capacity to attribute false beliefs to others has yielded discrepant findings. While preschoolers have been shown to fail verbal false-belief tasks, findings based on non-verbal tests suggests that preverbal infants expect an agent to act in accordance with the content of her belief. Why? This volume addresses this experimental discrepancy by offering a pragmatic explanation of the failure of preschoolers on verbal false-belief tasks. Further findings also show that preverbal infants appropriately respond to the presence of ostensive cues whereby the agent of a non-verbal communicative action (pointing, for example) provides them with evidence of her communicative intention. Overall, the developmental evidence calls for a biological phylogenetic account of the human capacity to mentalize: human children could not be taught to mentalize by knowledgeable adults unless they could already mentalize. Rather, the evolutionary ancestors of current human infants were selected for their capacity to mentalize. Human Mentalizing: Its Scope and Limits also explores the complex relationship between the human capacity to mentalize and the human capacity to attribute reasons to self or others for the purpose of explaining or justifying one's own or another's thoughts or actions. An objective reason is not a mental state: it is a fact that supports an epistemic or a practical conclusion. The book argues that a necessary (though not a sufficient) condition for the phylogenetic and ontogenetic emergence of the capacity for reason-attribution is the human capacity for verbal communicative interactions, i.e. the capacity for interactive mentalizing.

Some of a person's mental states have the power to represent real and imagined states of affairs: they have semantic properties. What Minds Can Do has two goals: to find a naturalistic or non-semantic basis for the representational powers of a person's mind, and to show that these semantic properties are involved in the causal explanation of the person's behaviour. In the process, this 1997 book addresses issues that are central to much contemporary philosophical debate. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy of mind and of language, cognitive science, and psychology.

Some of a person's mental states have the power to represent real and imagined states of affairs: they have semantic properties. What Minds Can Do has two goals: to find a naturalistic or non-semantic basis for the representational powers of a person's mind, and to show that these semantic properties are involved in the causal explanation of the person's behaviour. In the process, this 1997 book addresses issues that are central to much contemporary philosophical debate. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in philosophy of mind and of language, cognitive science, and psychology.

Pierre Jacob est l''un de nos (rares) philosophes analytiques. Son livre, publié simultanément en anglais par Cambridge University Press et en français, entreprend de résoudre deux questions:La première est un dilemme : si d''une part les choses ont un sens et si d''autre part nos représentations sont des processus cérébraux dotés de propriétés sémantiques. La seconde question relève du problème corps/esprit : nos représentations peuvent-elles expliquer nos comportements ? Pierre Jacob montre comment la solution du dilemme précédent permet de donner une réponse affirmative à cette question. En même temps qu''il apporte une contribution originale, ce livre offre un exposé magistral de l''état des discussions sur ces questions en philosophie analytique. Pierre Jacob, philosophe, est directeur de recherche au C. N. R. S..