Vincent Descombes (1948—) is a contemporary French philosopher. His major work has been in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. He is particularly noted for a lengthy critique in two volumes of the project he calls cognitivism, and which is, roughly, the view current in philosophy of mind that mental and psychological facts can ultimately be treated as, or reduced to, physical facts about the brain.

See John Haugeland, Jerry Fodor, John McDowell, Andy Clark, Noam Chomsky, John Searle, Tim van Gelder, Jonathan Potter, George Lakoff.

Works

• Le platonisme (1970)
• L'inconscient malgré lui, 1977
• Le même et l'autre. Quarante-cinq ans de philosophie française (1933-1978), Editions de Minuit, 1979
• Grammaire d'objets en tous genres, 1983
• Proust: philosophie du roman, Editions de Minuit, 1987
• Philosophie par gros temps, 1989
• La denree mentale, 1995