Elisabeth Camp is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, held a post-doc at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and taught at the University of Pennsylvania before settling at Rutgers in 2013. She has held fellowships or visiting positions as Scots Philosophical Association Centenary Fellow at the University of Glasgow, the Burman Lecturer at Umeå University, Visiting Professor at Institut Jean Nicod, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others.
She is the author of over forty articles in philosophy of language, mind, and aesthetics, as well as the editor of a volume on philosophical implications of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Her research focuses on thoughts and utterances that don’t fit a standard model of minds as rule-governed engines for compiling and transforming information, and language as a medium for expressing propositions to share information. She seeks to explain how human cognition and speech can be at once systematic, abstract, and truth-conditional, and also contextually varying, holistic, and expressive. Recent publications have addressed nicknames, social labels, and sociolinguistic style ; stories, insinuation, and the heresy of paraphrase ; and maps, concepts, and structural representations.
 

Framing for Perspective

Why Mantras, Metaphors and Maps Move Us

Presentation of the Jean Nicod Prize and cocktail reception after the lecture

Tuesday 3rd November, 2026 - 2pm
Salle des Actes, 45 rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris

The world bombards us with information ; we must make sense of it. Philosophers and other humans accomplish this by critically interrogating hypotheses. But we also grope our way intuitively.
We explore hunches and inclinations. We try on alternate ways of being and thinking – sometimes out of curiosity or for strategic gain, but sometimes despite ourselves, while attempting to resist.
Understanding the world and each other requires deploying and modulating among perspectives : dispositions to selectively attend to, integrate, and respond to information, in virtue of a background of motivations and statistical assumptions. From the inside, perspectives appear self-justifying ; but they can produce interpretive impasses between perspectivally divergent agents who have achieved local propositional agreement. How should we decide who’s right ? In our attempts to make sense of the world and to be understood by others, we often turn to frames : expressive devices like mantras and maps that encapsulate regulative principles for intuitive interpretation. The cognitive and
communicative power of such devices is puzzling on an orthodox model, which analyzes minds as proposition-compiling machines and language as a medium for exchanging propositional contents. To explain perspectives and frames, we
need a more expansive and flexible understanding of how limited rational agents take in, digest, and engage with the world, and how people coordinate understanding.

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Mantras for Attention

Thursday 5th November, 2026 - 2pm
Salle des Actes, 45 rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris

On their face, slogans like ‘It is what it is’ and ‘Boys will be boys’ flirt with vacuity : “syllables for the sake of syllables, a waste of cognition and breath,” as Frank Bruni puts it. And yet they can be powerful heuristics for handling situations that threaten to overwhelm us with informational complexity or emotional intensity. Rather than adding new information to a common ground, mantras exhort us to regulate our attention by setting expectations and focusing on what really matters. In this respect,
they pattern with labels for social kinds, which also parse information and selectively prioritize attention in generic terms. Mantras’ schematic evocativeness makes them useful tools for sca olding stability over fine-grained variations in assumptions, attitudes, and contexts. But they also leave those who don’t ‘get the gist’ out in the interpretive cold. Moreover, as they are
repeatedly re-deployed across contexts, mantras tend to lose their intuitive anchoring, becoming rigid and empty.

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Metaphors for Comprehension

Tuesday 10th November, 2026 - 2pm
Salle des Actes, 45 rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris

Some mantras are metaphorical : ‘Justice is blind,’ ‘Hope is the thing with feathers.’ The threat metaphors pose to meaningfulness is less of emptiness than of seductive richness : thus, Locke calls metaphors “perfect cheats” that “insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment.” And yet, we regularly deploy them to crystallize insight and guide investigation in art, science, and life. Like stories, metaphors help us comprehend complex topics by imposing an intuitive Gestalt on a rich body of assumptions, images, and feelings. Agents seek out and maintain intuitive interpretive coherence by maximizing explanatory simplicity, marginalizing anomalies, and positing hidden connecting grounds. However, the very features that facilitate rational inquiry also perpetuate epistemic myopia and seduce us into self-perpetuating conspiracy theories.

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Maps for Action

Thursday 12th November, 2026 - 2pm
Salle des Actes, 45 rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris

On its own, information is static. Mantras and metaphors may move us emotionally and evaluatively, insofar as they track distinctions, forge connections, and activate emotions that matter given our interests and inclinations. But understanding becomes dynamic only when we are oriented in the world. Maps can show us how to move in a literal sense, by anchoring us indexically within a holistic spatial structure that purports to mirror the target territory. At a more abstract level, scripts show us how to act by plotting paths through situations parsed in terms of roles, goals, opportunities and obstacles ; while questions show us how to inquire by plotting paths through possibility spaces structured in terms of modal accessibility.
Perspectives are not quite “maps by which we steer,” as Ramsey described beliefs. Rather, they are the base of unarticulated motivations and assumptions that generates the dynamics of cognition, disposing us to form and update complex structures which represent particular domains. We use maps and other
frames to regulate those dispositions. When they work well, frames and perspectives equip us to reliably assimilate new information and to act fluidly in response to complex, changing environments. But they also trap us within simulacra that fail to fit our goals and blind us to the inaptness of those goals. We can try on new perspectives and critique our own and others’ perspectives, but we can never escape perspectives entirely. We can only grope our way toward a more robust grasp on the world.

Bibliographic selection

• “Nicknames as Tools for Managing Face” Aristotelian Society
  Supplementary Volume 99:1 (2025), 47–74.
• “Insinuation, Common Ground, and the Conversational Record” in New
  Work in Speech Acts, ed. D. Harris, D. Fogal and M. Moss (Oxford University Press, 2018), 40-66.
• “Why Metaphors Make Good Insults: Perspectives, Presupposition, and
  Pragmatics” Philosophical Studies 174:1 (2017), 47-64.
• “Logical Concepts and Associative Characterizations” in The Conceptual Mind: New Directions in the Study of Concepts, ed. E. Margolis and S. Laurence (MIT Press, 2015), 591-621.
• “Slurring Perspectives” Analytic Philosophy 54:3 (2013), 330-349.
• “Sarcasm, Pretense, and the Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction” Noûs 46:4 (2012), 587-634.
• “Putting Thoughts to Work: Concepts, Systematicity, and
  Stimulus-Independence” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78:2
  (2009), 275-311.
• “A Language of Baboon Thought ?” in The Philosophy of Animal Minds, ed. R. Lurz (Oxford University Press, 2009), 108-127.
• “Two Varieties of Literary Imagination: Metaphor, Fiction, and Thought
  Experiments” Midwest Studies in Philosophy: Poetry and Philosophy XXXIII (2009), 107-130.
• “Thinking with Maps” Philosophical Perspectives 21:1, Philosophy of Mind (2007), 145-182.