Notre travail porte sur la théorisation de la nature et du mécanisme de la foi en milieu franciscain, de 1230 à 1330. Le corpus comprend des questions disputées issues d’œuvres théologiques écrites par plusieurs auteurs franciscains et ceux qui les ont influencés. Nous avons cherché à comprendre quelles instances psychologiques sont mises en jeu pour assurer la fermeté de l’assentiment de la foi et de quelle façon nos auteurs justifient le fait même d’avoir une foi, par opposition par exemple à une connaissance, et le fait d’avoir un assentiment de foi donné, catholique, par opposition à un autre. Selon nous, il existe deux courants historiques : celui qui mène d’Alexandre de Halès et Bonaventure à Olivi et celui qui mène d’Henri de Gand et Godefroid de Fontaines à Duns Scot. D’après nous, ces deux mouvements se caractérisent par la combinaison de deux tendances. La première consiste en une naturalisation de la foi : le rôle de l’action divine surnaturelle dans la production de l’habitus et de l’acte de foi se réduit. La seconde consiste en une « volontarisation » de la foi : la volonté joue un rôle de plus en plus crucial dans l’accomplissement de l’acte de foi et intervient d’une manière de plus en plus large dans la production des croyances humaines en général. Ces tendances se perpétuent au XIVème siècle, par exemple chez Ockham et Holkot. Les justifications de la foi suivent ces deux mouvements : les modèles volontaristes appellent des justifications pratiques plutôt que spéculatives et la naturalisation implique que rien dans le processus de production de la croyance ne puisse, pour le croyant, différencier l’assentiment propre à la foi catholique des autres. / We have chosen to study the theories of the nature and mechanism of religious belief put forward by Franciscan thinkers, from 1230 to 1330. Our corpus is comprised of disputed questions from a diversity of theological works written by Franciscans and those who influenced them. We tried to understand what psychological acts and faculties come into play to ensure the firmness of the assent of faith, and in what way our authors justify the very fact of having faith as opposed, for example, to knowledge, and the fact of having a given faith, the catholic one, as opposed to another. According to us, there exist two historical movements: the one which leads from Alexander of Hales to Bonaventure to Olivi and the one which leads from Henry of Ghent to Godfrey of Fontaines to Duns Scotus. We show that these two movements are characterized by the combination of two tendencies. The first one consists in a naturalization of faith: the role of supernatural divine action in the production of the habitus and act of faith is reduced. The second tendency consists in a “voluntarization” of faith: on the one hand, the will plays a more and more crucial role in the carrying out of the act of faith and, on the other hand, the scope of its intervention in the production of human beliefs in general is ever larger. These tendencies still exist in the 14th century, for example in Ockham and Holkot. The justifications of faith follow these two movements: voluntarist models demand practical rather than speculative justifications while the naturalization of faith entails that nothing in the process of production of belief can, for the believer, distinguish the assent of catholic faith from others.

In recent years the normativity of thought and meaning has been the subject of an extensive debate. What is at issue is whether intentionality has normative features, and if so, whether that constitutes a problem for naturalistic attempts to account for intentional phenomena. The origin of the debate is Saul Kripke’s interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, published in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Kripke claimed, on behalf of Wittgenstein, that dispositional accounts of linguistic meaning - accounts, i.e., which attempt to reduce semantic phenomena to facts about how speakers are disposed to employ words - fail to ground the factuality of semantic statements. From this, and other arguments, the far reaching conclusion was drawn by Kripke’s Wittgenstein that there are no semantic facts, that every application of a word is “a leap in the dark”. This position has become known as meaning scepticism. In the present essay, it will be argued that meaning scepticism is incoherent, but that the normativity argument is interesting in its own right. The development of the debate will be traced, primarily through detailed consideration of the writings of Paul Boghossian, who has shifted the focus from the normativity of linguistic meaning to that of belief. It will be contended that even though Boghossian’s attempt to locate a normativity of belief fails, there is a related form of normativity that has to do with the intrinsic badness of false beliefs. Also, suggestions made by Kripke regarding the normativity of intentions will be investigated, and related to contemporary arguments in the philosophy of rationality. The tentative conclusion is that there are some interesting kinds of normativity associated with the intentional, but of a somewhat different variety than those usually discussed.

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