Colloque - Discourse Files - Gergely Csibra : Tracking Discourse Referents in Symbolic Depictions

François Recanati Philosophie du langage et de l'esprit Collège de France Année 2024-2025 Colloque - Discourse Files Tracking Discourse Referents in Symbolic Depictions Gergely Csibra Central European University, Vienne Résumé Scene constructions, or more broadly, episodic simulations, are internal representations of states, relations, and events in the spatial navigational system of the brain. These constructions serve various purposes, including action planning, imagination, and memory retrieval. The format of these constructions is hybrid: they arrange discrete elements (internal symbols of objects, agents, abstract entities) in analog space and time to represent relations among them iconically. Such constructions can also represent not inherently spatial relations and operate both in humans and in non-human species. However, humans also create external representations in a format analogous to scene constructions, which I call symbolic depictions. Symbolic depictions are composed of discrete elements (objects) that function as local physical symbols standing for their internally represented counterparts in scene constructions. The arrangement of these symbols in physical space and time depicts relations or events among the entities they stand for. When entities represented internally in a constructed scene are tied to object-symbols in external displays, I consider them functioning as discourse referents. I will outline the cognitive operations required to establish and track such discourse referents and argue that some of these operations are available in early ontogeny, even before capacities for tracking discourse referents linguistically emerge. Gergely Csibra Gergely Csibra is a professor at the Deparment of Cognitive Science at Central European University, Vienna, and a professor emeritus at Birkbeck, University of London.

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Colloque - Discourse Files - Gergely Csibra : Tracking Discourse Referents in Symbolic Depictions is an episode from Colloques interdisciplinaires by Collège de France.

This episode is 78:32 long.

This episode was published on Mar 31, 2026.

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