Étude des communications : approches constructivistes (French Edition)

Although the CEFR is careful not to say how languages shoul d b e taught , i ts approach to the description of language use nevertheless reminds us at every turn th a t communicative language u s e plays a central rol e i n communicative language l e ar ning. The majority of the participants came from language education backgrounds, and this was an important stage in showing the [ The Italian school has developed its own textbooks and [ The pedagogical rationale behind the use of Information and [ L'utilisation des technologies de l'information et de [ English for European trade unionists was [ The older structure of the traditional Anglo-Saxon 'European language and literature' department has been replaced over a period of decline with a new European Studies model, in which a broadly [ While previously the emphasis in language teaching was on grammar and vocabulary, with a focus on skills in reading [ The intercultural component and learning how to learn" produced by the Council of [ For intercultural communication [ Tous les cours sont [ International House supplies us with the latest [ The branch of linguistics concerned with practical applications of language [ But I will not attempt to explain these transformations, which are more properly the subject of a separate study.

I would like rather to try to define as precisely as possible the nature of the changes introduced by the communica- tional approach to the social world and to identify some of the implications it has for sociological analysis and theory. This will form the third part of the paper.

The idea that will guide my argument Is that the communicational approach is a critical alternative to the 'epistemological' approach that we have inherited from the seventeenth century. The problem is therefore first of all to substitute a communicational model as such in place of the repre- sentatlonalist-informational model of communication.

I employ the term 'epistemological' in its English sense, in which 'epistemology' is the theory of knowledge.

L'approche constructiviste de l'ethnicité et ses ambiguïtés

I call 'epistemological' that model of communication which reasons in terms of the formation and transmission of adequate representations of the properties of things, through mental processes and methods of 'indexing' internal states. Representation or constitution by reciprocal action? Two schemas to explain communication. It seems to me that two major conceptions of communication can be opposed. One Is eplstemological, in the sense that it reasons in terms of the production and transfer of knowledge about the world and people; it refers essentially to the schema of representation.

It seems to me that only the second conception is able to bring about the change of paradigm that the communicatlonal approach to social phenomena virtually carries within it. I should like to describe the premisses of each of these models and provide justification for abandoning the eplstemological conception of communication. We spontaneously see communication as a process of Information transmission.

If we follow the Intuitions of common sense we arrive at the principal basic presuppositions of the representationalist schema:. For some people, let us say the semiologlsts, who think in terms of coding and decoding of messages, what guarantees this success is a correct application of a code. Others, for example the intentiona- lists, consider that the determining factor is the inferential process by which a receiver calculates the exact Intentions and representations of a communicator.

In one case the semlologlcal model , it is a matter of signals from which the message must be extracted, in the other the ostenstve-lnferential model it is a matter of signs from. The system of premises that underlies this informational schema of communication can be broken down as follows. The main premiss is that communication has a fundamentally cognitive purpose: There are three elements in this main premise.

Firstly, the world is predefined and its properties are independent of the perception and cognitive activity of the subjects of knowledge, who confine themselves to retrieving or reconstituting an extrinsic reality. Secondly, there is the conviction of a clear and sharp separation between ideas, thoughts, representations and description, on the one hand, and the real world, external or internal, on which they have a bearing.

Thirdly, there is the idea that cognitive activity is a matter of construction and validation of adequate representations of the properties of the predetermined real world, using language, images or artefacts. This predefined real world also encompasses the internal states of subjects, who can communicate their intentions, desires, beliefs, thoughts, sentiments, emotions, and so on - considered as intentional states that are real, discrete, individuated and directly accessible to their possessors -Just as much as circumstances, events, objects and persons.

A second basic premise of the repre- sentatlonalist schema is the conviction that an epistemological subject exists separate from the world and other people,. Hence the special position accorded to the point of view of the observer who produces, validates, transmits and infers representations not least through the recognition of informative and communicative intentions , to which he has direct access by the method of internal observation thanks to the 'mind's eye'.

The epistemological model basically entertains only unilogical subjects. These subjects, which have internal states and mental representations, relate to the world and other people only in a posture of observation and objectlvation. They focus the properties of a predefined internal or external world in facts or hypotheses. They seek to know what facts or hypotheses are also manifest to others.

In their mutual communicative relationships they seek to establish, working from signs and by inferences, what their respective informative intentions are, considered as representations or facts in the mind. Lastly, when they communicate between themselves it is fundamentally to modify their cognitive environments, that is, their representations, and thereby affect behaviour. These subjects are disengaged observers Taylor, ; in order to gain access to the Intrinsic nature of things and construct an 'absolute' representation of the properties of the real world, including the Intentions and representations of their partners in interaction, they must leave out of consideration any point of view and any membership of a commonality of communication.

The third premise is a purely factual conception of subjectivity. As well as being able mentally to represent facts and directly observe his representations, the epistemological subject has Intentional states desires, beliefs, intentions, thoughts, opinions which are also realities in themselves, independent of his activities and capable of being represented as facts.

These states are supposed to be directly accessible to their. Action then is divided into two components: The signification of actions, or their intentionality, are the product of the ideas that engendered them or that they incarnate. From this standpoint, communicating is behaviour caused or motivated by the existence of a previous intention to inform to make known a fact, a thought, a hypothesis and of an equally pre-existing intention to ensure recognition of this intention to inform; this second-level recognition is essential for understanding the information that the communicator wishes to transmit.

These intentional states, the content of which the subject is capable of representing mentally, are in any case events or states Independent of the communicative act itself, which consists of making them mutually manifest by the production and interpretation of signs. Understanding is therefore essentially a matter of forming adequate representations or of access to what the communicator has in mind by observation and inference ; and determining what a speaker is referring to in the world depends on reconstructing his intentions and representations.

Lastly, this epi- stemological subject can act strategically - he can produce signs which will permit recognition of his intentions - and he is endowed with a semiological ability he can associate messages with signals and skills in the ordering of logical reasoning he can infer conclusions from premisses and representations from signs. The fourth premise is the application of this dualist schema to language itself. As the world is predefined with no reference to language and independently of any language activity, language is useful only for defining the entities of the world and.

But it is possible to replace it in this function with other means, such as images or mathematical formulae. This is also valid for the manifestation of intentional states by subjects in communication. Language is not essential to this manifestation, as this is a matter of producing and interpreting signs that enable us both to recognize real intentions and to make reasonable attributions of 'propositlonal attitudes' desires, beliefs, etc.

Such a conception of language has important implications for the theory of signification and the understanding that it makes possible. Charles Taylor has given a perfect account of these implications, the main one being that this conception thematizes signification in a problematics of the representation of states - circumstances and intentional states - and therefore supposes that one can understand language and its uses in the posture of a unilogical observer as it is simply a matter of establishing facts and inferring representations.

It is therefore not surprising that the repre- sentationalist schema makes truth its key semantic notion the descriptions in which language represents things may be true or false , that it apprehends the relationship between doing and saying, or between being and language, in a problematics of correspondence, or that it makes great efforts to discern in the different types of language act an identical representative kernel that can be verified.

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In this schema it is considered that orders, promises and questions depict the circumstances that satisfy them, that they give a linguistic representation of them. By thus finding in all language acts a representative content and an attitude towards that content, this approach enables propositional attitudes beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on to be attributed to speakers.

Can we think in another way and defend a conception of communication that does not necessarily have the support of common-sense intuitions? In fact, if we discard the 'presumption of the objective world' and the representationalist conception of knowledge and action that it induces, we find that other thematizations of communication are possible. The one that interests us here is in a way the opposite of the epistemologi- cal schema. It does not take the objectivity of the world and the subjectivity of agents i.

If communication is not the transmission of information by coding and decoding, or by the 'indiciation' of communicative intentions and by inference, what else could it be? The hermeneutic nature of the anti-rep- resentationalist model should not lead us to be too hasty in replacing the transmission of internal states and representations of the circumstances facts or hypotheses with mutual comprehension or intercomprehension. For we would then run the risk of merely shifting the ground of the question, as it is so tempting to cling to a representationalist conception of understanding seen as access to another person's subjectivity, intentions, motives, etc.

However, it is precisely the epistemological schema of representation, as core of the common- sense conception of communication, that we have to deconstruct. But for them to be able to generate a non-repre- sentationalist approach to. When we change standpoints in this way, communication becomes a matter of 'the mutual modelling of a shared world through joint action', to repeat Varela's excellent formulation in the Introductory quotation.

The fundamental idea then is that communication is not a process in which intentional states already provided with their determination, or facts and hypotheses representations of a predefined real world , become mutually manifest, but a joint activity of constructing a common perspective, a shared standpoint, as a basis for inference and action. In particular, this common perspective enables communicating partners to specify the mode in which they are temporarily relating to each other and to the world, and thereby to construct, In a concerted way and in the mode of 'incarnate meaning' what they are making mutually manifest or perceptible in their interaction, that is, a way of creating relationships, a structure of reciprocal expectations, a shared world and outlook, and of course a communicational content which is available in the mode of discrete, individuated representation only in a derived form, i.

This definition applies as much to ordinary communication as to social communication in public debate in which the construction of a shared outlook on events is the result of collective action. The heart of communication for the agents therefore consists of jointly fashioning this common perspective. When I speak of a common perspective, I mean neither an agreement of thought or opinions, nor a convergence of personal points of view, but the fact, for the partners, of jointly constructing a common ground in which they will momentarily relate to each other and to the world, and organize their reciprocal actions.

So for the praxeological model, communication is fundamentally a process of organizing shared outlooks, without which no action or interaction is possible. This process can be explained in terms of joint construction of a public space, in ways that it is the task of analysis to elucidate.

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It is immediately clear where this argument differs from that of the epistemologi- cal model; we are now dealing with a joint activity of construction of a public space, shaping a common world and reciprocal configuration of the terms of relationships in our interactions with others and with the world, and no longer simply with the calculation of representations or states on the basis of signs.

Moreover, the individ- uation of intentions to communicate meaning and the determination of communication content what is at Issue between the partners pass solely between the agents, in their public space, and are their joint creation. Intentions and referents what is jointly referred to are emergences; they proceed from a concerted performance, which is mediated both by time and by public practices, transactions, symbols, concepts and significations.

In short, in this model there is no longer a predefined world, either external or Internal, that has to be adequately represented. It is in communicative action, as a process of 'publicizatlon', that things and beings acquire their determination - for all practical purposes -. Lastly, language in this model takes on new dimensions. As the dualism of the epistemological model has been done away with, language and the real world no longer relate to each other in the mode of two independent orders of reality. In contrast to the epistemological model, the praxeological approach adds expressive and constitutive dimensions to the representative dimension of language.

It considers that language is an essential mediation in the 'social construction that gives life to our world' because there is a 'linguistic constitution of the being of the world' Gadamer, The rhetoric of information transmission and processing no longer has much meaning in this context. This is because that which has informational value emerges, locally and without representation: To demonstrate this, I will use two examples, one taken from a study by Marc Relieu for his sociology degree Relieu, , the other from ordinary.

Through these two examples I would like to explain as precisely as possible the mode of reasoning applied to communication by the praxeo- logical schema. Communication as a process of publicization. The construction of a shared world. Marc Relieu, examining the problems of co-ordinating action between sighted and non-sighted people, worked on a video film of a meal among friends, one of whom was non-sighted.

His attention was held by a significant incident: He asked A, the non-sighted person, to give his opinion on the wine. B, who was sitting next to A, immediately picked up the bottle and asked A if he should pour it. A, who knew that he still had a small amount of aperitif in his glass, asked him to wait and drank off his aperitif, as he did not know he had a separate glass for the wine.

A few seconds later B, seeing that he had finished his aperitif, told him he was pouring the wine, as agreed. Thinking that the wine had been poured into his aperitif glass, whose position on the table he knew, A lifted the empty glass to his lips with the ritual gesture for wine-tasting and, finding that it did not contain the expected wine, said to the pourer, with a hint of reproach in his voice: What this example illustrates is, first of all, the fact that pertinent information is constituted locally in the context of an activity and that it emerges according to the structuring of the environment of an.

Taking part in the ritual activity of tasting the wine at the start of a meal makes mutually manifest, because they are relevant to performing this activity, certain elements in the environment or certain circumstances - glasses, for example, which until then have not been noticed, and therefore the 'fact' that there are wine glasses as distinct from aperitif glasses. The visibility of these objects and circumstances is in a way produced by their being matched with the current action, that is, by the fact that this action makes its own world 'emerge', with its foregrounds and horizons, circumstances and expectations.

In the case under consideration, the non-sighted person clearly does not make the same match as the others; he does not construct the same world. Admittedly, for him too the fact of having to taste the wine gives special pertinence to the glasses elements In the environment , but he is not referring to the same glasses as the others because what is manifest to the others and that they believe is sharedinforma- tion is not manifest to him, that is, that he has a separate glass for wine.

There is not much sense in seeking behind the gesture a corresponding will-to-do, an idea engendering it, or a psychological state, with a mentally represented content, provoking or supporting the physical performance of the act. But here it is a matter of a capacity engendered by a practical deed, rather than internal states; of what he can say to back up what he has in fact done, and not the mental or psychological background of his public act.

This example, which combines gestures and verbal actions, allows me to emphasize two other important aspects of prax- eological reasoning applied to communication.

The first is that it is by an engagement in action, and not by a disengagement enabling an objective, adequate representation of reality, that reality opens itself to consciousness, that its properties are revealed and that facts become mutually manifest, precisely because they are constituted as facts by an organizing activity.

It is a 'fact', for example, that the non-sighted person did not know there was a glass on the table in front of him. But the factuality of this 'fact' and its becoming-manifest are performed by the construction of different worlds in the context of the joint activity occasioned by the proposed wine tasting. On the other hand, the members of the dinner party knew perfectly well, by. Now, it appears that it is in the organization of a practical activity that the 'properties' of a non-sighted person become positively manifest or perceptible, without representation, and this for all practical purposes, as they are 'properties' to which the others must adjust their own behaviour in situ.

Approches constructivistes : Etude des communications

A is part of the environment of the actions of the members of the group, but in a completely different mode to that of an objective element to which they would adapt through the formation of an adequate representation. It is the practical details of the experience of interaction, through contact, one could say - to contrast thought through contact with thought through representation C.

Taylor - that it becomes manifest to all what it is to be a non-sighted person and how a non- sighted person does not construct the same world as a basis for inference and action. Low to High Price: High to Low Avg. Available for download now.

From an Epistemological Model of Communication to a Praxeological Approach

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