Romain Bourdoncle

About

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Philosophy of Language and Mind at the Collège de France (Paris). My primary focus is on the structure of mental representation sharing and transmission in humans. This leads me to examine various phenomena related to human communication, attitude attributions, interpretations of agreement and disagreement, joint attention, and inner speech.

Before joining the Chair of Philosophy of Language and Mind, I worked at the Conseil Scientifique de l'Éducation Nationale, where I coordinated the development of research-based resources to improve mathematics education in France (resources available here). This experience has intensified my interest in mathematical cognition. It also made me realize how central issues of mental representation sharing and communication are in mathematics education. I am eager to continue working in this area.

I obtained my PhD in December 2022 from the Institut Jean Nicod, École Normale Supérieure (Paris). One of the main questions I have sought to answer is how we can explain successful communication. My hypothesis is that communication does not involve the replication of thought from speaker to hearer, but rather a form of coordination of thoughts. My goal has been to characterize and explain interpersonal coordination so construed. Part of my current work involves continuing to publish the results of this project.

Additionally, I am involved in a project exploring the connections between language, behavior, society, and health. Further details will be shared in due course!

Publications

Shareability of Thought and Frege’s Constraint: A Reply to Onofri
Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (2022)
Romain Bourdoncle
abstract | preprint | doi | cite

Onofri [Onofri, A. 2018. ‘The Publicity of Thought.’ Philosophical Quarterly 68 (272): 521–541.] proposes an individuation criterion for thoughts that purports to satisfy both shareability (the notion that different thinkers, or a single thinker at different times, can and generally do think type-identical thoughts) and Frege's constraint (according to which two thoughts are different if it is possible for a rational subject to endorse one while rejecting the other). I argue that his proposal fails to satisfy Frege's constraint. Then I propose a modification to Onofri's proposal to fix the problem.

L'Opacité du contenu dans la communication
Klēsis Revue Philosophique (forthcoming)
Romain Bourdoncle & Michael Murez

Samethinking
PhD Dissertation, École Normale Supérieure (2022)
Romain Bourdoncle
details

Teaching

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Contact

Feel free to reach out.

Collège de France
11 Pl. Marcelin Berthelot
75005 Paris, France

romain [dot] bourdoncle [at] college-de-france [dot] fr

ORCID logo https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4056-3265

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