Colloque - Discourse Files - Karen Lewis : Discourse Referents as Mental Files

Épisode de Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit - François Recanati par Collège de France · 30 mars 2026 · 1 h 14 min

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.

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