Tools for Making Meaning

This year, the Jean Nicod Prize is awarded to Professor Elisabeth Camp (Rutgers University), one of the main world experts in philosophy of mind. She seeks to explain how human cognition and speech can be at once systematic, abstract, and truth-conditional, and also contextualy varying, holistic, and expressive. 

 

Ordinary and theoretical discourse is rife with perspectival talk about intuitive thought. We coach our children to "see things from the other's point of view" ; bemoan clashing "worldviews" that mire politics in discord ; celebrate art and history for articulating alternative "standpoints" ; and report flashes of scientitic "insight" where the pieces fall into place. What motivates such talk, even about entirely non-perceptual domains ? 
Pr. Camp will offer her theory in a series of 4 lectures in English on "Framing for Perspective". They will take place in person only and will be subject to availability at the École normale supérieure. 

 

Tuesday 3 November - 2pm

Presentation of the Jean-Nicod Prize and cocktail after the conference

Ecole normale supérieure, Salle Jaurès, 29 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris
 

Ordinary and theoretical discourse is rife with perspectival talk about intuitive thought. We coach our children to ‘see things from the other’s point of view’ ; bemoan clashing ‘worldviews’ that mire politics in discord ; celebrate art and history for articulating alternative ‘standpoints’; and report flashes of scientific ‘insight’ where the pieces fall into place. What motivates such talk, even about entirely non-perceptual domains? Perspectival thought contrasts with paradigmatic cases of propositional thought in being open-ended, densely relational, context-responsive, and immediately compelling. I propose that these qualities are functional features rather than implementational bugs, and that much of our communication is designed to express and coordinate perspectives. 
On my view, a perspective is a cognitive superstructure: a set of values and expectations that maintains interpretive coherence over many representations of a target domain by regulating how an agent attends, connects, and responds to stimuli. On their own, perspectives are implicit and amorphous. We often turn to frames – consciously accessible objects like maps, mantras, metaphors – to express and induce perspectives, and to refine them into more well-regimented forms. When they work well, perspectives and frames equip us to reliably assimilate information and respond flexibly to rapidly changing environments in terms of our operative interests. In this sense, they are an integral aspect of our rationality. But they can also trap us within simulacra that blind us to their inaptness and coerce us into complicity with malign ideologies. 

Thursday 5 November - 2pm

Ecole normale supérieure, Salle Evariste Galois, immeuble Rataud, 45 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris

Perspectival thought is like perception in being richly relational. In actual perception, ‘point of view’ is literal: a concrete location from which an agent can access many objects and features arrayed in relative distances and directions. In language, indexical terms like ‘here’, ‘tasty’, and ‘must’ fix contextually variable parameters that structure abstract possibilities and locate an agent within those structures. In this sense, we can think of a perspective as a set of background assumptions for ordering and evaluating circumstances. However, the propositional format of language leaves this relational structure implicit, and presents information in discrete chunks. By contrast, maps show dense relations in an explicit, integrated way. For abstract topics like politics and plans, we can display relational structure through diagrams and flow charts. Exploiting representations that encode such relations directly brings a functional benefit in scaffolding accurate informational integration and efficient navigation. But it also raises a correlative risk: of projecting the representation’s structure onto a target domain that is in fact much messier. 

 

Tuesday 10 November - 2pm

Ecole normale supérieure, Salle Dussane, 45 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris 

Perspectival thought is like perception in presenting the world in immediate, relevant terms. In perception, ‘affordances’ present an agent with robust objects and kinds that elicit responses like grasping, fear, and curiosity. In language, labels like ‘socket wrench’, ‘bartender’, and ‘riot’ parse the world into categories that purport to capture what kinds of things there are and why they matter. In this sense, we can think of a perspective as a set of assumptions for classifying objects in terms of operative interests and expectations about when features co-occur. Thick terms like ‘brassy’ and slurs like ‘libtard’ illustrate labels’ power, beyond categorization and inference, to regulate attention, elicit emotion, and motivate action. At a more global scale, mantras like ‘Make America Great Again’ offer heuristics for focusing attention and orienting response to situations that threaten to overwhelm us with informational complexity and emotional intensity. Labels and mantras move us, then, less by contributing information than by helping us to ignore noise, in order to keep track of what really matters. Again, however, this benefit raises a correlative risk: of epistemic, practical, and moral myopia. 

 

Thursday 12 November - 2pm

Ecole normale supérieure, Salle Evariste Galois, immeuble Rataud, 45 rue d’Ulm, 75005 Paris

Perspectival thought is like perception in connecting many bits of information into cohesive wholes. In perception, ‘Gestalts’ synthesize disparate elements into holistic unities, often ‘locking in’ with a phenomenologically palpable tipping point that is only partly under voluntary control. In language, generics like ‘Women are empathetic’ articulate simple, flexible schemas for comprehending complex bodies of information by appealing to hidden grounds. In this sense, we can think of a perspective as a set of background assumptions about why things hang together and change in the ways they do. Stories impose schemas with a different structure, linking sequences of events into arcs defined in terms of their ends. Metaphors like ‘George is a bootlicking lapdog’ and ‘Genes are selfish’ illustrate frames’ potential to alter the evaluative and predictive significance of basic bits of information even without purporting to truth, just by shifting interpretive structure. While their holistic structure can make generics, stories, and metaphors generative guides to inquiry and action, it also raises the risk of seduction: conspiracy theories and self-fulfilling prophecies that seem like they must be true just because they feel so satisfying. 

The Jean Nicod Prize is funded by la Fondation Meyer pour le développement culturel et artistique and la Fondation CNRS, with the support of the Ecole Normale Supérieure ENS, the Université Paris Sciences et Lettres PSL and of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales EHESS.