b. 1952
François Recanati (born 1952) is a French philosopher of language at the Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS/ENS, Paris), widely regarded as a leading figure in the study of context-sensitivity and the semantics–pragmatics interface. He is the principal architect of Truth-Conditional Pragmatics, a position holding that pragmatic processes partly constitute the truth-conditional content of utterances, not merely their implicatures. His work spans direct reference, mental-file theory, and the formal semantics of anaphora and perspectival thought.
Developed Truth-Conditional Pragmatics as a systematic alternative to Gricean and Minimalist semantics
Pioneered the mental-files framework for understanding singular reference and de se thought
Contributed a relational, semantically grounded account of accessibility in Discourse Representation Theory
Authored influential monographs including Literal Meaning (2004), Perspectival Thought (2007), and Mental Files (2012)
Directed the Institut Jean Nicod and helped establish it as a leading center for cognitive and linguistic philosophy