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Vincent Descombes
a
École des hautes études en sciences sociales
b
École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Directeur d'études, 54 Raspail Boulevard,
75006, Paris, France E-mail:

Available online: 17 May 2006

To cite this article: Vincent Descombes (2004): Replies, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 47:3, 267-288

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 Inquiry, 47, 267–288

Replies1
Vincent Descombes
École des hautes études en sciences sociales

I will begin with Taylor’s and Richard Rorty’s papers since they give us much
of the background that is needed to appreciate the points to be discussed. As
they have noticed, my general aim in The Mind’s Provisions was to argue that
philosophers of mind, if they are serious about the external conditions of our
‘mindedness’ will need to spell out these conditions in terms of institutions.
So they will have to add to their treatises on the mind a chapter covering the
phenomenon of what has been called, in the German tradition, the ‘objective
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mind’. It is not an easy notion to introduce. Obviously, it will be useless

unless we are able to sort out an ‘objective’ dimension from a ‘subjective’ one
in the way we exercise our mental (intellective) powers.
Now the more interested we are in the phenomena of ‘objective mind’ the
more we will want to understand its complementary domain, namely the
phenomenon of ‘subjective mind’. It seems to me this is precisely the task that
both John Haugeland and Robert Brandom want us to take up. Starting from
premises that are not altogether dissimilar, both end up addressing the same
paradox of human freedom. ‘Paradoxically, our freedom consists in our
capacity to bind ourselves, to commit ourselves, to undertake responsibilities’
(Brandom). ‘When Luther concluded his theses with “Here I stand, I can do
not other”, he was neither claiming nor exhibiting any lack of freedom, but
rather manifesting it to the full… To take such a stand is freely to impose upon
oneself binding requirements or standards’ (Haugeland). But this is also
where they part ways since Brandom wants the act of committing oneself to
be a social act (a way of entering into a social status) whereas Haugeland says
that taking a stand does not belong to the social sphere, in which conformity
to external norms is what matters. So it seems that I will not be able to join
forces with both Brandom and Haugeland. However, I do not think it is
necessary to take sides with one against the other, since I will provide a
different formulation of the disputed point.
Before delving any further into the matter of our philosophy of mind, it
might be useful to comment briefly on the two Hegelian terms that will be
recurrent in the discussion. They are not the sorts of words that can be
explained starting from scratch, so I will quote here the English translation of
a text in which Hegel describes the two finite forms of what he calls der Geist
(as was hinted at by Taylor in his monograph on Hegel, we may be interested

DOI 10.1080/00201740410006375 # 2004 Taylor & Francis

 268 Vincent Descombes

in these two forms while safely leaving aside the third form of ‘absolute
mind’, in which der Geist is supposed to be both finite and infinite).2 When
the mind exists ‘in the form of self-relation’ it is to be called ‘subjective
mind’. When the mind exists ‘in the form of reality’, i.e., ‘in a world produced
and to be produced by it’, it is to be called ‘objective mind’. Hegel goes on to
say: the reality he calls ‘an objective mind’ is nothing but freedom presenting
itself ‘in the shape of necessity’. It seems to me that such a combination of
freedom and necessity raises precisely the question both Haugeland and
Brandom want to address: How are we to explain the possibility for a free
agent to impose upon himself the necessity of doing something (for instance,
of drawing a necessary consequence from a given set of premises)?
As my translator points out, it is not easy to decide whether to stick to the
word ‘mind’ in order to translate both the French ‘esprit’ and the German
‘Geist’ or to switch when needed from the perspective of ‘mind’ to that of
‘spirit’.3 First, let us examine why ‘esprit’ is the right word for translating
‘Geist’. I have pointed out in my book that Hegel himself had referred the
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German reader to Montesquieu’s writings on the ‘spirit’ (esprit) of laws and

institutions. Now Montesquieu did not just mean that it was possible to
understand the legislation and the whole culture of a particular people as
based on principles, i.e., as having an intellectual content. He went so far as to
write that historical peoples have distinct ‘ways of thinking’, like individuals
do.4 So we may follow him in distinguishing between individual and social
ways of thinking. And we might use as a criterion for that distinction the
Wittgensteinian test: Could I be alone in thinking that way?5 Then we could
allocate to our ‘subjective’ forms of thought the ideas and interests that I can
be alone in forming and entertaining, to the ‘objective spirit’ the system of
common ideas and thought-forms that constitutes the ‘ideology’ in George
Dumézil’s and Louis Dumont’s sense of the global society to which we
belong.
It might be more acceptable to translate ‘der objective Geist’ into English
as ‘objective spirit’. However, this will not do for the time being, since we
want to discuss the status of the Geisteswissenchaften. According to Hegel
himself, das Geistige should be understood in the sense in which French
authors speak of ‘le moral’ as opposed to ‘le physique.6 It follows that
Geisteswissenchaften are nothing other than ‘les sciences morales’, or moral
sciences. As was mentioned in the foreword of the original French edition,
The Mind’s Provisions is only the first half of a larger work whose ultimate
end is to spell out the conceptual requirements that the social sciences – the
moral sciences exploring all aspects of das Geistige – put on our concept of
mind. I take it that it is our job, as philosophers, to work out the ‘logical
geography’ (to use Ryle’s and Taylor’s term) of human action and mental
phenomena. In this respect, the sub-title, ‘A critique of cognitivism’, should
not suggest that I see such a critique as an autonomous task. As Taylor has
 Replies 269

pointed out, there was in my undertaking a pars construens as well as a pars

destruens. Most of the ‘negative work’ is done in the first Volume, the one
that has been translated as The Mind’s Provisions. For the ‘constructive work’
I will have to refer the reader to the second Volume, entitled in French Les
institutions du sens [The Institutions of Meaning].

Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor offers an excellent summary of the whole argument I have
tried to present. Of course, it must have been easy for him to apprehend my
meaning if only because I had drawn so heavily upon his own work. As soon
as the readers reach Chapter 2, they find a reference to Taylor’s first book The
Explanation of Behavior7 at the bottom of my presentation of the method-
ological debate (via G. H. von Wright’s use of it in his Explanation and
Understanding8). And when they come to the final chapters of Les institutions
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du sens, they are introduced to the notion of ‘objective spirit’ through a

Taylorian argument – common meanings and beliefs are needed for the
performance of cultural cooperative acts (such as voting, negotiating, or even
dancing together). I will take up four of his comments.

I. The Human Sciences

Following Taylor, I have argued that we must indeed distinguish between
Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften, but that the line dividing
these kinds of inquiry does not separate those areas where we can look for
‘explanatory’ natural laws from other areas where all we can do is to
empathize with the entities we encounter (insofar as they are human beings). I
think we should not start with the traditional opposition between erklären and
verstehen as it has been explained in the Hermeneutic school because that
explanation concedes too much ground to the Mill-Carnap-Hempel brand of
epistemology. Rather, we should adopt a philosophy of science large enough
to allow for various kinds of causal explanations. This was of course one of
Taylor’s main points in his discussion of Behaviorism. Functional expla-
nations are perfectly respectable ways of accounting for phenomena,
provided we do not try to turn them into mechanical explanations in disguise.
By deciding to look at something as a functional system, we agree to
‘understand’ its functioning in the light of its own goals and its capacities to
achieve them. Of course the assignation of goals to a system is not yet the
ascription to it of intentions, and thereby of a mental power to form intentions.
Nevertheless we are here on the right track since we have already got rid of
Cartesian dualism. Not all functional systems are animate systems (i.e., those
that have their own goals). Not all animals are endowed with intellectual or
 270 Vincent Descombes

rational powers. However, the condition for applying mental concepts to an

agent will be that it shows at least as much complexity in its behaviour and in
the environment it inhabits as a living creature does. So the question is not
how to locate reasons in a world of efficient causes, but how to locate
rationality and intellectuality in the regions of world we want to describe in
‘teleological-intentional terms’. This remark has some bearings on the issue
of subjectivity. I will have more to say about subjectivity below, but I would
like first to add something about the similarity between Structuralism and
Cognitivism, since it was actually my starting point when I began to work on
the two volumes.

II. Structuralism in the Light of Cognitivism

For people (like me) who have been through a previous attempt at providing a
naturalist basis to the human sciences without reducing cultural differences to
natural phenomena, it should have been obvious that the cognitivist program
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raised the same great expectations and hopes that the project of a structuralist
approach to human phenomena did in the 1950s and 1960s. I am aware that
today, for most philosophers, the label ‘Structuralism’ will carry with it the
vague notion of a kind of linguistic philosophy (or post-philosophy), to be
found in works like Foucault’s Archeology of Knowledge or in Derrida’s On
Grammatology. These books do not conjure images of philosophers uniting
their forces to contribute to a scientific study of the mind, quite the contrary.
But that variety of linguistic philosophy belongs to another time. It was no
longer rooted in the tradition of the Enlightenment and did not share the
project of carrying out a scientific and encyclopedic study of the human mind,
following in the steps of Montesquieu, Condorcet, Durkheim or Mauss. Now,
the genuine structuralist project initially sought to define the proper way to
study the human mind in all its manifestations (languages, myths, kinship
systems, ritual practices, cultural beliefs). In trying to do so, it combined two
conflicting orientations.
First, structuralism was a vigorous rejection of atomistic or associationist
views in both sociology and psychology. A ‘structural’ method of analysis
meant a holistic or systemic approach to phenomena. Thus we find Lévi-
Strauss explaining how his analysis of kinship rules rests upon the principle
that ‘the whole can be given before the parts’. Since Lévi-Strauss added that
the whole can be given before the parts of the social system because it is given
as an intellectual principle and therefore given in the minds of the people
sharing common rules of matrimony, he was assuming our current conception
of mind was compatible with his claims. It is as if social anthropologists were
asking us, philosophers, to come up with a better logical ‘geography’ of
mental concepts in order to account for the mental presence of such ‘struc-
tural principles’ as the rules of marriage. Now, in my view, we do have the
 Replies 271

conceptual resources for accepting their challenge, since we can make room
for their insights by re-interpreting such notions as ‘the spirit of laws’ and
‘objective spirit’.
Structuralism also hoped to develop a scientific conception of the mind by
resorting to advance in psychology. At that time, the advance was supposed to
come from cybernetics and the theory of self-regulating systems. Obviously,
the ‘whole’ as given in the mind could not be located in the consciousness of
the individual agents since the rules were not present to the mind of the
participants. On the other hand, nobody wanted to locate the rules within a
‘collective subjective consciousness’. At that time, Lévi-Strauss could not use
anything like the analogy of Artificial Intelligence. Still, he wanted to assign
the application of the social rules to a sub-personal level of the mental
functioning of the person. Lacking the model of the computer, Lévi-Strauss
looked toward the psychological theories that were available to him and made
a misleading reference to the unconscious activity of the mind. The reference
to Freudian theories was misleading because what he had in mind was not
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psychic repression, but the familiar fact that people are able to apply rules, for
instance linguistic rules, without having to think about it.
At the ‘unconscious level’ of our mind, rules were supposed to apply
themselves without the conscious agent being in charge of the work. This
explains the vogue at the time for such enigmatic sayings as ‘the myths are
thinking each other’ (somehow without us) or ‘the symbols circulate by
themselves’ (without intentional agents planning their own contributions to
the exchange). Post-structuralist authors have kept the enigmas of a sub-
personal life of the mind without taking the trouble to find plausible models
for the mechanisms that are supposed to produce the surface phenomena of
meaning and intentionality. At that point, structuralism was no longer an
intellectual project. It had been reduced to a collection of slogans.

III. Subjectivity
I welcome the way Taylor has formulated the reasons we want to have an
idiom for subjectivity in the first place. Let’s define the ‘subjective dimen-
sion’ of a concept by the fact that it will be expressed by a ‘significance-
predicate’ (such as ‘dangerous’ or ‘attractive’). A ‘significance-predicate’ is
meant to characterize something in terms of its ‘relevance or meaning’ for an
agent. This is, more or less, the sense in which the phrase ‘für sich’ is used by
philosophers who have been educated in the Hegelian tradition.
The next step is to distinguish two kinds of subjectivity: first, the ‘caring for
oneself’ that can be exhibited by Taylor’s tiger when it gets interested in my
cow; second, the intellectual life of agents ‘who are capable of forming
descriptions of the things they encounter’. At the first level, agents are
responding to things in a ‘purely inarticulate’ way. At the second level –
 272 Vincent Descombes

which is the level of ‘full-blown intentionality’ – the agents will be able to

take responsibility for the rationality of their moves, since they will use the
descriptions they form in their practical inferences.
With these two levels of ‘meanings for the agent’, the inarticulate one and
the discursive one, it seems to me that we have all that is needed to account
for the personal appropriation of human rules by human agents. Since human
rules are conventional, they cannot get implemented by themselves – people
need to be taught to follow them. But in order for such a teaching to be
possible at all, there has to be, as we know from Wittgenstein, ‘a way of
grasping a rule which is not an interpretation’ (Philosophical Investigations,
§201). In terms of the distinction just introduced, we could say that we
perform a non-interpretative grasping of elementary rules at the level of the
distinctively human way we react to things. ‘It is part of human nature to
understand pointing with the finger in the way we do’.9
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IV. Objective Spirit

I am aware that borrowing concepts from a systematic thinker like Hegel will
always be a problematic operation. Nevertheless, I believe we can profit from
doing so since our aim is not to get from him the philosopher’s stone that was
meant to be produced by the System as a whole. It is, rather, to acknowledge
the need for any attempt at a synoptic understanding of human phenomena to
possess a vocabulary including terms like ‘rules’, ‘institutions’, ‘ways of life’,
‘mores’, ‘practices’, ‘cultural symbols’, and so on. What is to be praised in
Hegel’s philosophy of mind is the awareness of these social, historical, and
cultural dimensions of human intellectual and moral life.
In Les institutions du sens (§19.3), I quoted the explanation Taylor offers of
the ‘objective Spirit’. It gives us not only the content of the notion, but also
the reasons why there can be no moral science without some term playing the
same role of delineating the ontological status of ‘cultural facts’ and
‘historical institutions’:
The point is that the objects of public experience, rite, festival, election, etc. are not
like facts of nature. …They are partly constituted by the ideas and interpretations that
underlie them. A given social practice, like voting in the ecclesia, or in a modern
election, is what it is because of a set of commonly understood ideas and meanings, by
which the depositing of stones in an urn, or the marking of bits of paper, counts as the
making of social decisions.10
I have tried to follow up the consequences of there being common ideas at the
bottom of common practices. First, the ‘set of commonly understood ideas
and meanings’ cannot be a mere gathering of atomic units of thought – it will
present a coherence or ‘structural order’ so as to constitute what some
anthropologists have called a ‘cosmology’ (Mary Douglas). This was of
course the main point of a structural social anthropology – systems of social
 Replies 273

ideas are organized according to intellectual principles. In so far as structural

anthropology has worked out the application of this insight to various
‘symbolic systems’ (kinship systems, mythologies, cultural polarities), it has
shown how theoretical progress is possible in the Geisteswissenschaften. We
have today a better understanding of man as a ‘ceremonious animal’ than we
had at the time of Frazer and Roberston Smith.
Second, as Taylor points out, ‘these ideas are not universally acceptable or
even understandable’. Of course, the idea of a group making a collective
decision has to be accessible to any human being. But the thought that all of
us have decided to do something when a majority of us has voted for the
resolution is certainly not a notion that will present itself to any rational mind
just by reflecting, out of context, on the pure Idea of a collective decision.
Therefore, we need to distinguish between ideas that are merely inter-
subjective, meaning that they can be shared by different individuals
independently of each other, and ideas that are intrinsically common. Thus,
one individual cannot be alone in thinking he owns some personal property
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unless the very idea of personal property is a common one in his particular
community – ideas of this sort are not just intersubjective, they are social in a
stronger sense because they are structurally related to complementary ideas
within an intellectual system. It seems quite fair to call such a system a ‘social
spirit’ (to stress the fact that these ideas belong to the community before
popping up in any particular individual’s mind) or an ‘objective spirit’ (to
stress the normative status of these ideas vis-à-vis individual agents). I will
make use of the distinction between various kinds of communality below in
my responses to Brandom and Haugeland.

Richard Rorty

I. How to Study Language?

I am very grateful to Richard Rorty for the way he has illuminated the current
philosophical issues about the mind by putting them into historical
perspective. He presents the ‘standoff between Davidson and Chomsky’
over the philosophy of language as an illustration of the decades-long struggle
between the heirs of Carnap and the followers of the later Wittgenstein. He
then quotes Chomsky as saying that one must choose between a serious way
of studying language (the cognitive approach) and an irresponsible attitude –
irresponsible from the point of view of our scientific ideals. Either we look for
‘innate mechanisms’ underlying linguistic abilities or we give up linguistics
as a respectable discipline. On this matter, I would like to suggest that there is
actually a third option besides linguistics understood as a branch of cognitive
 274 Vincent Descombes

psycho-linguistics and linguistics dismissed as a frivolous ‘theory of

everything’. This third option allows linguists to make scientific claims
about the various languages spoken in the world without having to pose as
brain-scientists doing some kind of abstract neurology. The French linguist
Lucien Tesnière, it seems to me, has defined a program in structural syntax
that provides just such a third option in a work that antedates any of
Chomsky’s writings, since it was done in the 1940s.
According to Tesnière, syntax should be understood as the theoretical study
of ‘metataxis’ i.e., as the theory of the structural changes one has to make in a
sentence when working on its translation. Here is one elementary example he
gives: if we want to translate into French the sentence ‘I miss you’ (or the
German ‘Ich vermisse Sie’), we cannot do it by way of a (word-for-word)
‘surface translation’. The only way to express the same idea is to change the
syntactic form or, as Tesnière puts it, to recur to a ‘deep translation’ (‘Vous
me manquez’).11
In such a conception of linguistics, there is room for theoretical progress –
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since the ultimate goal is to get a synoptic view of all of the structural
correspondences among human languages – as well as empirical control,
since the hypotheses will have to be checked by reference to the practice of
translators. And this sort of linguistics will be intellectually rewarding: by
trying to translate at the level of depth syntax rather than surface syntax, we
will get a better understanding of the innere Sprachform of the particular
language we are working on.12
Would an advance in structural syntax bring us nearer the ideal of a ‘unified
science of all phenomena’? Of course not. Nevertheless, such an advance
would give us a better view of the ‘universals of language’ since it would
make possible systematic comparisons among all families of human
languages. This kind of goal is very much in line with the general orientation
of a structural anthropology.
Now, Tesnière’s definition of a program for a structural linguistics rests
upon a reference to the practice of translation, i.e., the practice of introducing
structural – not just lexical – changes as needed (‘metataxis’) in order to get
equivalent sentences in different languages. Tesnière does not raise any doubt
about the very possibility of translation. The two sentences ‘I miss you’ and
‘Vous me manquez’, although different in construction (and not just in the
words they use), have just the same meaning. That is to say, they would strike
a competent translator as having the same meaning. How can that be? What
are the translator’s criteria of identity? We philosophers are prompt to ask
such questions, but it is important to notice that we are asking for the
translator’s criteria. We are not attempting to design tools to be used in a new
profession by ‘super-translators’ who would produce ‘super-translations’
certified by ‘philosophically improved criteria’ of sameness in meaning.
Thus Tesnière’s kind of linguistics requires us to apply our ordinary
 Replies 275

notions about identity in meaning or contradiction in opinion. But it is a fact

that these ordinary notions, as used by translators or by commentators
assessing the identity of views between people, are holistic. Ordinary
translation work, as Rorty puts it, ‘has nothing to do with inspecting two
entities called ‘meanings’ and ticking off their resemblances and dissimi-
larities’. Therefore, and this is Rorty’s next point, we must now face an
objection coming from the partisans of a positivist-atomistic-representation-
alist view of the mind. According to them, holism about meaning and the
mind will beget a ‘crazy theory’13 since it will not allow a comparison
between units of meaning, only between totalities of such units.

II. Holism
Rorty quotes Fodor arguing that semantic holism has unpalatable con-
sequences: no two persons ever share a belief, there is no such relation as
translation, no statement can ever be contradicted, etc. As a matter of fact, I
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would have thought this was precisely the objection we would want to raise
against any serious form of atomistic representationalism: since public signs
are supposed to be external representations of internal items, it seems to
follow that two persons can share the same language to express more or less
similar ‘internal representations’, but that we will never be able to say
whether this common language is an effective means of communication
because all it permits us to achieve is the comparison of public copies of
private meanings, not of the ideas themselves.14 However, such a response
does not exempt us from giving an account of the way we propose to identify
‘ideas’, ‘beliefs’, and ‘meanings’. My proposal is that we work out a more
sophisticated conception of ‘holism’. Slogans like ‘The Whole is more than
the Sum of its Parts’ are only the beginning of wisdom. In order to do better
than that, we must explain how we propose to identify these ‘parts’ as parts of
the whole they belong to (without turning this ‘whole’ and its ‘structure’ into
a mere ‘sum’ or ‘collection’ of atomic units). I tried to do just that in Les
institutions du sens. And I began to clear the way for this elucidation at the
end of The Mind’s Provisions by stressing the difference between
distinguishing one individual from another of the same kind (that is to say,
identification by individuation) and, say, distinguishing one meaning from
another or one thought from another.

III. Relative Identity

Of course, I agree with Rorty against Quine that one does not need to assign
meanings a ‘second-rate ontological status’ just because they cannot be ‘fitted
into a physicalist world view’. They are perfectly decent citizens of this
world, although one should not look for them in the category of ‘middle-sized
 276 Vincent Descombes

physical objects’. To use Wittgenstein’s point about ‘kinds of objects’, this

would be like not being able to find ‘railway accidents’ or ‘railway laws’
among the category of railway objects (the paradigms being entities such as
railway stations, railway cars, etc.) and deciding that there are no such things
as railway accidents or railway laws.15
Brandom, in the text quoted by Rorty, is applying to indexical terms a
lesson learned from Frege.16 Actually, I learned it myself the same way he did
by reading the literature on ‘relative identity’ that was initiated by Peter
Geach’s comments on Frege.17 But in my case it was from the early writings
of Rorty himself that I got another insight. Rorty has shown how these
speculations on ‘the same such-and-such’ had important bearings on some
traditional issues in philosophy. Thus, in his ‘Pragmatism, Categories and
Language’, Rorty argued that both Peirce and Wittgenstein had as a common
enemy the doctrine that ‘vagueness is not real’ (as Peirce would say) or that
we do not really know how to apply a rule or use a word as long as we have
not reached in our explanation a complete, context-free determination of what
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to do (as Wittgenstein would say).18 Thanks to the connections Rorty has

brought out between the various kinds of ‘linguistic turns’ in 20th-century
philosophy or, later, the various brands of ‘neo-pragmatism’, I began to see
the consequences of these Peircean thoughts about determination or Fregean
thoughts about identity for die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (to
borrow a title from Heidegger).
According to phenomenologists who take their inspiration from Levinas
and Derrida, there is such a thing as the ‘experience of Otherness’. For
instance, in front of my daughter, I could realize that she is ‘other’ than me
and, somehow, have the experience of her being other than me in virtue of her
‘Otherness’. It has proved helpful, in discussions with such philosophers, to
ask them how they would relativize the attribute of ‘otherness’ to some
concept, i.e., to ask them for criteria of otherness – The same what? The other
what?
I am deeply indebted to Cornelius Castoriadis for having shown me in my
young years, just by the vivid example of intellectual integrity he provided,
how to resist the pressure of what he called ‘the inherited philosophy’ and its
various derivations (such as ‘rational decision theory’, ‘automatic translation
theory’ or ‘scientific historical materialism’, for that matter). But even
Castoriadis, for all his sound judgement, could not escape the inherited
prejudice that somehow the logic of ‘identity’ was incorrect since things in
the world were chaotic and fuzzy rather than answering to sharply defined
concepts. In holding such views, Castoriadis was thus siding with the very
people he would criticize on almost everything else. The poststructuralist
crowd has propagated the view that ‘assigning identities’ to persons and
things was somehow abiding with the prevailing dominant powers in their
strategy of repressing ‘otherness’ (a magic word that tends to be used in order
 Replies 277

to suggest any disturbing event, any kind of romantic eccentricity). So it has

been for me a genuine emancipation of the intellect to realize that one did not
have to take logical concepts (such as ‘the same’ and ‘other than’) to be
descriptive. There was no need to ‘deconstruct’ identity by disclosing its roots
in our experiences of familiarity and estrangement. Rather than trying to
ground our concepts in experience, we should instead see them as linguistic
skills, and that obviously means as social skills.

IV. Locating the Mind

I must admit that the question ‘Where is the mind located?’ may be confusing.
Of course, people who take the brain to be the mind have no difficulty
answering it, but soon realize that they then have to reduplicate the world in
which the person lives (his Umwelt) into a notional world somehow
‘represented’ in the head. But, then, it does not help to offer them in response
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mere slogans about the mind being outside rather than inside the head.
On the other hand, the question I really wanted to ask was not: Where is the
mind? Such a way of asking about its location is certainly objectionable since
it suggests that we look for an entity present by itself somewhere. Rather I
was asking: ‘Where are mental phenomena given and how do they manifest
what they manifest?’ Since one of our goals is to examine a claim made by
philosophers on behalf of a new cognitive psychology, it seems quite in order
to ask psychologists about their field of investigation: Where do you look
when you want to study mental phenomena? Once this question is raised, it
appears that the psychologists have been trapped for a long time in the
Carnapian alternative either phenomena are given ‘in the first-person mode’
or they are given as ‘colorless movements’ to external observers. But neither
answer will do. As Wittgenstein puts it:
The science of mental phenomena – by this we mean what everyone means, namely
the science that deals with thinking, deciding, wishing, desiring, wondering, etc. And
an old puzzle comes up. …I can’t observe the mental phenomena of others, and I can’t
observe my own, in the proper sense of ‘observe.’19
To solve or, better, to dissolve the puzzle, we have to get rid of the very idea
of having two possible ways of getting at the mental, one direct (in the first-
person) and one indirect (in the third-person). When we look at the other
person’s behavior, we do not see the ‘external’ manifestations of internal
mental events: we see the thing itself, die Sache selbst!
What about the ‘Solomonic’ solution Rorty offers in order to make room
for two perspectives on the mind, one assuming it to be a natural product and
the other taking it to be the social or cultural outcome of human History? Of
course, I must agree that there have to be mental powers attached to the
individual, and therefore ‘inside the subject’ since we have to know where the
 278 Vincent Descombes

person is if we want to decide where the powers of that person are. However, I
think I am going to resist the suggestion of cutting the mind into a Cartesian
mind (brain) and a Hegelian mind (culture). More precisely, I want to resist
the assimilation of the Cartesian mind to the brain for the very reason John
Searle endorses it when he writes that each of us is indeed a ‘Brain in a Vat’
or, better, a ‘Brain in a Skull’.20 A Cartesian res cogitans is the subject of
various experiences, such as seeing a light or feeling a sensation of heat. But
the same reasons for which we do not want to ascribe such experiences to an
immaterial part of a person will also hold against their ascription to a material
part, since these reasons rule out (in virtue of the Wittgensteinian ‘principle of
narrative intelligibility’) the literal transfer of psychological predicates from
whole persons to their parts.

V. Objective Spirit
Rorty has found a similarity between Brandom’s views on concepts being like
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people in that they have histories rather than natures and a point made by
Sartre that I quoted at the end of The Mind’s Provisions. According to Sartre,
the meaning of my own sentences is ‘stolen from me’ as soon as I form them
since other people will use the same words but in different contexts. Actually,
I did not exactly quote Sartre ‘approvingly’, although I was certainly struck
by the force of his point. In the text I quoted, Sartre tells us (of course without
using our current terminology) why holism without structural order, that is to
say without the possibility of differentiating the whole into its parts, amounts
to the paradox of a shared situation of solipsism. Since our meanings are
contextual, it appears that successful communication is impossible. But this is
just the conclusion Fodor has told us we would have to swallow if we kept our
holistic view of meaning. So it would seem Fodor was right about holism after
all!
Now communication as well as translation do take place, and they take
place in holistic contexts. Therefore, the contextual character of our acts of
speech does not hinder us from reading ancients texts or understanding each
other. I conclude from this fact that radical translation does not begin at home,
although this would be the case if there was not an ‘objective spirit’ present in
the historical languages we speak (common languages, not idiolects). But still
Sartre had a point which deserved to be addressed – this I tried to do in a
discussion of his and Merleau-Ponty’s views about language as a way of
pointing out our need for the very notion of ‘esprit objectif’.21

Robert Brandom
I read Robert Brandom’s paper with great excitement because it provides a
 Replies 279

very helpful map of the territories already explored and draws from it an
illuminating formulation of the work that still lies ahead of us. I am struck by
the complementarity between his impressive contribution to a ‘genuinely
post-Cartesian’ philosophy of mind and my own tentative steps in the same
direction. As a matter of fact, both of us have been more concerned with
‘sapience’, i.e., mens in the Latin pre-Cartesian sense, than with ‘sentience’.
Since we share so many assumptions, I will turn directly to the main issue of
his paper: How might one bring together the common lessons to be learned
from Hegel and Wittgenstein?

I. Self-Ascription
Brandom, quoting Arthur Collins, writes that beliefs cannot be inner states
endowed with causal powers because ‘an expression of belief is not a report in
which the speaker tells others about himself’. The argument seems to me to be
cogent and I am happy to endorse its two premises. First premise: there are
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two ways of expressing a belief, either by making an ordinary assertion or by

making the assertive force explicit with the prefix ‘I believe that’. It is clear
that I am no less committed to the opinion that it will rain when I just say ‘It
will rain’ than when I say ‘I believe it will rain’. Second premise: neither of
these two forms of expression amounts to describing one’s own inner state
because taking a stand on how things are in the world (e.g., whether it will
rain) is not taking a stand on something that is logically independent of it
(namely, the state in which I find myself).
Actually, I wrote a brief section to the same effect at the end of Chapter 9:
‘[I]n order to know whether I believe the story you have told me… I look to
see whether there are reasons to believe the story, not whether there are
reasons to think that I believe it’.22 In distinguishing the reasons to believe
that p from the reasons to judge what sort of state I am in, I was in fact relying
on the whole Wittgensteinian discussion of Moore’s Paradox in the light of
the characterization of the verb ‘to believe’ as being ‘psychological’. I cannot
enter into that discussion here,23 but I would like to show how it bears on
Brandom’s own remarks. Let us call ‘self-ascription of belief’ the kind of
speech act we perform by using an explicit form of assertion such as ‘I believe
that Kant lived in Königsberg’. As Brandom points out, this form looks like a
report on an inner state, but that appearance is deceptive. When I want to take
a stand on the kind of state in which I find myself, I will do it by asserting
something concerning my person, not by pronouncing myself on Kant’s
biography. So I entirely agree with the three concluding points that Brandom
makes at the end of his second section.
However, I wonder whether I have understood the notion of ‘self-
ascription’. What do we mean by an act of ‘self-ascription’? Is it just a term of
art for designating the assertions we make about p by using the redundant
 280 Vincent Descombes

form ‘I believe that p’? Or is it supposed to convey something more than that?
And then the question arises as to what is added to the expression of my belief
by the prefix ‘I believe’ (or ‘I say’).
I would say that John and I say the same thing when we both assert the
same sentence ‘Kant lived in Königsberg’. But I do not see how John and I
could say the same thing in the case where I express a belief concerning Kant
(‘I believe that Kant lived in Königsberg’) whereas John makes a claim
concerning me, not Kant (‘Descombes believes that Kant lived in
Königsberg’). Here, considerations about Moore’s Paradox can help us bring
out the difference. Thus, Peter could say that ‘Descombes is mistaken in
believing that Kant lived in Weimar’ whereas I could not say, without being
paradoxical, ‘I am mistaken in believing that Kant lived in Weimar’ (as
opposed to ‘I was mistaken’ or ‘I might be mistaken’).
Is it obvious that both ‘I believe that Kant lived in Königsberg’ and
‘Descombes believes that Kant lived in Königsberg’ are entailed by the claim
that everyone believes that Kant lived in Königsberg? It seems to me that here
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‘believes’ is becoming equivocal. There is a sense in which ‘I believe that p’

can be the consequence of ‘Everyone believes that p’. For instance, I could
argue from the truth of ‘Every Frenchman believes that red wine is good for
your health’ to ‘I believe that red wine is good for your health’ a consequence
I would have to admit on such premises even if I had not been previously
aware of my sharing that particular belief with my compatriots. The inference
does make sense, it seems to me, provided that it is intelligible to conclude to
the specification of one of my beliefs from general facts about the world. In
such a case, it is all right to draw a consequence such as ‘therefore I believe
that p’ (I hope Brandom will appreciate the inferentialist tenor of this last
remark). Now, endorsing the general premise (‘If a Frenchman, therefore
believing that p’) and its consequence concerning my person would be
committing myself to an opinion about my own state. In that case, Moore’s
Paradox would not arise since I would not be using the psychological concept
of belief – the one that is asymmetrical in the first-person of the present
indicative – but another concept that one can apply to one’s own person on the
basis of observations and inferences, as one does for other people in the third
person. Wittgenstein suggests that we could turn the psychological ‘to
believe’ into an ordinary verb like ‘to cut’ by adding to its sense an epistemic
dimension: I seem to believe. Thus it would be possible to judge that I have
such-and-such a belief, because I could discover facts and evidence leading to
that conclusion.
The same considerations apply to the other point made by Brandom. ‘My
claim that I believe that Kant lived in Königsberg can be true even if Kant did
not live in Königsberg’. As it stands, the claim expressed by ‘I believe that
Kant lived in Königsberg’ is not to be assimilated to the one expressed by
‘Descombes believes that Kant lived in Königsberg’ if I want it to be about
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Kant, not about Descombes or even about myself as a speaker. As Brandom

puts it, what I do here is right or wrong depending ‘on how things are outside
the individual taking the stand’.
On the other hand, it is true that I might be mistaken in what I believe.
Then, I might want to express both my belief and my general admission that I
may be wrong. I could do it by saying something of the form: ‘It is possible
that I believe that p even if it is not true that p’.
And there is of course no paradox in admitting that some of my present
beliefs may not be true. This is just the possibility expressed by the kind of
propositions discussed by Brandom himself in another context: ‘It is possible
that (I believe that p and it is not true that p)’.24 However, the paradox would
reappear if I said instead: ‘It is true that I believe that p although it is not true
that p’.
But then we could solve the paradox by using Wittgenstein’s way out. We
could just replace ‘I believe’ by ‘I seem to believe’. The result would be a
splitting of my opinions into the personal beliefs I express (in the
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psychological first-person) and the ‘states of belief’ I report on the basis of

my observations (in the non-psychological first-person).
Here, it is useful to compare the logic of the expression of a belief by
asserting a sentence, on the one hand, to the logic of ‘I say’, on the other
Wittgenstein has pointed out that it is always possible to turn a statement
about anything into what appears to be a first-person description, just by
inserting ‘I think’ or ‘I believe’ into it (Philosophical Investigations, §24).
Some philosophers have attached a special significance to the very possibility
of such a grammatical transformation since all statements can be turned into
‘self-ascriptions’ of beliefs, and since the self-ascription of a belief is an
assertion about the speaker (known as ‘the subject’ in traditional parlance), it
follows that all my statements are, ‘as it were, descriptions of my inner life’. A
purely grammatical transformation has been turned into a philosophical thesis
about the speaker necessarily being his only possible subject of predication.
Against such a solipsistic view, we should remind ourselves that ‘undertaking
commitments cannot be reduced to attributing them, even to oneself’.25

II. Normative Order

When our colleagues in the social and human sciences discuss topics like
‘methodological individualism’, ‘symbolic structures’, or ‘cognitive mech-
anisms’ they are in fact calling on us philosophers to come up with a more
perspicacious conceptual apparatus than the one we have inherited from the
Cartesian philosophy of mind. This is precisely where ‘anthropological
holism’ becomes relevant. As Brandom points out, the idea is to turn
Putnam’s semantic externalism into a larger view of the social dimension of
our concepts. Meanings are not in the head because they are to be explained in
 282 Vincent Descombes

normative terms, terms that are normative because they belong to a common
language.
Brandom has approached the phenomenon of a ‘normative order’ mainly
from the point of view of the individual agent who is expected to commit
himself to the consequences of his acts. I have tried to approach the same
phenomenon of a ‘normative order’ from a different perspective by stressing
the systematic relations between social statuses (no husband without a wife,
no thing given without a status of giver and a status of beneficiary of the gift).
Our perspectives appear to be complementary: the internal relations with
which structural holism is concerned are acknowledged in Brandom’s work,
for instance when he defines in a circular way the two statuses of having made
a commitment and being entitled to attribute a commitment.26 Let us suppose
that B is entitled to attribute a commitment to A. Then A has made that
commitment and he should acknowledge it whether he likes or not. The
commitment is ‘objective’ – it does not depend on what A thinks of it. But
what about B? What entitles B to attribute the commitment to A? It has to be
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something about A – what he said, what he did, what he implied, etc. – in the
context of the prevailing norms defining the consequences of one’s actions
and omissions. Such an explanation of the two statuses is circular, but I think
it is not viciously circular, since it is not a matter of mutual presupposition
between two independent (or atomic) facts, but rather a matter of one and the
same fact constituting a defining relation between two statuses. One and the
same fact holds of two independent individuals insofar as they are acting
within the same context, the same order of meaning. And I would say that this
explains why individuals, although they are free to perform or not to perform
the action that will commit them to the consequences attached to it by
‘objective spirit’, are no longer free to decide on the content of those
consequences once they have been brought into existence. So I want to
endorse the excellent formulation of the ‘objectivity’ of objective spirit by
Brandom: ‘It is up to me whether I play that counter – assert that sentence –
rather than another, or none. But it is not up to me what I have thereby
done’.
But how much of a social bond do we find in the correlation between the
two normative statuses of ‘making a commitment’ and ‘being entitled to
attribute a commitment’? For instance, I am entitled to attribute opinions to
Kant on the basis of what he wrote, but Kant himself never anticipated that, by
writing his work, he was entering into a relationship with my own person. He
was just addressing any possible reader in an indeterminate manner.
Therefore, the internal correlation between Brandom’s two discursive
statuses is not to be assimilated to the kind of correlation we find between
husband and wife or between the author of a promise and its addressee. And
with that remark I have reached the point where Haugeland and Brandom part
company.
 Replies 283

John Haugeland
Haugeland writes that he is willing to join forces with me. I welcome his
gallant offer and will try to contribute to the common project of getting at a
better understanding of the problems of mind. As he points out, this will
require keeping the right balance between the social and the individual
aspects of the human mind. I will leave aside the question of whether
cognitivism should be pronounced ‘incoherent’ or rather ‘false’. I am not sure
we have a substantial disagreement here. Actually, I wrote ‘incoherent’
because I wanted to stress the philosophical character of the discussion. I
could have said that it was ‘false for philosophical reasons’. It seems to me
that Haugeland wants to say that cognitivism makes sense as a theory of the
mind because he often addresses audiences who take the ‘mind-body
problem’ seriously. If we accept that there is such a problem, then we have to
credit attempts to solve it with some degree of philosophical respectability.
But still there might be bits of nonsense built into the problem itself.
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I. The Ontology of the Mental

I am very grateful to John Haugeland for having provided in his paper an
extremely perspicacious formulation of both cognitivism and my critique of
it. Actually, I cannot but approve of his way of expressing the ‘very idea’ of
cognitivism, since it is under the guidance of his books that I got the first
rudiments of whatever understanding I have gained of it. So it would be
preposterous for me to say otherwise! As to the ‘principles’ I have laid down
as grounds for the critique, it is true that ‘narrative intelligibility’ is just
paving the way for ‘anthropological holism’.
I welcome Haugeland’s remarks on ‘categorial monism’. First, what I
objected to is indeed the possibility of a ‘formal ontology’ and not a
‘substance monism’ such as the view attributed, for example, to Thales. It is
also true that I did not try to present a ‘full ontology of the mental’ if by this
we mean a general elucidation of the way in which the various categories of
‘state’, ‘power’, ‘act’, ‘relation’, and above all ‘subject’ apply to our ‘mental
life’. Of course, there have been attempts to achieve just that task, not
necessarily using the ‘ontological’ terminology (besides Heidegger, one
thinks here of Ryle). But it seems fair to say that we have become more aware
of the limits of such undertakings. So my strategy has been to start with the
notion of ‘categorial difference’ between concepts or linguistic expressions
rather than with the apparently simpler notion of category.
In accordance with that strategy, I decided I would just bring out each
categorial distinction in a piecemeal way as needed in the course of the
discussion. And this is what I tried to do, following Wittgenstein and some of
his pupils, when it became clear that the whole issue rested upon the notion of
 284 Vincent Descombes

inner mental states. Haugeland points out that I am siding with Rorty and
Brandom in taking a ‘mental state’ to be a sort of ‘civil status’ because of its
historical and social character. He suggests that I could then speak of a civil
status of mind, bringing together ‘having a thought’ with such ways of being
as ‘being the captain of a team’ or ‘owning a house’. In so doing, he is
preparing the way for an objection on which I will return below.

II. Mental Powers

Haugeland is perfectly right to point out that ‘anthropological holism itself
clearly needs and presupposes something internal that explains how and why
people can learn to talk, form elaborate societies, and draw up biographies,
whereas dogs and trees cannot’. I agree that the ‘anthropological’ story about
‘public mental statuses’ needs to be complemented by some account of the
‘inner states’ that enable us to acquire these statuses.
What sort of inner components are we then looking for? Since we want to
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explain the possibility of performances such as learning languages or entering

into conventional bonds, we need to find these components in the category of
personal powers, skills, abilities. Therefore, it seems to me, cognitivism is
already ruled out as a possible account of the ‘inner part’ of our story about
the mental since it tells us about operations on symbols where we want to hear
about the capacity to perform these operations. So perhaps there never was a
last loophole to close in the refutation of cognitivism after all, at least on this
side of the argument!
But of course a lot is missing if we are trying to develop a general account
of our mental powers. We could call this missing part of the account a
‘philosophy of subjective mind’ since it will cover whatever individual agents
must contribute by themselves in order for the ‘objective spirit’ to get any sort
of hold on their lives. Thus ‘subjective mind’ will be the term of art for the
system of personal powers we expect our fellow-citizens to exercise in their
lives, especially when we complain about their not having done what
(according to us) they should have done or when we praise them for the
‘resoluteness’ (Entschlossenheit) they exhibit when taking a stand on
something.
Haugeland gives two very telling examples of the sort of personal powers
he thinks we need to account for. The epistemic skills he mentions as a first
example have a dimension of personal caring and involvement that cannot be
explained away by any reduction to a set of propositional attitudes. Then he
cites the ability to be resolute and he insists that such an ability is personal
rather than social. We might say it is the ability to make ‘existential
commitments’ rather than ‘social commitments’.27
Both kinds of powers have a ‘subjective’ or ‘personal’ (as opposed to
social) dimension in the sense that, in both cases, we expect something from
 Replies 285

the person, so to speak, ‘in person’. Nobody else can replace me when it
comes to exercising my own skills. Nobody can compensate for my own
weakness by being resolute in my place when resoluteness is expected from
me. So in both cases there is something that has to come from me and me
alone. This is why, in both cases, there is room for shame in case of failure, for
pride in case we prove equal to the task. It is therefore appropriate to speak
here of a ‘relation between oneself and oneself’ and to apply the Hegelian
idiom of ‘subjective mind’ since a ‘self-relation’ appears to be involved in the
phenomena we are trying to describe.

III. Commitments
Finally, I will try to say something about the point in dispute between
Haugeland and Brandom. How are we going to sort out the social from the
non-social? Is there room in our philosophy of the person for both ‘social
commitments’ and ‘existential commitments’?
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It seems to me that the term ‘social’ is ambiguous. Haugeland compares

‘committing oneself’ or ‘taking a stand’ in Brandom’s social sense to
‘accepting a job’ or ‘taking out a loan’. But of course to take out a loan is to
take it from a lender, to accept a job is to accept it from an employer, whereas
committing oneself to the consequences of an assertion is not a way to enter
into a specific connection with anybody in particular. This suggests that we
need to distinguish between a weak and a strong kind of sociality. In my
recent book devoted to ‘subjective mind’,28 I have tried to work out that
distinction along the following lines.
Let us start by defining a class of dialogical verbs. That class will include
any verb that can be used to make explicit the speech act performed by a
speaker. Some of these dialogical verbs can also be used in monologues. As
Wittgenstein points out, speaking to oneself has nothing to do with having a
conversation with oneself in a private language: ‘A human being… can ask
himself a question and answer it’.29 One can establish with oneself a
dialogical relation by first playing the part of the author of the question and
then playing the complementary part of the one giving an answer. Since a
question has to be asked of the agent of another speech act, but not necessarily
of another person, I think it is appropriate to call the dialogical relation
between the author and the addressee of the question an intersubjective one.
Thus the subjective self-relation is just a special case of intersubjectivity.
Another way to express the same point would be to say that the monological
use of the verb is a mere variant of its general dialogical use.
Now there are dialogical verbs that are social verbs in a stronger sense.
This is the case with ‘to give’: my right hand cannot make gifts to my left
hand. I have dubbed verbs that behave like ‘to give’ sociological verbs, by
analogy with Wittgenstein’s psychological verbs, because there is a
 286 Vincent Descombes

grammatical test for defining the class to which they belong. Just as
psychological verbs are defined by the asymmetry between the first-person
and the third-person (in the indicative present), sociological verbs will be
defined by the asymmetry between their ordinary transitive use and their
reflexive use. I can give the book to somebody else, but I cannot give the book
to myself (the grammatical reflection to be considered here is not between the
giver and the given object but between the giver and the intended beneficiary
of the gift). In the same way, it is clear that I can exhort myself to do
something or blame myself for having done it, but it is doubtful whether I can
literally give orders to myself or condemn myself for not having done what I
was ordered to do (unless I hold from a legitimate source the required
authority to command or to judge myself).
But, as Kant would say, we have developed an idea of our autonomy, which
allows us to say things like I owe it to myself. And here we have reached the
issue both Haugeland and Brandom want us to place at the center of our
reflections on these topics. For my part, I would like to argue that the sentence
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‘I owe it to myself’ can be understood in four different ways.

First, acknowledging a duty to oneself can be taken as an indirect way of
positing oneself within a social space or a normative order. For example, I
owe it to myself, as a member of a particular community, to behave decently
because this is what the other members of the group expect of me. Here, the
social bond is the ground of the apparently reflexive relation of obligation
holding between self and self. Taylor might want to say that in this case it is a
matter of the individual subject defining her identity in communal terms.
Second, ‘I owe it to myself’ can be taken in the Kantian sense, and this
means that one must distinguish in one’s own being between two distinct
persons, the auctor obligationis and the subjectum obligationis as regards the
terminus obligationis (cf. Kant, The Doctrine of Virtue, §1). The Kantian
notion of duties to oneself assumes the intelligibility of what can be called
‘personal commitments without social bond’. However, this notion seems to
make sense only when defined within a system opposing the homo noumenon
(the one I am indebted to) and the homo phaenomenon.
As a third possibility, one can take the notion of owing something to
oneself in a figurative sense. Instead of splitting the human being in the
Kantian way into a rational and a phenomenal component, both endowed with
a sort of legal personalitas, we can contrast two ways of determining one’s
goals and expectations. This will yield a distinction, not between two selves,
but between commitments. A rational person will see to it that his long-term
strategic objectives prevail over his short-term tactical goals. But it would be
a matter of wisdom and practical rationality, not of any obligation to
someone.
Finally, I will register as a fourth way of taking the sentence Haugeland’s
notion of ‘existential commitment’. Such a commitment is not social in the
 Replies 287

strong sense of an attitude involving a relation of obligation to another party.

Indeed, if I say I am existentially committed to something, it certainly means
that I cannot ask anybody else to relieve me of the tasks and obligations
resulting from the stand I have taken. But is it also non-social in the sense in
which a Kantian duty to oneself holds in abstraction from any social context?
Since Kant grounds my duties to other people in my duties to myself, he has to
think of the human individual as being already, all by himself, a small society
of ‘persons’. This is the reason why the Kantian individual cannot, as an
auctor obligationis, relieve himself of his duties as a subjectum obligationis.
On the other hand, it seems to me that an ‘existential commitment’ in
Haugeland’s sense does not necessarily have to be taken as the original
ground of all the obligations one has to other people.
There are of course people holding a sort of methodological individualism
about norms and duties. They would argue that we do not get our sense of
‘being committed to something’ from our participation in normative
practices, but from our inner experience. But it is one thing to acknowledge
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the existence of one’s various commitments, it is another to understand the

very language of commitment. Just as the fact that one can follow a rule
without having to be helped or supervised by other people does not prove that
following a rule is not a social performance, so the fact that an individual can
take some of her commitments as being her own commitments, as opposed to
commitments imposed from outside, does not prove that we can make sense
of the concept of commitment in abstraction from a social context.
If we could agree on that distinction between the origins of our various
commitments and the origins of our being able to use the language of being
committed, then we could say that existential commitments, while not being
generated in the context of a social interaction in the stronger sense of ‘social’
are nevertheless social in the weaker sense of being at least dialogical.

NOTES

11 Lucien
I wish Tesnière,
to thank Éléments
Stephen deSchwartz
syntaxe for his valuable
structurale, comments
2nd edition onKlincksieck,
(Paris: a first draft1966),
of this
p.
essay.
288.
2 Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p.
20 (= Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §385).
3 Cf. Stephen Schwartz’s notes The Mind’s Provisions, pp. 251n.1 and 258n.10.
4 Cf. Montesquieu’s text quoted in The Mind’s Provisions, p. 50.
5 “Could there be only one human being that calculated? Could there be only one that
followed a rule? Are these questions like, say, this one ‘Can one man alone engage in
commerce?’ ” (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, VI, §45, tr. Anscombe, 3rd
edition, 1978, p. 349).
6 It is interesting to notice that Wallace renders ‘le moral’ as ‘the mental’: ‘In French le moral
is opposed to le physique, and means the mental or intellectual in general’ (Hegel’s
Philosophy of Mind, op. cit., §503, p. 249).
7 London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964.
8 Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974.
 288 Vincent Descombes

9 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, tr. A. Kenny (Oxford, Blackwell, 1974) p. 94.

10 Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 381–382.
11 Lucien Tesnière, Éléments de syntaxe structurale, 2nd edition (Paris: Klincksieck, 1966), p.
288.
12 Tesnière actually refers to Humboldt’s ‘innere Sprachform’ as an ancestor of his notion of
the ‘hierarchy of connexions’ being the proper object of linguistics (ibid., p. 13; cf. The
Mind’s Provisions, p. 101).
13 Fodor and LePore, Holism, p. XII.
14 I have argued along these lines against the mental atomism advocated by Dan Sperber in his
La contagion des idées (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996) in ‘L’identification des idées’, Revue
philosophique de Louvain 96: 1 (Feb 1998), pp. 86–118.
15 Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), p. 64.
16 See Making It Explicit, p. 438.
17 See Making It Explicit, p. 439.
18 Philosophical Review, 70 (1961), pp. 197–233. This article was well known among French
Wittgensteinians thanks to the section Jacques Bouveresse devoted to it in his Le mythe de
l’intériorité (Paris: Minuit, 1976).
19 Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology, 1946–47, ed. P. Geach (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 235.
20 See J. Searle, Intentionality, Cambridge University Press, p. 230.
21 Cf. Les institutions du sens, ch. 19–20.
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22 Op. cit., p. 199.

23 I must refer the reader to my essay on ‘Wittgenstein face au paradoxe de Moore’ in J.
Bouveresse, S. Laugier and J. J. Rosat (dir.), Wittgenstein: dernières pensées (Marseille:
Agone, 2002), pp. 207–235.
24 Making It Explicit, p. 604.
25 R. Brandom, op. cit., p. 554.
26 ‘Coordinate with the notion of commitment is that of entitlement’ (Brandom, op. cit., p. 159).
27 Cf. John Haugeland, Having Thoughts: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
28 Le complément de sujet: Enquête sur le fait d’agir de soi-même (Paris: Gallimard, 2004)
29 Philosophical Investigations, §243.

Received 20 January, 2004

Vincent Descombes, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Directeur d’études, 54
Raspail Boulevard 75006, Paris, France. E-mail: Vincent.Descombes@ehess.fr