Pierre Jacob

Friend or Foe? Early Social Evaluation of Human Interactions

We report evidence that 29-month-old toddlers and 10-month-old preverbal infants discriminate between two agents: a pro-social agent, who performs a positive (comforting) action on a human patient and a negative (harmful) action on an inanimate object, and an anti-social agent, who does the converse. The evidence shows that they prefer the former to the latter even though the agents perform the same bodily movements. Given that humans can cause physical harm to their conspecifics, we discuss this finding in light of the likely adaptive value of the ability to detect harmful human agents.

Emotional contagion: its scope and limits

The contagion model of emotional propagation has almost become a dogma in cognitive science. We turn here to the evolutionary approach to communicative interactions to probe the limits of the contagion model.

Developmental Psychology: A Precursor of Moral Judgment in Human Infants?

Human infants evaluate social interactions well before they can speak, and show a preference for characters that help others over characters that are not cooperative or are hindering.

Consciousness, intentionality and function. What is the right order of explanation?

I ewamine and criticize two views held by John Searle, i.e., that the assignment of biological functions is relative to a conscious agent with beliefs and desires and that consciousness has priority over intentionality.

Précis of Ways of Seeing

This is a summary of the book Ways of Seing co-authord witth Marc Jeannerod and published by Oxford University Press in 2003

Is self-knowledge compatible with externalism?

Externalism is the view that the contents of many of a person’s propositional attitudes and perhaps sensory experiences are extrinsic properties of the person’s brain: they involve relations between the person’s brain and properties instantiated in his or her present or past environment. Privileged self-knowledge is the view that every human being is able to know directly or non-inferentially, in a way unavailable to anybody else, what he or she thinks or experiences. Now, if what I think (or experience) is not in my brain, then it seems indeed as if I cannot have any privileged authoritative first-personal access to the content of what I think. Hence, externalism seems inconsistent with privileged self-knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to provide a road towards a conciliation between self-knowledge and externalism.

Reply to Our Critics

Marc Jeannerod and I wrote a Precis of our 2003 book Ways of Seeing. The journal Dialogue asked Tim Schroeder, Alva Noe, Pierre Poirier and Martin Ratte to write a critical essay on our book. In this piece, we reply to our critics.

State Consciousness Revisited

My goal in this paper is to defend the so-called “higher-order thought” theory of conscious mental states, which has been presented in various places by Rosenthal (1986, 1990, 1993, 1994), from a pair of objections recently advanced by Dretske (1993; 1995). According to the version of the “higherorder thought” (henceforth HOT) theory of conscious states which I have in mind, none of my mental states will be a conscious state unless I am conscious of it. The intuition behind this view— which I find appealing — is that a mental state of which a person is completely unaware counts as a non-conscious (or unconscious) mental state. I think that some of the intuitions underlying Dretske’s views can be reconciled with an amended version of the HOT theory. In particular, I will recommend the incorporation into the HOT theory of the concept of a state of consciousness intermediary between the concept of creature consciousness and the concept of state consciousness (or the notion of a conscious state).2 Before, however, I defend the amended version of the HOT theory of conscious states against Dretske’ s attack, I want to say a word of the representationalist approach to consciousness according to which some of the mysteries of consciousness might be unraveled by a prior account of intentionality.

What Can the Semantic Properties of Innate Representations Explain

Some of the things I do, I do for no reason: I inhale oxygen, I vomit, I cough, I hiccup, I perspire, I snore, and so on and so forth, if and when I do, for no reason. Other things I do, I do for reasons and some of my reasons for doing them are the contents of my beliefs and desires, i.e., my propositional attitudes. So I recently went to the travel agent closest to the place where I live because I wanted to reserve my flight from Paris to Amsterdam, I believed I could do so by going to a travel agent and I wanted to go as close to my place as possible.