Notes on the epistemological rupture between scientific and natural thought *

Abstract

This article revisits the concept of epistemological rupture by questioning the stark division between scientific and non-scientific thought. Drawing on the theory of representation, it contends that both forms of knowledge are socially constructed, moulded by communication, norms and group dynamics. Rather than labelling non-scientific thought as flawed or regressive, the discussion shows how decontextualization and recontextualization processes apply equally to everyday ‘natural’ knowledge and formal science, exposing the social and historical contingencies shaping concepts. Consequently, rupture appears less a sudden break than a gradual threshold reached through dialectical transformations in cognition and society. Rather than conferring total superiority on science, ruptures highlight how certain discourses gain legitimacy while others become ‘non-knowledge’. The article concludes that science's dominance reflects broader power relationships and evolving modes of production and validation. By situating epistemological rupture within these processes, it illuminates how different knowledge forms coexist, evolve and sometimes conflict in stratified social fields—ultimately challenging a simplistic binary between scientific progress and supposedly primitive or natural thought. This viewpoint opens new possibilities for examining the shifting boundaries between rational explanations and the shared beliefs shaping collective reality and daily life.

One of the schools of anthropology has devoted much time and scholarship to proving that non-civilized peoples do not think logically. This is entirely accurate except for one detail: it is forgotten that the same applies to civilized peoples.

—Ralph Linton

1. The opposition between scientific thought and natural thought: Problem position ¹

1.1 The opposition between knowledge and non-knowledge

Established and accepted from the onset, the demarcation between non-scientific thought and scientific thought is evidently reinforced by the usual experience that contrasts the ‘observed’ of sensory knowledge, transparent to the preformed characteristics of spontaneous objects, with the ‘experienced’, a product of a construction in rupture with the immediate configurations presented to perception. Considered flawed, non-scientific thought offers an intrinsic resistance—the epistemological barrier—to the development and dissemination of scientific thought. Only a transformation of the mind—the epistemological rupture—founded on the destruction of this poorly constructed knowledge, by dissociating belief from thought, ensures that the knowing subject has an objective and rational grasp of reality. It is therefore permissible to assert that scientific thought is a secondary thought, a rectified thought, erected against a transcended primary knowledge. Thus, this conception of the articulation of modes of knowledge prescribes the nature of the objects to be produced and the modalities of dissemination by guaranteeing orthodoxy.

This stark opposition between non-scientific thought and scientific thought constitutes the conceptual core of the vast majority of research, the object of which is the study of the various relationships of objectivation and the modes of knowledge they institute. They establish and perpetuate a fundamental dualism. The problems of determining the specificity of these modes and their articulation are reduced to one form or another of the irreducible opposition between two terms, themselves hierarchized. This presupposition of a fundamental gap legitimizes, mutatis mutandis, the recourse to an integrative theoretical framework that retains from the diversity and complexity of knowledge processes only their characterization in the form of stable states. The questions concerning the conditions of possibility of common experience and the genesis of non-scientific thought are thereby obscured. Similarly obscured are those concerning the experience and genesis of scientific thought, the ideal accomplishment of which would be characterized by the development of autonomous forms liberated from any social contingency.

Each mode of knowledge, thus characterized in terms of state, institutes a substantial difference between forms of thought. The transition from one state to another is likened to a reversal of polarity similar to the relationship established between the transition from false consciousness to true consciousness. This opposition and the necessary transformation that it entails reside both in and through the manner of conceiving the relationships between modes of knowledge. They presuppose that the problem of the truth of the scientific object, assimilated to that of the truth of knowledge, delineates a field outside of which knowledge is diminished. However, science does not institute knowledge; it aspectualizes a modality of it. The formal norms that it adopts to regulate its own activities aim primarily to ensure and maintain, within its limited context, a form of cumulativism (Freitag, 1973). The gap is not what explains but what should be explained.

The regulated articulation of a ‘combinatory of signifiers’ with a reproducible method generates signifieds: scientific objects (Jurdant, 1969). The ‘increase of knowledge’ that ‘is the specific problem of scientific knowledge’ attributes to the work of these signifieds captured under the dual relationship of ‘questions of fact’ and ‘questions of validity’; that is, on the one hand, their relation to ‘the state of knowledge at a determined level’ and the conditions for the transition from one level to the next, and, on the other hand, their evaluation as a ‘formal structure of knowledge’ in ‘terms of improvement or regression’ (Piaget, 1957, 1967a, 1972; Popper, 1973). To resolve the problem of the supremacy of scientific knowledge over other cognitive formations, it would be necessary to demonstrate that, in constituting its objects, it reduces inferior forms.

The notion of epistemological rupture fulfils an essential function: to establish the specificity of the mode of knowledge instituted by scientific thought. It determines the constitutive moment of ‘true’ knowledge and guarantees science the reproduction of the alternative between the determination of the conditions of legitimate knowledge—the relationship to the scientific object—and non-knowledge—the thing to be apprehended; that is, the field of investigation: common knowledge, popular knowledge, ideology, myth, and so on. This reduction is only possible by folding the relationship of objectivation onto the ‘objective category’ and doing so by assimilating it to the sole conditions of truth—validity—of scientific discourse. Thus, anything not conforming to the established norm is rejected back to nature, outside of culture: science conceals the process of legitimizing the process of producing its modalities of knowledge. In short, the opposition conceals the primacy of the scientific model which, by designating itself and imposing itself as the ultimate referent of the relationship of objectivation, masks the orders of legitimacy from which it derives and those it establishes. Acting as both judge and party in the evaluation of knowledge, transparent to its own rules of production and designation of objects, it presents itself as the perfected form, as the natural culmination of the evolution of knowledge, and not as the manifestation of a differential gap between relationships of objectivation. This is why only an all-or-nothing relationship sanctions the accession to scientificity, and thus to knowledge.

The correlative questions concerning the nature of the various relationships of objectivation and the relationships they maintain with one another are denied and resolved simultaneously, even before being raised. It is only after posing them and attempting to answer them that the thorny question of the hierarchy among the various forms of knowledge can be resolved.

1.2 The contingent and the necessary

However, to achieve this, it is necessary to reintroduce what scientific discourse systematically excludes: the weight of the social conditions of its production; in other words, to demonstrate that the contingent is a condition of the necessary. It may be objected that the scientific approach consists of producing objects solely within the strict limits of their operational definitions and that their validity arises exclusively from this process (Ullmo, 1969). The artifices of a metalanguage, shared by an entire community, would serve to establish and then maintain a discontinuity with common practices; to extract the object from the tangle of contingent factors and subsequently preserve it from arbitrariness and the fluctuations of social factors. From this perspective, pure sciences, highly mathematized and formalized, would represent an ideal to be attained by other disciplines. This proposition, while certainly acceptable in recognizing the epistemological work accomplished by the rupture, proves, however, to be incomplete: the unconditional reliance on models developed by the pure sciences, true benchmarks of legitimate scientificity, does not allow for the consideration of the processes and conditions underlying the genesis of the specific modes of breaks that they institute and reproduce. It may also be objected that, given the reified nature of scientific knowledge, within a scientific paradigm the object evolves through successive structural convergences, constantly amplified, but in accordance with an ever-unfinished becoming. Residues, biases and contradictions, inevitable in any genesis, would thus be progressively erased as retouches affirm the object, or when one paradigm shifts to another.

In doing so, the weight of the social conditions of production, initially taken into account but reduced to the status of a mere temporary obstacle, a transient epistemological resistance, would diminish until becoming insignificant in a completed science. Only conceptual difficulties would remain, without the possibility of relating them to anything other than the intrinsic properties of discourse. However, the problem lies precisely in grasping the genesis and dynamics of these internal transformations.

Due to the very absence of formalisms or their incidental use, the respective conceptual borrowings and the fluidity of their objects with indistinct boundaries, the ‘disciplines’ of the human sciences, in their attempt to delimit each their field, allow for the consideration of the establishment of the rupture and the apprehension of its effects. The distinction between pure sciences and human sciences, far from constituting an obstacle, is perhaps a revealing key to the process of the epistemological rupture as a constitutive moment of a science, especially if one realizes that the observed differences between the objects and methods of pure sciences and human sciences (that is to say, at the level of the internal coherence of the discourses considered separately) are accompanied by a temporal gap in the constitution of these same objects. Distinct objects, having reached various stages of their evolution, coexist simultaneously within the social field. It is therefore possible to make a cut, at least theoretically, and observe the development of each of them. This involves considering the relationship to the object from a dual perspective: as a process of determining the characteristics of the ‘real’ based on the specificity of each kind of knowledge (thus making it useful to compare these types of knowledges among themselves); and as a moment of social conjuncture (thereby making it useful to assess the relative temporal gaps between different types of knowledges).

The primacy of the scientific model as a legitimate form of the relationship of objectivation rests partly on the erasure of the temporal relationship and ultimately on the elimination of the social process of constructing the object. Therefore, the question of the weight of production conditions on the organization of the object appears entirely unnecessary, as scholarly discourse is reduced solely to the expression of its operational practice. The scientific object derives all its validity from its operational definition, but this validity, always momentary, conceals the successive transformations that it undergoes. In La formation du concept de réflexe (The Formation of the Reflex Concept), Canguilhem (1977) demonstrated that each reformulation of the reflex concept, relative within the series of transformations of the notion, remains each time the completed expression of the determination of one of the characteristics of the real. If each characteristic moment of the relationship of objectivation retains all its heuristic importance, it is equally important, in the context of this analysis, to determine its conditions of production and transformation, and the work that it performs in return.

The idea of a profoundly unitary science is only conceivable within an idealistic vision that dissociates knowledge from the social processes of knowing. At least four consequences emerge from maintaining this duality. First, it imposes a prohibition on the genesis of scientific thought and non-scientific thought by confusing the causes with the legitimations that science ascribes to itself. Secondly, it relegates non-scientific thought to the status of non-knowledge. This rejection presupposes an automatic hierarchy of knowledges, at the pinnacle of which scientific thought naturally resides. Thirdly, it obscures the social work produced by both scientific and non-scientific thought and forbids the contemplation of a possible dialectic between cognitive fields. Finally, the epistemological rupture is assimilated more to a moral rule than to an operational rule. It distinguishes legitimate forms of knowledge from illegitimate ones.

1.3 Resistance to scientific thought

The correlated notions of epistemological barrier and rupture isolate a problematic field more than they raise and, a fortiori, resolve the complex issue of the genesis, transformations and articulation of knowledges among themselves. In fact, it is the very persistence of non-scientific thought that necessitates a reassessment of the relationships between scientific and non-scientific thought and, consequently, a re-evaluation of the notion of rupture.

At the very moment our society reaches a level of scientific and technological advancement unprecedented in human history, it appears as though the development of rational thought is confronted with an obstacle that emanates from a distinct, autonomous entity separate from the realm in which scientific thought operates: an obstacle that would necessitate a reconsideration of the conditions of scientific thought itself. From one displacement to another, from one object to another, non-scientific thought constantly resurfaces and poses a persistent resistance to the expression of scientific rationality. Viewing it merely as a residue, an incidental detour whose eventual disappearance is hoped for, results from a misunderstanding of the conditions of its genesis and its properties.

This residue presents three problems. The first is the constant resurgence, within the very scientific project, of a non-scientific form of thought. Does it refer to a specific mechanism? When Bachelard emphasized that ‘the scientist is equipped with two behaviors’ or that ‘a well-made head is a product of schooling’, to what type of cognitive relationship was he alluding? If the epistemological barrier is intrinsically linked to a structure of thought, how can it, after a long process of education, persist in the ‘scientist’?

The second problem concerns the nature of non-scientific thought. Is it amorphous? A mere residue? On the contrary, does this resistance indicate a consistency or a specific organization?

Furthermore, there is a third problem: raising questions about the persistence and possible consistency of non-scientific thought raises questions about the relationships between constituted objects and the relationships between relations of objectivation. It is, to some extent, an attempt to conceive the genesis and transformations of scientific thought within and through the dialectical relationship that it maintains with other bodies of knowledge; that is, to dissociate but to articulate science as a specific instituting practice with other instituting forms, more or less qualified as ‘common knowledge’ or ‘world views’, with which it is associated and often intertwined: ideologies, myths, magic, and so on. Thus, it explicitly raises the question of the conditions of the genesis of this non-scientific thought and the work that it performs within the scientific field itself.

The central question of this analysis emerges naturally: is it possible to consider scientific and non-scientific thought from the same perspective? To consider them from a viewpoint that encompasses both? One possible solution would involve articulating the conditions of production of a relationship of objectivation with the forms of knowledge that it engenders. It would be necessary to demonstrate when and how they can, under certain conditions, mutually implicate each other.

Such a genetic approach should make it possible to define and measure the progress of knowledge within a given relationship of objectivation. More specifically, it should allow for addressing the so-called non-scientific forms as elementary forms; that is, as primitive forms in the sense of primary forms. Scientific thought could then be conceived as a prevailing structuration. The hesitations of the human sciences would emerge from their recent advancement. It could be thought that the development of each new discipline occurs according to a constant process, identical for all.

This approach should also allow for envisioning non-scientific thought as a regressive form of scientific thought. In this case, it would represent a diminution of knowledge within the framework of a given paradigm. It should finally allow for determining whether scientific and non-scientific thought stem from distinct processes. The particular cognitive competence of a given epistemic subject could be conceived based on the tasks required of them.

The object of this analysis thus boils down to two related problems: do different modes of thought exist? And, if so, what are the relationships between these modes and between the objects?

The notion of rupture is central to the contemporary problematic. This occurs in two respects: regarding the production of scientific knowledge (that is, the constitution of an object of knowledge) and regarding the acquisition of scientific knowledge (that is, the appropriation by a subject of the notions and concepts inherent to a field, enabling an explicit relationship of knowledge). It is symptomatic that the cognitive competence of the subject culminates in scientific thought; that the maturation of cognitive development coincides with the characteristics of scientific thought in such a way that the properties of one merge with the modalities of the other. Consequently, it is also symptomatic that the social relationship is erased to such an extent that only discursive modalities remain: the discourse itself, as an isolated object, detached from its conditions of possibility, as if the apprehension of discourse alone sufficed to establish a concrete relationship.

The objectives pursued by this analysis stem from the relationships between its object and the chosen subject. It seeks to attempt to isolate the constitutive dimensions of the notion of epistemological rupture by articulating discourse with its context of production and transformation. More specifically, it involves studying the relationships between the delimitation of a given field of knowledge, characterized by the composition of the symbolic objects that express it, and the structuring interactions through which it is shaped. In a word, it is the analysis of the interactions between the structuring of a field and the structuring of social relationships. The approach thus consists of relating the properties of discourse to the social conditions of its genesis, as well as examining the influence of discourse on the production and transformation of the social field: attempting to dialecticize the process of knowledge and the social process.

Secondly, it aims to clarify, to some extent, the general problem of the individual's relationship to social reality by examining the specific function of groups; to pose the problem of the integration and evolution of the subject through the analysis of the mediation between them and society, carried out by the group.

Finally, it seeks to contemplate, although this objective is much more distant, the conditions of possibility for a cultural anthropology of science that would be founded on the articulation of cognitive processes with those of communication.

However, in the current state of research development, our approach is considerably hampered by the fragmentary nature of the available data and the near absence of systematic theoretical approaches: those on which we base our analyses come from different frameworks and distinct disciplinary fields. In this context, our aim is limited. We outline the rudiments of a problematic concerning the dialectic of sociocognitive processes. This barely sketched problematic does not propose a model that can be tested. It remains exploratory. Thus, we prefer to adopt a mode of treatment that raises questions more than it resolves problems. If this analysis manages to reignite, and perhaps clarify, a debate that some consider closed, then we would consider ourselves satisfied.

2. Natural thought and knowledge: An overview

The term knowledge refers to two distinct objects depending on whether it designates the contents, objects or events upon which thought operates or the very processes of thought itself. We will address these two aspects sequentially, referring to natural knowledge as the nature and form of the contents upon which thought operates, and natural thought as the operations performed on these contents.

This second part aims to allocate a space (which is not that of science) to the debate on the epistemological rupture. However, to specify this, we must first compile a provisional catalogue of relevant facts and then develop an analysis of the dimensions that integrate them. The approach involves organizing the facts into dimensions: each represents an indicator; that is, a concrete element and a potential member of a class. It is, in a sense, a reverse dimensional analysis (Lazarsfeld, 1971). Since these facts originate from different studies, the objective is less to present them as positive elements and more to identify, among various theories, identical problematic issues. This is to determine whether, beyond the objects studied and the facts reported, a persistent question runs from one study to another and has been only partially resolved (Canguilhem, 1977).

Finally, we will attempt to approach natural thought and knowledge from three complementary aspects: (a) their genesis, that is, their origin and transformations; (b) their organization, because if knowledge and thought have a history, there is no reason to believe that the functional relationships between their constituent elements derive solely from their prior meanings; on the contrary, it is highly possible that the value of an element changes as it becomes part of a new organization; and (c) their function within the general cognitive process by addressing the work performed by natural knowledge and thought (Le Moigne, 1977).

In the absence of a unified field proposing an already constituted object, we must draw from different studies that revolve around a common, albeit variably articulated, question. Our aim is to extract the guiding concepts and then discuss and articulate them among themselves. This endeavour thus entails certain risks, such as making inappropriate associations. The state and development of the human sciences do little to facilitate the task, and the risk of employing implicit categories remains. Consequently, we may propose a line of inquiry that might prove flawed or even entirely erroneous. This represents the most restrictive intrinsic limit of this work.

We will limit our analysis to cognitive aspects alone, reserving for subsequent research the analysis of more affective factors, embodied in attitudes, norms, values, and so on. Finally, it goes without saying that reporting the entire body of available results would require a development far exceeding the scope of an article.

2.1 Natural knowledge

(1) Composition of natural knowledge

Natural knowledge is a ‘fragmented knowledge’. It is composed of ‘judgements’, ‘clichés’, ‘fixed expressions’, ‘conventional expressions’ and ‘scattered notions’. These ‘unordered scraps’, these autonomous fragments, form a heterogeneous repertoire the cohesion of which primarily stems from the proximity relations between elements, associations of ideas, contexts of acquisition, and assonances, rather than from a ‘structure’ that would organize them. They constitute, to use Lévi-Strauss's expression, a ‘structured ensemble’ that offers ‘density’ and ‘compactness’ in the absence of logical structuring (Boltanski, 1968; Lévi-Strauss, 1962; Moles, 1971; Moscovici, 1976a).

The components of natural knowledge can be classified into practices, which encompass rules of conduct, behaviours and know-how; knowledges, which includes all the notion-based elements detached or abstracted from immediate practice; and categories, which organize practices and knowledges. Thus, even though it possesses the characteristics of a structured ensemble, natural knowledge does not present itself as a mere conglomerate. It splits, and therefore structures itself, into levels articulated with one another. It is pertinent to add that natural knowledge borders on a cognitive type not by the content of any particular fragment, historically and culturally marked, but by its essentially fragmentary nature. Each of its constituents forms an informational isolate.

The very nature of natural knowledge raises the challenging problem of articulating a set of fragmented practices and notions by a given subject who does not necessarily act erratically. What is the relationship between practices and the conceptual schemes available to the subject? Reintroducing the notion of praxis seems difficult, as it implies a too close relationship between knowledge and practice, which is not the case. How does the subject integrate the knowledges and practices at their disposal? How does the subject coordinate and prioritize them? What is the underlying principle of coherence in the subject's behaviour?

(2) Relationships between fragments

It is impossible to immediately resolve the problem of integrating practices and knowledges. All we can attempt is to outline a problematic that describes the modalities of a possible integration. This results ‘from the conjunction of the microscopic properties of the subsystems and the characteristics of the interaction networks between subsystems, operations at the end of which the macroscopic properties of a system are determined’ (Walliser, 1977: 47). It follows that the scheme developed, within the framework of behavioural integration, for example, has a greater generality than the experiences that contributed to its constitution. It stems less from the object than from the interaction between the subject and the object, in such a way that it contributes to establishing the predictability of a sequence of elements, allowing the subject to compensate ‘for missing elements by drawing on others’ in the case of an incomplete subsequent relationship (Moles, 1973: 399). It is reasonably conceivable that ‘practices’, ‘notions’ and ‘categories’ correspond to successive levels of integration.

(3) The process of decontextualization

For the vast majority of researchers, natural knowledge is decontextualized knowledge. It would derive from previously constituted discourses, fragmented as a result of the loss of an integrative principle. The fragments would acquire autonomy and mobility. Popularization, for example, would represent a fragmented cognitive field, constituted by the juxtaposition of scraps torn from coherent discourses. It would thus exhibit the characteristics of diminished knowledge, lacking an integrative principle, the internal consistency of which would derive from an external elsewhere to the object considered (Roqueplo, 1974).

This notion of decontextualization, while advantageous in clarifying the genesis of popularizing discourse, neither raises nor resolves the problem of integrating notions. The decontextualization of notions is not a phenomenon inherent to the composition of non-scientific thought. On the contrary, it appears as a structural process that pertains to the economy of exchanges; that is, the rules governing the transfer of statements between two or more parties. Therefore, it is a process found at all stages of the diffusion and assimilation of knowledge. All discourses, regardless of their internal coherence, are thus structurally decontextualized. They are apprehended only through fragmentary statements collected by a receiver because they cannot be transmitted and assimilated in bulk all at once (Skemp, 1979) but must be progressively reconstructed by the subjects.

(4) Dimensions of the decontextualization process

Decontextualization results from the combined action of several factors present in any exchange. We will consider the processes of communication and cultural diffusion, to which the influence of psychological and social factors is added.

(1) The communication process

The information assimilated by a subject is presented to them randomly through media, conversation or any other form of exchange, excluding systematic instruction. This information is static in nature and arises from immediate needs. In the case of the media, the information presented primarily originates from selections made by the communicator within their ‘microsystem where they draw nourishment’, as ‘the actual importance of knowledge is never a mandatory criterion for selection by the mass media’ (Moles, 1971: 268). This results in a constant discrepancy between the ‘real’ importance of knowledge and the relative importance attributed to it by the mass media. But what constitutes the real importance of knowledge? Knowledge thus appears to be constituted, at least in the case of prolonged contact with mass media, through progressive thickening and inferential structuring based on the co-occurrence of information. Given that information is uneven, the structuring performed is equally uneven.

However, it would be misleading to assume that this random process solely results from the mass-media mode. Bourdieu and Darbel (1969) demonstrated, in an entirely different context, that contact with culture becomes increasingly random as one descends into the popular classes. Using the example of museum attendance, they show that it is practised by those who have long internalized the code of artistic expression, while others, particularly members of the working classes, attend only for heavily advertised special events but do not return. Contact remains even more incidental as the level of cultural offering focuses on ‘noble’ works—those requiring a greater mastery of the code from the receiver. Regarding immediate cultural needs, Bourdieu and Darbel emphasized the differential nature of this practice. The least culturally endowed visitors ‘are primarily attracted by historical, folkloric, or ethnographic objects’—those whose perception and categorization rely on daily experience.

(b) The message, as Eco (1972: 117) emphasizes, ‘is an empty form to which various meanings can be attributed’. It is a ‘source of possible message-meanings’. This work of integrating information by attributing meaning is performed by the receiver. However, it should be clarified that, for the same source message, different receivers will construct distinct and distinctive interpretations because the conditions of reception vary with cultural practices and habitus (Bourdieu, 1980: 88‒89). Thus, the appropriation of the same message remains relative to the properties of the receivers, and, to the extent that cultural practices are differentiated, reception remains structurally differential. The relative intelligibility of a message will result from both the receiver's capacity and expectations. Consequently, the readability of a message is not an intrinsic property but a relationship established between the emission level and the receiver's competence.

(c) Finally, it is sufficient to recall that attention and retention, as cognitive factors, modulate the reception of the message, since their combination during active listening determines the receiver's threshold of receptivity; and that the threshold of receptivity itself is a function of cultural habitus.

• (2) The cultural diffusion process

• While the diffusion and propagation of knowledge primarily occur through written means, they also take place during informal or accidental contacts. Certainly, the written mode constitutes an important channel, but the practice of reading suggests that, for the vast majority, it serves more as a leisure and entertainment activity than a deliberate learning process. Conversation thus represents the preferred mode through which information is exchanged. The conversational mode is characterized by the direct association of information scraps with the expression of group rules and norms, without the possibility of completely dissociating the cognitive relationship from the normative relationship. This occurs in such a way that fragments of knowledge pass through the expression and maintenance of a social relationship. It is rare in conversational exchanges for interlocutors to have the leisure to fully develop a theoretical or normative context, to explicitly elaborate the premises and outcomes of their actions. The context demands from them immediate real or symbolic action, as well as taking a position on all debated issues. This ‘pressure to infer’ (Moscovici, 1976a) compels interlocutors to economize their means and to draw only from their knowledge elements that can directly advance the debate. Since any explanation involves detours and delays, it is therefore reduced to the essentials. The prescriptive statement, whether justified or not, at least clarifies the aim of the action. Learning, when it occurs, can thus pertain only to fragmentary elements or remain entirely implicit.

(3) Social factors

The expression of social relationships establishes a double gap. The first pertains to the properties of the source compared to those of the receiver. The universe from which the information emanates corresponds little or not at all to that of the receiver. Assimilation of notions proves difficult, if not impossible, as they do not align with the receiver's experiential schemes. ‘Notions’ then represent more free signifiers that can be invested with meaning rather than information connected to a shared discursive or practical context. The learning process is thereby burdened (Roqueplo, 1974). The second gap is established between daily practices and daily discourses. These rely more on mechanisms of reaffirming social belonging than on their formal correspondence with the associated practices. This situation of cognitive dissonance is constitutive of natural knowledge. Moreover, the opposition between discourse and practice is rarely experienced as a conflict. In fact, the problem lies in the acquisition of discourses and practices: practices, most often acquired implicitly, were learned by chance; they are thus disparate. The associated discourses were learned in the same way. Thus, the subject is compelled to coordinate strongly internalized fragments of universes that they only partially master.

Additionally, the subject and the group to which they belong evolve dialectically. The group has the particularity of mediating the exchange and diffusion processes among its members. Within a group, the acquisition of a practice occurs more under the dual constraint of group pressure and imitation than through individual decentring, which remains, of course, always possible. Behavioural imitation marks belonging, perpetuates norms and reinforces the internal cohesion mechanism. It should be added that the deferred processing of information, since it is first subjected to the influence of the leader, resembles secondary diffusion mechanisms, such as rumours, because it entails distortion based on distance and sociometric relays (Rouquette, 1975). This results in transfer delays and an increase in the number of errors.

(4) Psychological factors

All these factors, whether pertaining to communication processes or social processes, are further modulated by an emitter or receiver who is constantly focused by the interplay of their expectations, motivations, interests, and so on.

(5) Conclusion

Is there a moment or place where perfectly integrated knowledge is unitary? To the extent that each individual must constantly appropriate knowledge by reconstructing it, can there exist any that are not partial? It seems to us, for all the reasons cited, that completely assimilated and perfectly explicit knowledge is simply inconceivable. Let us emphasize that the quantitative aspect of knowledge (the mass of knowledge accumulated and stored in libraries and databases) remains, in our opinion, secondary. It is within and through the very process of cultural and social exchanges that the decontextualization of knowledge becomes structural.

(5) The form of natural knowledge

Natural knowledge, an undivided consciousness, remains superficial in relation to phenomena. Originating from daily experience—its substance comprising the most objectively preserved and paradoxically the most internalized properties—it is not conceptualized as knowledge and remains transparent to its object.

The form of knowledge established by natural knowledge is direct and continuous. It focuses, for reasons now evident, on the immediate aspects of everyday experience (Bachelard, 1966). It culminates in a phenomenology of the observed: it is, to reiterate Bachelard's (1972) expression, a ‘non-duplicated consciousness of observation’ and experimentation. In fact, the means at its disposal preclude the conceptual detour that underpins experimentation. The apprehension of the world is confined to the materiality of the objects that constitute it—not due to a deficiency of intelligence but because this knowledge relies solely on the categories of everyday experience, from which interpretative schemes are abstracted. Moreover, everyday experience imposes itself and suffices by itself, as man, constantly engaged in action and decision-making, regulation upon regulation, modulates his cognitive universe through partial centrings and decentrings without fully decentring. If the world is grasped in its phenomenal materiality, that might not be due to the influence of a positivist ideology permeating the knowledge-elaboration process but perhaps because this positivism corresponds to a specific form of knowledge, resulting from it.

Consequently, this knowledge is primarily that of the sensory properties of objects or daily activities (Bachelard, 1966)—the properties of ‘first aspect’ (Boltanski, 1968: 105), those upon which everyday experience is based and which suffice to regulate it. It is less about knowing than about recognizing the experiential given. One could envisage that scientific knowledge, also highly articulated with its practice to the extent of making it the validity norm of the discourse it produces, surpassed the stage of continuity with sensory experience only when the coordination of activities and sensory experience proved insufficient to overcome the difficulties posed by a given problem. The transition from experiential fact to experimental fact would stem less from a desire to know than from its functional necessity. The transition to the intelligible might perhaps result from a resistance based on the insufficiency of means. If the familiar aspects of phenomenal reality refer to one another and specify each other, and if this homogeneous plane suffices for daily practices, it is perhaps sufficient for their regulation without the need to transcend it.

Can this knowledge genuinely transcend primary utilitarianism? It is difficult, as utilitarianism is what specifies and regulates its object or action. Describing what objects do or what they are used for is to speak about the objects and partially explicate the relationships one maintains with them. Consequently, it assigns them a place in the world and determines its own: it orders this world. The finalistic explanation that results in finalism, from which functionalism is not exempt, expresses a condition and a limitation of knowledge, at least at a given stage of its development. Utilitarianism is the limiting condition of a coordination threshold. Could it be that the experimental detour that allows a rupture with sensory experience ultimately expresses, in a more abstract manner, only a functional relationship applied at a higher coordination level?

The character of this knowledge, as previously noted, partly stems from the economy of the cultural diffusion apparatus. Only objects the properties of which are objectively preserved can be assimilated without the effort of complex decentred coordination. It follows that objects will be individualized rather than apprehended in terms of their generic aspects, as they always present themselves in their uniqueness and singularity. Furthermore, articulating them with one another proves difficult because it would require abstracting their common properties; that is, constituting and designating the class to which they belong. This is obviously realized at an elementary level; otherwise, behaviour would be erratic. However, as categorization remains implicit and the initial task would be to explicate it by constituting them as specific objects, there is regulation but not decentred coordination. Finally, and for obvious reasons, this knowledge remains figurative.

Natural knowledge raises at least three fundamental questions. First, does it inherently belong to the popular classes, thereby expressing their economic and cultural marginalization? It would then represent, compared to the ‘scholarly’ knowledge of the favoured classes, one of the conditions of alienation. The validity of such a pathway can be doubted, as nothing proves that the integration and explicitness of knowledge increase as one ascends the social hierarchy. According to Moscovici (1976a), it seems that, at equal levels of information, regardless of expression norms, values, interests or attitudes inherent to each class, the relationship to knowledge remains the same. The question thus remains open.

The second question specifies the first. It involves addressing the problem of appropriating the phenomenal given in relation to the cognitive schemes available to the subject for apprehending it. This question pertains to the subtlety or complexity of the network of meanings one possesses to specify reality and the conditions that facilitate the development of such a network.

Thirdly, if ‘knowing does not consist in copying reality, but in acting upon it and transforming it through manifest or internalized actions’ (Piaget, 1967c: 33), it is important to question why and how the clarification of schemes leads to a transformation of action. How does the transition from rhythms to regulations and from regulations to groupings lead to an improvement of action (Piaget, 1967b)?

2.2 Natural thought

(1) The substance of natural thought

Essentially, the substance of natural thought consists, on a synthetic level, of empirical categories of substance and, on an analytical level, of bipolar classification schemes.

Natural thought, through its mode of designating objects endowed with attributes or qualities, presupposes the permanence of an object that persists beyond the transformations that it undergoes. If the epithet functions to reveal the essence, it can be said that natural thought presupposes an essence that is revealed only through the attributes of phenomena: ‘substance calls forth quality, and quality calls forth substance’ (Bachelard, 1970: 104). ‘To say that the cabbage is strong, that cow's milk is natural, is already to have something to say about the cabbage or cow's milk, to, in a certain way, define their nature’ (Boltanski, 1968: 102). It is an economical knowledge because the attribute emanates from the substance without the necessity to question it. And, if one must do so, the attribute suffices to describe it by specifying one of its sensory qualities ‘taken as the sign of a substantive property’ (Bachelard, 1970: 104); then, if further elaboration is needed, the accumulation of adjectives will suffice. Thus, foods will be described as ‘sweet, strong, bland, warming, diluting, dry, moist, fortifying, etc. …’ (Boltanski, 1968: 89).

The use of the epithet presupposes classification. This is the second major characteristic of natural thought. It orders the world according to a bipolar logic (Moscovici, 1976a): a classificatory thought, but a bipolar classification. Boltanski has demonstrated that classifications are operated on the basis of two oppositions from which homologies derive. Foods classified as ‘sweet’ and ‘strong’ become specified as ‘sweet nourishing’ and ‘sweet non-nourishing’, then subdivided into ‘sweet nourishing bland’ and ‘strong nourishing flavourful’. (Boltanski, 1968: 93). For Moscovici, the bipolar logic stemmed from what he called the ‘principle of compensation’, which involves distorting objects ‘by maximizing their similarities or differences’. It is, in a sense, a logical trimming employed to better classify them. This principle of compensation is articulated with the ‘principle of non-contradiction’, which involves balance and the maintenance of this balance. However, the principle of compensation and the principle of non-contradiction are opposed because one pertains to social norms and the other to the necessary relationships between the elements of an object. Moscovici (1976a: 270) emphasized that ‘the objects or beings to which the judgement pertains are perceptively and intellectually associated into two classes’. The relationships between these classes must be exclusive; otherwise, the relationship would be one of contradiction. However, the individual's primary pursuit is ‘social understanding’. Consequently, ‘collective consensus’ becomes a condition for ‘coherent thought’ beyond ‘unity’. Cognitive consistency thus reflects a desire to maintain this essential unity by avoiding social conflict.

Through the processes of modifying and organizing judgements, the aim is the constitution of homogeneous classes of objects, individuals or behaviours that share positive relationships or identical attributes; the relationships with members of other classes must, therefore, be negative or based on the presence of different attributes. This involves the distribution of objects, individuals or behaviours into defined classes to achieve cognitive clarity regarding their meanings and connections. (Moscovici, 1976a: 271)

However, the entirety is modulated by the desire to maintain one's identity, which is conceived only through the social relationship that binds the subject to their group. The maintenance of identity reinforces this essential unity. Thus, for Moscovici, bipolar classification and the requirement to transform attributes to allocate them into only two classes stem from a desire to maintain one's identity. This explanation has the immense advantage of closely linking cognitive facts with social facts.

Nevertheless, we question whether other factors might be in play. Could it be, on the one hand, that the social accommodation of the subject—the maintenance of their identity—relies on group mediation (Bernstein, 1975; Bourdieu, 1965), especially as the categories from which they order the world become more internalized? On the other hand, does this bipolar classification stem from the subject's prior level of information? Possessing only two assimilative schemes to order reality, would all objects related to a portion of reality automatically fall into one or the other class? Is bipolarity the manifestation of a cognitive threshold determined by the development of the network of assimilative schemes available to the subject to order the world?

(2) The recontextualization process

What is the recontextualization of information? It is a reinterpretation. It consists of coordinating information under the influence of the subject's assimilative schemes. This operation maintains or restores the subject's degree of coherence. The appropriation of reality, in any form, involves a form of assimilation, and this assimilation relies on the categories available to the subject to order reality. The dialectical transformation of assimilative schemes merely illustrates a moment in this process of reinterpretation.

Like decontextualization, recontextualization is structural. In fact, it would be more accurate to speak of a dialectic of decontextualization–recontextualization because the two processes coexist constantly. If all information is, in some way, detached from its context of meaning, its reception presupposes another context of meaning into which it integrates. Reinterpretation pertains to practices and rules. It functions based on the mental categories internalized by the subject, which possess greater generality than practices. In effect, the individualization of categories increases relative to practices, thereby enhancing their unpredictability. They can be distinguished through a systemic approach by evaluating their probability of behavioural occurrence. A category represents a virtual behaviour, highly internalized and socialized, and highly predictable within a given context, whereas a practice remains individual as it is modulated by the randomness of contacts. Consequently, practices exhibit less fixity than categories.

Under Boltanski's hypothesis, the reinterpretation of practices is based on categories. The more deeply ingrained and unconscious they are, the more significant they become as products of prior sedimentations. They structure themselves by preserving the accumulated traces of the subject's personal history. Thus, disparate practices, regardless of the conscious relationship that social subjects maintain with them (Boltanski's principle of cohesion), reify a set of social conditions that prevailed in the subject's personal history. The structuring ambient social context contributes to the integration of practices and of the discourses surrounding these practices. However, it should be added that practices or discourses carry within them the trace of their social production process. To the extent that traces are objectively preserved, they carry an autonomous virtual meaning that modulates the receptive structure (Lévi-Strauss, 1962).

While in The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss successfully demonstrated the weight of fragments torn from the original myth in reconstructing a discourse, he did not sufficiently emphasize the conditions of their appropriation by the subject. Therefore, he, in our view, underestimated the influence of social frameworks and cognitive frameworks in the unfolding of this process. It appears promising to attempt to articulate them.

The subject's appropriation of a practice or discourse thus lies in the articulation of the receptive framework's properties and those of the practices themselves. Thus, the transformation of practices certainly results from the type of reinterpretation that they undergo, but it must also be added that this reinterpretation relies on the practice that anchors it.

(3) Dimensions of the recontextualization process

We will consider three dimensions: the communication plane, the social factors plane and the cognitive factors plane.

On the communication plane, always within the context of the formation and transformations of popular knowledge, two elements constantly intervene: the ‘pressure to infer’, which consists of the demand placed on everyone to produce a response in all circumstances (Moscovici, 1976a), and the primacy of the conversational discursive mode (Berger and Luckmann, 1967; Moscovici, 1976a). The ‘pressure to infer’ compels the subject to produce a rapid response that can only be the dominant response, since, to constitute itself, it can appeal only to the common code, which is necessarily subject to norms that ensure the maintenance of group cohesion. From centrings to reified consensuses and from consensuses to regulated centrings, a relationship of appropriation develops that closely unites the expression of cognitive processes with social processes. Adopting a Piagetian perspective, one might view this as an effect of sociocentrism (Piaget, 1976). The subject reformulates their knowledge through an interactive tactic that dialectizes external, threatening factors through the constraints that they exert with internal factors—the stability of the group's members’ universe. This reformulation modulates the cognitive process and, consequently, knowledge, albeit unbeknown to the subject.

The conversational mode intensifies this apparatus because it is rare for the subject to have the time to construct a complete form that integrates all the parameters of the discussion's stakes, as Piaget demonstrated. The integration of information into a coherent representation requires a time lapse that increases with the number of parameters to integrate into a gestalt. The written form, or any form of material preservation of information, has the advantage of being durable and partially momentarily complete. It allows for an appropriation relationship without the necessity or urgency to take an immediate position. The written form facilitates decentring since the subject can concatenate it. In contrast, the conversational mode demands an exchange of information for the sake of real or symbolic action or behaviour. It involves influencing, persuading, being approved; in short, being recognized or forcing recognition. Preservation, where it exists, can only be subjective. It is merely approximate preservation since it is entirely linked to the process of individual and collective memory.

Unlike the written form, the exchange process is thus direct but transitory. It involves less alternating between premises and conclusion, as in written expression, thereby suspending decision-making, and more opting for a decision and then adjusting to it. Thus, categories are never objectified as in formal thought: they remain implicit and are transformed only through centrings and partial consensuses (that is, through the incessant play of interactions), without the subject ever, or rarely, fully decentring to encompass the entire process. Through successive regulations operated gradually, through cognitive and normative assimilations and accommodations, cognitive and normative frameworks are constantly transforming. A reconstruction of the exchange process does not restore the initial conditions: it is merely the reification, projected into the past, of the newly developed reading framework. To some extent, the conversational mode erases history because it subsumes past traces under those of the present. Thinking about the past of a conversation is prohibited by the very apparatus of its economy.

Focusing plays a pivotal role here as well, as focus only isolates and retains one of the possibles. It confines the understanding of complex phenomena within the expression of a particular viewpoint. This undue generalization pertains more to the expression of an objective condition than to the weight of an ideological constraint, although the two can coincide. It reflects the impossibility faced by humans in integrating and coordinating all parameters of a complex situation of which they are but one element. The subject's preferences or interests, which ‘spontaneously direct attention to a zone of the environment’, reinforce the apparatus (Moscovici, 1976a: 250). Focus is thus a limiting condition of the human cognitive experience.

The weight of group values and norms can only accentuate this focusing process. Consequently, legitimate and illegitimate cognitive relationships emerge. The group delineates the forbidden and the permitted, which determine the operational system of the subject–group pair. This framework, though implicit, constitutes the metasystem that bounds the actions and operations of social subjects. Thus, all reflective work is partially overdetermined, unbeknown to the subject, because it ignores the rules that underpin its process.

At the level of individual cognitive factors, reinterpretation relies on two mechanisms: the extension of categories, thereby covering an increasing number of objects and different contexts (Boltanski, 1968), and the translation of schemes. The extension of categories results from their inherent generality: they are constantly reusable tools. The problem thus lies in the number and diversity of categories that an individual possesses to order and classify objects in the world. As for the translation of schemes, it simply involves the assimilation of the unknown to the known through the ‘transfer of a thinking scheme from one domain to another’.

(4) Social representation

Let us briefly recall Moscovici's guiding hypothesis. He analysed the modalities of disseminating a scientific theory and the consequent transformations of its object into a representation. He then addressed the cognitive organization of this representation by dialectizing the object to be known, the knowing subject, and the social groups’ economy. According to him, a representation is ‘a particular modality of knowledge’ (Moscovici, 1961: 302). It would differ from myth, religious thought, scientific thought, ideology, and so on. To clarify our viewpoint: representation is an intermediate instance between categories, functioning as a cognitive and normative metasystem, and practices, which anchor empirical reality. It is an operatory theory of reality. However, it is an implicit theory for all the reasons we have previously mentioned.

(1) Nature of representation

A representation is a ‘mediation process between concept and perception’ (Moscovici, 1961: 302). It renders the concept and perception somewhat interchangeable, as they reciprocally generate each other. Thus, the object of the concept can be taken as the object of perception, or the content of the concept can be ‘perceived’. The content of a representation is predominantly figurative. It is structured by a given meaning. Cognitively, it reproduces the properties of an object in a ‘coherent and stylized’ manner (Moscovici, 1961: 302); this reproduction is concrete, imaging and meaningful.

(2) Formation of a representation

A representation is developed in two stages: objectivation and anchoring. Objectivation, which relies on the selective retention of information, ensures the transition from theory to its image through the development of a figurative model, which is, in fact, a stylization of the theory. This figurative model represents the imaging core of the representation. It involves a phenomenological thickening through anchoring abstract thought by fixing states through images. These images intercalate between general concepts and the lived situations that they illustrate. It suffices to mention that the difficulty Moscovici tackled consists of developing a satisfactory theoretical model that integrates the figurative and operatory aspects of knowledge. We will discuss the proposed solution shortly.

Objectivation is completed when the image contributes to the edification of social reality. Moscovici calls this moment ‘naturalization’. It confers upon the figurative model an autonomy and an evidential status—a reality of ‘common sense’. It involves a reduction of complexity through its inscription as a material object, thereby making it observable (Moscovici, 1976a).

The second major moment is anchoring. It is a quasi-connotative process. The image derived from the concept transforms into an entity with a ‘quasi-autonomous existence’ as it expresses reality directly. This entity accrues a network of meanings and an interpretative system through functional generalization. Through this, Moscovici insisted that anchoring ‘contributes to expressing and constituting social relationships’ (1961: 318) as it allows for the development of a ‘conduct framework’ through the ‘constitution of a typology of persons and events’ (1961: 332). To borrow Lévi-Strauss's expression, one could say that the elaboration of a representation involves the development of a ‘structured ensemble’. This development, over which the subject ultimately has little control, relies on these entities—true portions of reality—that the subject combines and recombines. Faced with a problem to solve, the individual can devise a solution only by cataloguing responses already objectively inscribed in these entities (Lévi-Strauss, 1962). It is interesting to draw parallels between Moscovici's work and Lévi-Strauss's, as both approached the same problem from distinct disciplinary fields using different objects—the former with natural thought, the latter with mythical thought. They described similar processes using the same conceptual framework. This raises the central question of distinguishing between natural thought and mythical thought.

2.3 Operations of natural thought

(1) The most remarkable characteristic of natural thought

Perhaps the most notable characteristic of natural thought is the apparent absence of reasoning. It is constructed as though causality is non-existent. Reality is presented as given from the outset. It may be justified, but it is not elaborated upon. The conclusion prevails over the parts because it provides an integrative and regulatory framework to which the parts must conform. In reasoning, each proposition is considered in relation to the whole and to its place within a series of reasoning (Lévi-Strauss, 1962; Moscovici, 1976a). This implies that the parts adjust to the whole. One merely reiterates what has already been affirmed and reaffirms what has already been stated: such reasoning can only be recurrent and selective. It reconstructs what has already been affirmed or postulated. This approach differs from knowledge of the object, which relies on that of its constituent parts and expresses their synthesis, progressively developed through significant integration.

(2) The process of natural thought relies on the widespread use of analogy

The development of natural thought is fundamentally based on the pervasive use of analogy. By relating the unknown to the known, analogy explains by applying the same thinking model to diverse contexts. It assimilates different universes to one another. As a principle of generalization and mediation, it reduces phenomenological complexity to the categories available to the subject. It presupposes the use of elementary categories. As such, it allows for the economy of thought required by the demands of conversational mode. Moscovici (1967a: 278) aptly observed that, on one hand, analogy multiplies the power of the imagination as it ‘helps to establish the represented characteristics of the object by centering on the object’, but, on the other hand, it ensures the dominance of the symbolic order because it ‘constructs meanings’ or connections concerning the object by centring on the frame of reference, thereby contributing to the reaffirmation of its identity or difference.

(3) Analogy as a confinement to primary empiricism

For Bachelard (1966, 1972), analogy confined itself to primary empiricism, as it always provides more answers than questions. Therefore, its use is not heuristic, as it can be in science, but strictly explanatory. This is a characteristic of pre-scientific thought because it derives its explanatory power from comparing objects and natural phenomena with daily practices, of which they represent only an extension.

In fact, there are two groups of analogies in natural thought. The first is household analogy: the unknown to be explained is confined within the perimeter of meaningful daily activities because they are immediately transparent to their purpose. Ways of eating, methods of sleeping, modes of gardening and professional activities constitute practices that, in the case of the popular classes, represent the potential site for the possible integration of their knowledges and the only concrete frame of reference for this knowledge. Thus, in the absence of producing a discourse of knowledges about reality because the advent of such a discourse is impossible, one transposes recurrently the norms of established practices into knowledges. Bachelard (1972: 121) had already emphasized this: ‘The homo faber is sometimes a butcher; he draws his intuitions from his brine tank. He thinks as he salts.’ The second is the analogy based on the characteristics of objects manufactured by humans. For example, the eye is explained based on the characteristics of the camera obscura. In both cases, the familiar universe serves as the springboard for the assimilative activity.

Finally, for Bachelard (1966: 102–103), the use of analogy constituted nothing other than a ‘very simple application of the principle of identity’. Again, it characterizes the functioning of pre-scientific thought. Reality appears only as a ‘natural sequence of natural phenomena’ (Bachelard, 1966: 102). The generalization process involves establishing logical classes of equivalences between functions and inferring the equivalence of substantive principles. Thus, natural thought remains confined within elementary empiricism. Knowledge proceeds from a naive and syncretic phenomenology, primarily based on generalization through substantial equivalences. However, the frequency of household or professional analogies based on the norms of common linguistic practices should not be underestimated. On the contrary, these analogies underscore the weight of practices in the development of knowledge as they demonstrate, conversely, the functional articulation of knowledge with the expression of their practice. In this regard, the work of Louchet and Hautekeete (1973) shows that a cognitive profile not actualized within effective practice will gradually fade to the point of becoming inoperative. Routine activities, through the use of explanatory models based on the economy of common linguistic practices, will favour and ultimately anchor only the most easily communicable habitual schemes.

(4) Natural thought as repetitive thought

Natural thought is repetitive. Possessing a stock of scraps and fragments, it combines and recombines them to support its judgements. Moreover, it is less important to use the correct term than to use one recognized by the group, thus playing a role of identifier and fulfilling the function of a recognition sign. It is less important to explain than to signify conformity, thereby reaffirming one's belonging. Referential content allows identification with the group and eliminates the construction of reasoning that would require more complete information. Since a solution is known without a problem being posed and all that remains is to repeat it, variations around the same viewpoint occur through recentrings by substitution. Moscovici (1976a: 257‒258) emphasized that repetition functions to organize judgement: ‘The iterative element … is the cement’ of judgment; ‘it is the mark of continuity’ in reflection. Thus, if no deviation from the norm is manifested, reasoning can continue to develop constructively without corrections. However, repetition also fulfils a preservation function inherent to the oral form: the development of discourse relies on its constant reactivation. This reactivation takes the form of a recapitulation that revisits all stages of reasoning.

(5) Natural thought is not detached from values

Natural thought is not detached from values—good and evil remain attached to substances as primary designations. To some extent, this is related to the economy of the group, which associates intentionality with knowledge.

(6) Primacy of the moral over the causal

It is thus more accurate to speak of a primacy of the moral over the causal. As practices and knowledge remain disparate, isolated and without logical relationships, the links that bind them are not causal but moral. Errors do not arise from flaws in reasoning but from transgressions of the group's rules of conduct. In other words, causality fades under the influence of morality because the rational principle of the articulation of rules and practice is not explicit. This implies, on one hand, that the effectiveness of the rule is unfounded and can only be imposed (Boltanski, 1968; Durkheim, 1967), and on the other hand, that this imposition stems from a particular ‘stance’ adopted ‘towards the world’.

However, natural thought reintroduces a form of causality, which precisely results from the ‘stance’ adopted. This causality is phenomenological. Two perceived events will be associated with one another. Their proximity suggests an intention that explains their succession. A substance endowed with properties will cause consequential effects: bad causes correspond to bad effects.

An object is always perceived as being associated with a group, to the group's purpose. Therefore, it cannot be considered neutral, as it does not respond to manifest or calculated intentions. The lack of necessary information and adherence to certain values determine the meaning of the causal relationship. (Moscovici, 1976a: 260)

(7) Natural thought as a generalizing approach due to lack of information

Finally, natural thought, precisely because of its lack of information, is a generalizing approach. Details—elements devoid of necessity—appear to be ancillary. They serve, in essence, through their deceptive and illusory diversity, only to mask the substance. The task, therefore, is to prune to restore unity. In this context, it is difficult to formulate a particular problem because it is impossible to consider its specificity. As such, it is an approach that, driven by its own momentum, naturally leads to a cosmology. Thus, knowledge of the world is entirely reduced to an order principle—a primary explanatory principle from which all others naturally derive.

Do the modes of decontextualization and recontextualization not express the very process of regulating cognitive activities; that is, the modes of the general process of transforming assimilative frameworks? How could scientific thought escape this process? It must be considered that, like natural thought, the articulation between cognitive modes and normative modes is equally close.

3. Elements for a problematic

This third part aims to discuss the dimensions of natural thought, compare the proposed explanatory theories, and finally reformulate the problem.

3.1 Theories of the genesis of natural thought

(1) The loss of the principle of internal coherence

The common explanation is as follows: natural thought is a secondary thought. It derives from a primary coherent thought, the integrative principle ensuring the coherence of which has been lost. ‘To the extent that the theory, now an ensemble of relations, loses its internal coherence and principle, its dimensions and the scope of relations taken separately depend on the social rules of a group’ (Moscovici, 1961: 297). Moscovici based his explanation on the analysis of the diffusion of psychoanalysis. The transition from psychoanalysis-theory to psychoanalysis-representation occurs when, to satisfy societal norms, the theory of sexuality is excised. Thus, psychoanalysis becomes ‘socially acceptable’, but at the cost of losing its fundamental principle. Only an assemblage of autonomous notions remains, which can be rearranged according to the norms of each group (Moscovici, 1976a).

Moscovici progressively refined his thought. What was the fragmentation of a theoretical framework in 1961 became, in 1976, the socialization of a discipline. He clarified that the genesis of common sense does not proceed from the impoverishment, reduction, distortion or simplification of a science. It does not result from vulgarization. Previously, however, common sense traditionally originated from ‘language and wisdom long accumulated by regional or professional communities’, and ‘the evidence of senses or reason’ developed smoothly within this framework. ‘Sciences and philosophy drew their materials from it’ (Moscovici, 1976a: 22). Each person experienced their knowledge through contact with reality and reformulated the collective experience for themselves. With the advent and development of scientific thought, a double polarity reversal occurred. Sciences now modulate the genesis of common sense, and the essence of our personal knowledge derives from scientific experience transmitted through others, without us having direct experience of it (1976b).

It seems to us, despite the nuances and precautions, that the adopted viewpoint remains the same. Everything suggests that, for Moscovici, common sense remained a ‘secondary’ knowledge, a ‘diminished’ knowledge. Certainly, it is difficult to deny that the experience proposed by the sciences is indirect and that personal knowledge is equally indirect. However, several distinct problems remain conflated.

A first distinction must be made between what could be called the sphere of propagation of a science, which would indicate its social diffusion as a model of thought or value, and its sphere of penetration, which would be the actual transformations it induces within knowledges and practices. It is easily conceivable that propagation and penetration occur at different paces and that one does not necessarily imply the other.

Consider an example: the development of computer science and derived technologies permeates the entire sphere of scientific and commercial activities. Does the popularity enjoyed by computer technologies imply a consequential transformation of practices and cognitive skills required to master their components? Paradoxically, one might doubt it, as one might doubt that the advent of telematics entails a fundamental transformation of office work (Braverman, 1976). How do the knowledges that make this revolution possible accompany its social diffusion? How are they assimilated by the entire social body, since this technological penetration does not necessarily imply the transformation of cognitive skills?

The entire problem, it seems to us, lies in the presumption of a unitary knowledge. The assertion that there is a sampling of scraps within a discursive field during the diffusion of a science is true because this contact pertains to the decontextualization process, as previously described. However, presupposing that these scraps are free from any attachment, due to the loss or refusal of any integrative principle, overlooks the specificity of the scientific field. If the scientific field constitutes a complex of both discourses and practices circumscribing specific objects, it should not necessarily be concluded that there exist individuals who actualize them within social practices. Certainly, one could argue that knowledge is stored in libraries or databases. It should be immediately clarified that these instances are dead letters to anyone who does not have access to them; that is, to anyone who cannot appropriate them, at least at a primary level—that of their segmentation into specific fields and subfields. Furthermore, it is even impossible for anyone to master the entirety of information related to their field of competence. The frequent forgetting of these limits leads to an underestimation of the properties of the scientific field or any other field constituted by knowledge. The scientific field is a virtual complex. It requires, to actualize, a subject and a reference group. Scientific discourse is primarily a significative combinatory of statements. It is also the locus and institutions where these statements are exchanged and transformed. Certainly, scientific discourse is also defined by its method, which, being sutured, constitutes its specific practice (Jurdant, 1969). The union of discourse and method generates signifieds that circulate within the scientific field.

The idea that common sense derives from the loss of the integrative principle seems debatable to us because the integrative principle does not pre-exist partial relations: it is immanent to the complex of partial relations coordinated by the knowing subject. It is difficult to speak of a degradation of information. It seems more accurate to question the nature and form of the recontextualization performed by a subject. The problem to pose is less about the loss of the integrative principle than about the subject's ability to construct one. It is less the theory of sexuality, in itself, that poses a problem than the impossibility of reconstructing it because the information available remains too fragmentary. The rearrangement of partial concepts by the group would correspond, in the spirit of this analysis, more to the possibilities of the integrative framework itself. Information remains always decontextualized for anyone unable to constitute the synthetic link that regulates its integration. The work of Skemp (1962) sheds valuable light on the constitution of this link. He demonstrated that, from a number of concepts belonging to a given order, the communication of new concepts is impossible. Only suitably chosen examples allow a person to form them. Therefore, it is less about a primary principle from which specific effects would derive than a question of the cognitive information threshold relative to the state of the question. This also leads to another consequence: scientists are not exempt from this constraint. Their inquiry is never absolute but always relative. If, as Foucault (1969) stated, acquiring knowledge means ‘appropriating the rules that constitute the objects it designates’, this appropriation can be the product only of a construction carried out by the subject (as Piaget also supported). These rules and the relationships that derive from them can only be secondary. The coordination of scattered notions can result only from a feedback effect of thought. ‘The theoretical relationships between notions modify the definition of notions as much as a modification in the definition of notions modifies their mutual relationships’ (Bachelard, 1963: 51–52).

The integrative principle emerges from structuring. It is both structured and structuring. It recontextualizes the elements that contributed to its development. A new meta-information is produced by coordinating prior informations and then reinjected as data. As such, it contributes to an extension of the system itself and an increase in its assimilative capacity (Piaget, 1967c; Von Bertalanffy, 1973). In this spirit, deriving mythical thought from a primary myth, from which only remnants would be gathered, remains problematic.

Certainly, the integration of notions by the subject is an individual cognitive structuring, but it is supported by the entire social context, and more particularly the group context, within which the individual evolves and is constructed. One could even go so far as to say that information is contextualized only for members of the same group. For others, it remains structurally decontextualized. It can only be free statements circulated. A consequence emerges from this last remark: information, regardless of its complexity, remains relative to its recontextualization. There would thus be as many distinct objects as there are specific contexts. Speaking of ‘representation’ is therefore misleading because the term itself implies a referent—an elsewhere that would be more or less accurately reflected. Thus, the idea of an object with characteristics fixed once and for all reduces the complexity of the problem of knowledge diffusion and appropriation.

(2) A former form of knowledge

A second approach consists of viewing natural thought merely as a phased-out, and consequently outdated, form of scientific thought. Moscovici (1976a) explicitly mentioned that the socialized model of psychoanalysis developed between 1951 and 1955 is the one elaborated before 1920. Bachelard (1966) echoed a similar idea. Referring to Auguste Comte's law of three stages, he argued that these stages have left ‘permanent traces in every mind’, with the nuance that ‘the contemporary era consumes … the break between common knowledge and scientific knowledge, between common experience and scientific technology’ (Bachelard, 1966: 102). The result is that this latter phase—the one that requires a detour to know the object, the one that demands a rupture, the most recent—would also be the least well assimilated. However, it would be in conflict with the previous phase, the positive age, which is deeply internalized and for which knowledge, after renouncing explanation by the first principle, would content itself with observing reality to extract regular relationships in the form of laws. Common knowledge would thus be characterized by the persistence of this positivism.

More specifically: a social hierarchy corresponds to a parallel cultural hierarchy. Innovation initiated at the top offers models that progressively diffuse into all layers of the social body. Thus, it is a translation from the top down accompanied by a progressive decontextualization of information. Consequently, the popular classes, at the base of the pyramid, exhibit a structural lag in terms of both knowledges and beliefs. It is worth noting that the theoretical framework used by Boltanski is based on that of Linton. This is why he concludes that the adoption of cultural traits first concerns the most concrete elements. The pace of borrowings thus decreases as one moves from the least internalized elements, such as practices, to the more internalized ones, such as mental categories, passing through discourses that occupy an intermediate position. According to Boltanski, the journey of cultural traits from the upper classes to the popular classes, when both are in contact, is marked by the transition from an exchange relationship between equal partners to an authority relationship. One progressively shifts from an explanation that presupposes shared knowledge among peers, which maintains a logical link (or at least presents one) between an action to undertake and the reasons motivating it, towards an order that imposes adherence to unfounded rules. If popular knowledge is fragmented knowledge, that is due to the very conditions of its transmission and not by virtue of an internal principle being lost. However, it emerges that it is at the top, among the upper classes, that knowledge is the most contemporary and the best integrated.

Thus, the acquisition of knowledge is both a social translation and a temporal translation; and a cut through the social pyramid isolates the phases of historical transformations of a problem. Thus, as one traverses the layers of the social hierarchy, one encounters fragments of older forms of problem formulation, as well as the rules and beliefs that were associated with them.

The knowledge of the popular classes is therefore not ‘anarchic’ knowledge, or non-knowledge. It is another knowledge. More fluid and mobile practices are reinterpreted based on discourses and categories that remain more stable because they are more deeply ingrained and older. We will retain from the works of Moscovici and Boltanski that they have the immense advantage of breaking away from a conception that would consider the popular classes as the repositories of their own experience and knowledge, alienated by the dominant ideology. From this perspective, they allow us to think concretely about the lineage of knowledges within the social body, thus reconnecting with an evolutionary conception of societies, at least in terms of the successions and transformations of contents. However, several questions remain unresolved. The properties of the cognitive apparatus do not seem to have been directly addressed. Nevertheless, these works open a pathway for us: it is easy to conceive that a schooled subject, originating from a popular class, for example, integrates different cognitive apparatuses that can be mobilized in various circumstances. The question then is to determine the conditions under which apparatuses are mobilized. We might need to consider cognitive registers and subject them to specific social conditions of production and updating. One could also presuppose that, in the context of the constant evolution of scientific thought, popular knowledge will always appear as pre-scientific. It will always characterize an earlier stage of thought.

However, a problem remains unresolved, which we mentioned regarding Moscovici's work. It concerns the diffusion of a scientific model and the consequent transformation of cognitive modes. It seems to us that a possible solution lies in the articulation of diffusion processes and what could be called an informative valence; we will return to this below.

(3) One or multiple modes of knowledge

Piaget and Bachelard shared the commonality of distinguishing and opposing the sensory and the intelligible. As Kantians, they granted precedence to the intelligible over the sensory. For Bachelard, this was a phenomenon of societal evolution: the evolution of scientific thought inevitably leads to a ‘supremacy of abstract and scientific knowledge over primary and intuitive knowledge’ (1970: 105). It should be noted that, for him, scientific knowledge, at least that of today, was not reducible to the sensory (Bachelard, 1966). A fortiori, scientific knowledge is not the complicating of the sensory. The transition from empiricism to rationalism consists of jumping from the observed to the demonstrated, which relies on the development of apodixis in the scientific approach. The effect is distinguished from the fact because it relies on the demonstration that constitutes it. ‘Scientifically knowing a natural law means knowing it both as a phenomenon and as a noumenon’, he specifies (Bachelard, 1973: 5).

While Bachelard frequently reiterated that scientific knowledge is a construction, an instrumentation, he never showed us, except through examples, how it is elaborated. The same goes for common knowledge. Opposing them therefore amounts to characterizing states without describing or specifying the processes. Moreover, the opposition maintained by Bachelard between the intelligible world of scientific knowledge and the sensory world of common knowledge reprised the Platonic distinction maintained by the Christian tradition, which associates rational knowledge ‘with the thinking of things as they are’ and ‘vulgar knowledge with appearance and illusion’: irreducibility of the noumenon and the phenomenon, of intelligible reality and sensory reality. Bachelard's project thus appropriated, with little transformation, that of Descartes, for whom the awakening and development of rational thought, as a superior form of thought and knowledge, requires the transcendence of the sensory and, a fortiori, the relegation of an intuitive approach to the sensory based on its apparent external aspects. If, for Bachelard, scientific mutation grounded the transformation of the societal relationship of knowledge, for Piaget, it was cognitive maturation that grounds the evolution of the knowledge relationship. But neither of them left us a choice: their conceptions admitted only the transcendence of prior forms or regression.

For Lévi-Strauss, the choice was societal. The sensory or intelligible modes do not follow one another, and the latter is not the transcendence of the former. A society prioritizes one over the other. However, man is virtually capable of developing both. Moreover, these modes coexist constantly within him. They differ because one concerns sensory qualities, while the other concerns properties. Lévi-Strauss (1962) called the former the ‘science of the concrete’. It is ‘approximately adjusted’ at the level of ‘perception and imagination’ and approaches ‘sensory intuition’. The other is more distant. It proceeds by a detour and targets properties more than qualities. These two modes of knowledge represent two ‘strategic levels’: two angles of attack on nature.

(4) Cognitive and operative aspects

Let us emphasize that Moscovici and Lévi-Strauss both attempted to articulate the sensory aspects of knowledge with the intelligible aspects. The similarity of their viewpoints is even surprising. For Moscovici, representation occupied an intermediate position between image and concept to such an extent that the two assimilate each other reciprocally. For Lévi-Strauss, it was the sign that occupies this intermediate position.

What to retain? Is natural thought a non-knowledge or, more precisely, is it a degraded or outdated knowledge? One thing seems clear to us: in this perspective, natural thought is diminished thought. If it does not completely represent noise or disorder, that is because a certain thickness is recognized. And it is from this thickness that it draws all its consistency. However, in all cases, natural thought, opposed and compared to scientific thought, represents the sphere of illegitimate statements: those that do not reach the objects they aim for; those that are ultimately without true objects. But this direct or indirect relegation of natural thought into a form deemed inferior knowledge, even through contradictory explanatory approaches, seems to us to be a sign of a poorly defined problem—an underlying problem that needs to be identified. Under what conditions could this problem be satisfactorily posed?

3.2 Constitutive dimensions

(1) The confusion of levels

Posing the problem of rupture is an attempt to address the issue of the objectivation relationship in all its complexity. It manifests through the entanglement of levels and the confusion of objects. It seems to us, at least until further informed and within the context of this analysis, that three levels should be dissociated: the production of knowledge, the diffusion of knowledge, and the weight of social factors in the processes of knowledge production and diffusion.

(1) Knowledge production

Knowledge production raises the question of scientific discourse and the relative place that it occupies among all the discourses produced and exchanged within the social field. The scientific object is treated from the perspective of a differential object. Therefore, addressing knowledge production means addressing the objectivation process and, beyond that, the determination of the validity of the constructed objects. The distinction between pure sciences and human sciences clearly demonstrates that the progressive construction of their respective objects unfolds over time, is neither complete nor entire from the outset, and proceeds through a gradual process of abstraction and formalization. It is also necessary to consider that the legitimacy of objects remains fluid and mobile and does not derive from any intrinsic value determined once and for all. On the contrary, it must be understood and recontextualized within the transformations of the social process.

Our position is relatively straightforward. For us, the process of knowledge production cannot be understood if it is detached from the social process within which it is embedded and which it expresses as a conjunctural shaping. Secondly, there exist, scattered throughout the social field, distinct and distinctive practices and discourses. Should we add that these practices and discourses constitute as many particular cognitive configurations? Thirdly, the social field is structured by the set of practices and discourses exchanged within it.

However, these discourses and the practices they encompass do not all enjoy the same status. An implicit or explicit hierarchy orders them and determines the relative legitimacy of their objects and, consequently, the modes of knowledge that they encompass. This hierarchy simultaneously regulates the legitimate relationships maintained between these objects. While certain rapprochements are permitted, others remain prohibited (which does not exclude them; perhaps they are even the most frequent, as noted by Bourdieu, 1972: 162). Concretely, for us, it involves re-establishing the problem of the opposition between rational knowledge and sensory knowledge; that is, trying to understand the conditions of an opposition and a hierarchy. Simultaneously, it involves reintroducing illegitimate knowledges, ideology, myth, magic, and so on and attempting to understand the relationships they maintain with scientific discourse as well as those that scientific discourse maintains with them.

(2) Knowledge diffusion

It is within this context that knowledge diffusion must be understood. Unlike Boltanski's solution, diffusion appears as interactions and regulatory interrelations between discourses, certainly hierarchized but nonetheless in constant contact. While there are legitimate filiations, such as those from the laboratory to the school and from the school to practice, there are also more obscure yet equally effective parallels that propagate ‘knowledges’ purported to be illegitimate but with which we are confronted. Popularization would be a good example. Outside the circuit of legitimate instances, it propagates dominant, expected and desired models but constantly perverts them through its information-formatting apparatus. Grasping the dialectic of legitimate and illegitimate objects is, in our view, the context in which exchanges, borrowings and transformations of objects should be posed. While Boltanski allows us to apprehend the genesis of common sense, he does not grasp how a specific cognitive formation, scientific thought, is constituted, transformed and evolved. Consequently, he does not comprehend the conditions or factors involved in knowledge assimilation, nor the relationships between cognitive configurations.

(3) The weight of social factors

It seems essential to reintroduce the weight of social factors in the processes of knowledge production and diffusion. Essentially, this involves reintroducing contingent factors—those that scientific thought constantly seeks to eliminate. Perhaps this is to better protect itself from other forms of knowledge, to better guard against their encroachments. Three orders of interrelations allow for an understanding of the problem: relationships between practices and knowledges; relationships between knowledge and their relative legitimacy, which allows, for example, the dissociation of ‘scientific truth’ from the ‘legitimacy’ of that truth, or the articulation of social command and the production of scientific objects; and the articulation of the knowing individual with their peer group, reference group or aspiration group.

(2) Reformulation of the question

To attempt to delimit the issue of the diversity of objectivation relationships, the forms of these relationships, and their relations in all their complexity, is to approach it as a dual question:

Is it possible to conceive a genesis of cognitive modes without automatically presupposing a hierarchy or its absence?

Is it possible to conceive the specificity of these modes, that of their transformations and interactions, or even their interdependence, without precluding their possible autonomy or subordination?

Is it possible to think of an analysis in which the differences observed between forms of knowledge appear as variations rather than oppositions? Applied to a concrete social formation and viewed from the perspective of a conjuncture, the problem consists in determining how distinct cognitive modes form, evolve and coexist within the same society. How can the persistence of non-scientific thought in a society dominated by the ideal of scientific and technical rationality be explained? How can one simultaneously envisage a cumulative and a non-cumulative relationship to knowledge? More specifically, the problem can be reformulated as follows.

(1) Regarding the articulation of objectivation modes

Does scientific thought result from a transformation and subsequently a transcendence of earlier forms of knowledge? Such a hypothesis suggests a lineage of distinct phases or stages of knowledge necessary for the advent of scientific thought, which would integrate and transcend the preceding ones; non-scientific thought would correspond to a persistence of earlier forms, destined to gradually dissolve, or to an accidental regression of scientific thought. Thus, cumulativity would rest on an objective basis: the objectivation relationships succeeding and transcending one another would oppose themselves as objective categories.

Conversely, does non-scientific thought express an objectivation relationship distinct from that of scientific thought without being able to articulate them with one another? In this perspective, it would always be possible to conceive of a major lineage of non-scientific thought stages, with oppositions then exercising only between contents; that is, mobile and flexible referents. Viewed from this angle, each objectivation relationship is assimilated to a specific formal cognitive paradigm invested with the characteristics of a structure. It comprises composition laws that regulate the subordination of elements to the whole, transformation laws that ensure the regulated passage from one state to another, and self-conservation stemming from the functioning of the laws within the system's limits (Piaget, 1974).

Is it possible to envisage both the relative autonomy and dependence of each paradigm? In this case, transformations would derive from the internal functioning of the system's laws but also from the constraint exerted on each paradigm by the dialectic of their reciprocal relationships. Such an approach implies that a paradigm is never definitively constituted but designates a nodal point where systematic processes and event determinations suturize to constitute an individuated object (Granger, 1967). Consequently, this object would represent a heuristic and strategic locus.

(2) Regarding the articulation of an objectivation mode to the subject's cognitive properties

Does there exist, depending on the case, a relationship between the successive phases or stages of an objectivation mode during its evolution, cognitive modes as specific paradigms, or the dialectical transformations of modes in interaction, and, on the other hand, the cognitive properties of subjects? Within the context of this analysis, this question is reformulated as follows.

Can one envisage a convergence of the cognitive development process of subjects and the scientific forms of thought, such that the completed form of subjects’ cognitive properties is fulfilled in the scientific forms of thought development? If this were the case, the pre-scientific individual cognitive forms manifested by adult subjects would correspond to a stagnation or regression of thought. The articulation of figurative and operative aspects of knowledge could be approached only as a transcendence of the former by the latter. However, this transcendence would emerge from a sociogenesis of thought, the successive stages of which, each integrating and transcending the preceding moments of evolution, would confine and limit the possibilities of individual development. All else being equal, ‘the childhood of humanity would correspond to the childhood of man’. Furthermore, to support this viewpoint, it would be necessary to demonstrate the existence of an unambiguous relationship between subjects’ cognitive activities and the discursive modalities through which the objectivation relationship is expressed.

Do subjects’ cognitive properties diversify into distinct, autonomous cognitive modes, each determining, at least virtually, a specific objectivation relationship? In this view, figurative and operative modes would remain distinct, though susceptible to their own transformations, but complementary. Only societal choices would determine the dominant models.

The questions raised in the three preceding paragraphs presuppose:

Firstly (in a): that the intrinsic properties of a dominant objectivation relationship establish a boundary that sets the limits of subjects’ potential development or the actualization of one cognitive mode over another. Even from a constructivist perspective, which admits that the subject actively reconstructs these properties by assimilating them, the antecedence of the cognitive field's structuring as a receptive structure takes precedence. Collective properties impose themselves on subjects first because they pre-exist and then because they constitute them as subjects.

Secondly (in b): that the dominant objectivation relationship in a society prioritizes one or another of the cognitive properties inherently possessed by subjects.

In both cases, the properties of the objectivation relationship would internally delimit subjects’ development or the actualization of one cognitive mode rather than another. Is it possible to interpose an intermediate instance, the group, between the objectivation relationship and the subject? This would require substituting a ternary relationship for the binaryism of collective and individual rules. Is it conceivable that group structures mediate both the forms of the objectivation relationship and those of the cognitive activities manifested by subjects? If so, the forms would implicate each other within and through the group to which they are immanent. Consequently, examining the figurative or operative aspects of knowledge would involve analysing the group's properties. Knowledge forms, whether scientific or non-scientific, would aspectualize different processes; that is, as many distinct and distinctive social relationships. Moreover, it would become possible to dissociate the figurative and operative aspects of knowledge from the scientific and non-scientific forms of thought because it would be conceivable to consider an operative mode that is a non-scientific form of the objectivation relationship. However, this point (in c) requires, first and foremost, an analysis of the articulation between the objectivation relationship's properties and those of the subject to those of the group.

(3) Articulation of the subject, the group and the objectivation relationship

Should one envisage a relationship in which individual cognitive processes and group social processes dialectically result in the structuring and transformation of objectivation relationships? In other words, it involves determining whether the weight of social processes influences the structuring of discursive procedures. Thus, the question of the autonomy of discourses and their internal rules is raised.

Conversely, should the autonomy and dissociation of causality relationships that generate discourses and the links of implication between their elements be maintained? In this case, the same discourse could find itself within distinct group processes and vice versa.

(3) Methodological parameters

To describe the phenomena that we attempt to apprehend, it is necessary to move from an Aristotelian logic to a non-Aristotelian logic, shifting from immobile objects to non-stabilizable objects and determining under what conditions they can be considered at rest (Bachelard, 1973). This involves privileging processes over states and considering cognitive fields from the perspective of constantly evolving processes (regardless of their legitimacy within a given social context). These fields possess the property of retaining their form ‘only through a continuous flow of exchanges with the environment’; thus, constantly thinking about regulations and anchors that are perpetually modulating (Foucault, 1971).

This shift from states to processes implies that the approach attempts to conceptually dissociate, while concretely articulating, diachronic processes from synchronic processes (Piaget, 1967b) and structural processes from conjunctural processes (Granger, 1967). It seems important to us to link the evolution of processes over time and the equilibrium of these processes at a given moment to understand how they actualize in a concrete situation, which includes a margin of indetermination, the coordination of structural transformation rules and those equally structural equilibrium rules.

In the same spirit, the continually reiterated opposition between objective conditions and subjective factors seems to us to need abandonment, in favour of adopting a viewpoint that dialectizes the imaginary and the given. The position we support is as follows: the imaginary and the given constantly co-determine each other. The distinction between objective fact and subjective fact is debatable. If one postulates a reality of the world independent of the knowing subject, or at least considers this reality as a plausible hypothesis, the knowledge one has of it results from an elaboration such that the observed reality is inseparable from the structure of observation; what is called the ‘real’ expresses the product of a coordination between the object's properties and the subject's properties (Piaget, 1967a, 1967d, 1967e; Ullmo, 1967). In fact, the ‘real’ can be apprehended only through a structuring and structured coordination process, the product of which is reinjected as new elements, as new data that add to the previous data and transform the knowledge relationship. The conditions for the possibility of such an elaboration presuppose a ‘real’ endowed with properties that are preserved over a period, at least for a given interaction threshold (for a given level of reality). Every knowledge relationship is thus a relationship of knowledge–unknowledge; of knowledge because it expresses a coordination threshold, and of unknowledge because it only expresses a coordination threshold. The expression of this coordination is mediated by symbolic devices in such a way that higher forms of knowledge expression are carried out through languages that support them. One can question the relationships between a form of knowledge and a given discursive formation. This does not, of course, imply that knowledge and discourse are transparent to each other, nor that knowledge is transparent to coordinations. It simply implies that discourse is a means through which coordination is expressed. For example, talking about ‘concrete material relationships’ between humans involves a discourse on materiality that produces it as an observable effect. The imaginary presides over every apprehension of the given, thereby having a structuring effect such that the very notion of the real and the knowledge effect that results from it are merely the preservation of a subjective structuring.

The imaginary seems to us to be an element present at all levels of the reality-construction process. Just as there is no zero degree of interaction in humans, there is no zero degree of meaning. Humans are immersed in the universe of meaning. Every element of the real participates in a structure from which it derives its meaning and independently of which it cannot be constituted. The question of how and when we moved from ignorance to knowledge is a moot point. Humans have always been in a knowledge relationship. It is more promising to examine discourses that establish a sharing between knowledge and ignorance and to examine what is or was defined as the expression of ‘true’ knowledge. Analysing the conditions of a prohibition, such as that imposed on natural thought, refers to analysing the configuration of social relationships and the dialectic of ‘truth’ and ‘legitimacy’.

In a first approximation, we call structured imaginary the set of symbolic productions from which humans claim knowledge and mastery of the ‘real’. Thus, falling under this designation are representations, myths, theories, magic, and so on. Natural thought and scientific thought therefore belong to the order of imaginaries and characterize coordination thresholds; thus, moments of knowledge. Humans do not think reality in a partial manner; they think it in a complex manner because this reality results from the coordination of the relationships they maintain with the given and from which the ‘real’ itself is assimilated by the individual. The ‘materiality’ of the ‘real’ is only the attribution of properties that, socializing over time, acquire greater preservation. The opposition, even dialectical, between objective relationships and subjective relationships seems too partial to be maintained entirely. Social representation is not a residue: it has an influence as determining as the ‘material fact’. Even if we assimilate objective reality to a structured entity, which is different from the explanatory discourse that can be produced about this reality, action can occur only through the production of a discourse that liberates its appropriation. What are called objective relationships ultimately cannot be grasped and understood except through the production of a schema that allows conceiving an objective totality.

How to think about humans’ relationships to the real without thinking about the discursive relationships maintained with the ‘real’? But how to think about the production of this discourse without articulating humans with the social whole and vice versa? And how not to think about the specificity of cognitive processes that make possible the construction of an explanatory system capable of accounting for these same relationships? Finally, how to raise the question of this specificity without articulating the nature and organization of cognitive structures inherent to humans (ontogenesis) with social determinations (sociogenesis)? A subject cannot be thought of psychologically or socially without referring to a sociality that establishes an order of the signifier and thus releases the development of structuring interactions that are then possible. If we apply these considerations to the particular case of the relationship between infrastructure and superstructure, it cannot be anything other than inherent exchanges in their articulation. The superstructure is not a reflection, even a delayed one, of the infrastructure. Each proceeds from the other. It is from their dialectic that their respective legibility and the ‘objective’ transformations of the world result.

The discourse represents a modality of the structured imaginary. It is both function and symbolic expression. Humans do not insert themselves into the world and acquire objective practice of the world except through appropriating the discourses that regulate its course. Every action on the world presupposes an imaginary to think and transform it. Thus, the importance of interactions between structured imaginaries is all-encompassing: they are not merely language games; they have structure, organization, a ‘reality’ as determining as the ‘objective reality’ they enable to constitute and apprehend. Discourse thus appears to us as the specific locus of the imaginary and the nodal point of integrating synchronic and diachronic, structural and conjunctural planes.

The articulation of the objectivation relationship relates to its social production conditions. This means that the cognitive operations of a subject must be understood within the context that makes them possible and that produces them as effects. The production of a knowledge discourse is embedded within the context of social relationships that generate the conditions for it. The articulation of discourse with its genesis requires reintroducing as determining elements the norms, values, motivations, and so on—all these contingent parameters that legitimate scientific discourse systematically eliminates.

The ‘intersection point of lines of force’—the knowing subject—is also a ‘decision center’ (Granger, 1967: 213). It manifests an intention that is in turn structuring.

All the preceding considerations rest on the notion of interaction. Interactions can be defined as ‘behaviors modifying one another (from struggle to synergy)’ (Piaget, 1967b: 19), or as ‘reciprocal effects between two people resulting from the contact they maintain with each other’ (Purushottam, 1979: 155). Interactions are constitutive of an information flow between wholes, which they regulate.

3.3 Problematic

From the previous remarks, it is possible to infer that establishing an objectivation relationship is a result of a structuring triangulation between groups, practices and discourses.

(1) The social field

It is the multiplicity of interactions among human subjects that composes the fundamental and elementary fabric of society, conferring both existence and life upon it (Rocher, 1968). It is ‘essentially a system of activities, whose elementary interactions consist in, in the literal sense, actions modifying one another according to certain laws of organization or equilibrium … it is through the analysis of these interactions within behavior itself that the explanation of collective representations, or interactions modifying individuals’ consciousness, proceeds’ (Piaget, 1967b: 30). Society is thus a ‘system of relationships’ that links individuals to one another. However, we can distinguish society from the social field by defining it as a particular moment within the social field. It expresses a conjunctural state of a structural phenomenon.

Secondly, society, as a historical conjuncture, or the social field, as a generic form, can be characterized as the moment of a synergistic or conflictual relationship between the elements of which it is composed. But these elements are not isolated individuals but rather groups of individuals. ‘Every society’, said Linton (1959: 56), ‘from the primitive band to the modern state is effectively an organized aggregate of small groups themselves organized’. The social whole, produced by the structuring interactions between these totalities, is the regulated product of the relationships among its constituent groups.

The concepts of social stratification, subculture and social classes refer to the composite nature of society and its division into distinct and characterized subsets. Our hierarchical arrangement expresses only one possible case of organization.

Remark: Social stratification is less a concrete relationship between individuals than a logical class of attributes (behaviours, for example) in such a way that the relationship of belonging equates to the coordination of certain attributes and the rejection of others. The existential subject evolves at the intersection of two or more groups. This is at least what role theory allows one to think. It assimilates, at least in some representative form, the type of organization of its society and inserts itself into it by developing or adapting its behaviour to the system of rules, implicit or explicit, that constitute each subset. Since society is a system of relationships, and each of its subsets is also a system of relationships, the group occupies a determining position between the social whole and the subject.

The opposition between man and society thus obscures the fundamental fact that every man first evolves within groups and that each of these groups is the place where he realizes himself as an existential subject and as an epistemic social subject. One could say that society and the subject are ‘experienced’ within and through the group that anchors integration processes (socialization, acculturation), societal relationships and existential relationships. The group thus appears at a specific moment in the individuation process. Consequently, let us posit the triad: subject—group—society. And every analysis of objectivation processes requires, for each particular case, the description of the properties of the triad under consideration.

(2) The group

The group, a structured subset of the social whole, is a ‘system of activities’ and a ‘system of constructive interdependencies’. This means that ‘the elements that constitute it, initially possessing only the relationship that connects each element to the whole of which it is part, gradually acquire new structural properties as they become covered by a network of internal relationships’ (Greimas, 1976: 119).

Structural object: The group, as a structural object, possesses the characteristics of a system; it can be described by composition laws and transformation rules.

Conjunctural object: It has a concrete history that specifies and differentiates it.

Strategic object: The group is the place where behaviours (action schemas) are developed and decisions are made. It acts as an operator.

Communication process: The group gives rise to a communication process because behaviour and communication mutually induce each other. Watzlawick et al. (1972) emphasized that every behaviour and action carries the value of a message. At any moment, messages are produced, exchanged and reinterpreted.

Maintenance of relative equilibrium: Finally, the group maintains a state of relative equilibrium resulting from the conservation of its characteristics as a system, without which the group would simply not exist.

(3) Group and individual

Society, group and individual characterize three orders of totality, each interacting with the others. It should be noted that the individual does not pre-exist society; rather, society is a ‘function of this totality’. Does Lacan (1966) not emphasize that man is constituted by the order of the signifier, but he does not constitute it? One must explain man through humanity, as Comte already stated. The individual develops representations by coordinating actions and operations, whereas the group, by coordinating individual representations, generates collective representations. As such, the group contributes to maintaining the individual's identity through belonging mechanisms; it ensures coherence among subjects through the regulation of interdependence. This is how it adapts to other groups to maintain its integrity and that of its members (Linton, 1968).

All indications lead us to believe that the subject and the group are united by a shared form of thought because the psychological subject and the sociological subject mutually co-determine each other and can be conceived only in relation to one another. It seems impossible, pending further information to the contrary, to dissociate the psychological operations of the subject from those necessary for the emergence of the sociological subject. Take, for example, an illustration from Becker (1963). He shows that a novice's recognition of the effects of marijuana is structured through the interaction they develop with an experienced smoker. The latter provides the novice with the concepts to think about the sensations that they experience. The novice thus structures their sensations and perceptions based on categories resulting from a structuring social interaction. This example underscores how closely the subject, group and object are intertwined and ultimately cannot be conceived independently of one another. Boltanski (1968) noted that the representations that members of various social classes have of an object differ. We add, in the context of this analysis, that these objects should, in fact, differ from one another. Only maintaining the notion of a referent allows us to think of them as the same object. And that is for a very simple reason: the notion of the referent dissociates the represented object from the representation process. As for us, we believe that the group facilitates the development of a knowledge context and that this knowledge is not external to this context. The knowledge-production process involves designating a knowing subject and coordinated subjects. This object preserves the coordinations made between the subjects. In other words, social facts (structuring interactions) and cognitive facts (designating an object through the coordination of individual representations) are closely interwoven. A group thus develops a knowledge object that establishes and preserves the relationships established among its members. Individuals coordinate by developing common knowledge objects, but in return, their interrelations are oriented and maintained by this object.

A knowledge object consists, on one hand, of a construction of the real, as the real is merely the product of an elaboration, and, on the other hand, of the anchoring of a group structure, as the production of this object necessarily involves the development of a norm. This coupling conditions the individual's decision-making process in a concrete situation. It allows for predicting anticipated outcomes in a given context. The prediction thus pertains both to the object and to behaviour. Thus, developing an object determines the conditions for the production of the real and binds individuals because the determination of these conditions is a modality of information composition. As such, it proceeds from the group's regulatory influence and the assimilation of its regulation modes by its members, who, in a given situation, perform information processing consistent with that of other group members; that is, a processing predictable by other group members. In this way, the group constantly evaluates and maintains, even if implicitly, its own equilibrium threshold.

However, the individual is part of multiple groups and moves from one to another. Consequently, they redeploy and adjust their range of norms and virtual behaviours according to the rules of the host groups. The individual assimilates a layering of updated group relationships, depending on circumstances, which determine as many distinct objects and distinctive behaviours.

(4) Group and formal subject—group and existential subject

Let us distinguish between the existential relationship and the formal relationship. The group and the existential subject denote the product of a concrete individual history marked by historical social relationships. The individual within a group represents a concrete element of a concrete whole. It is within this space that norms and knowledge are articulated. This space is, in fact, the socialized space of knowledge. However, from another angle, both the group and the individual can be defined by their properties independently of the individual members’ attributes. This means that the individual or the group can, at the formal level, be related to a class of which they are the virtual agents—a class that is ultimately only the product of the abstraction and generalization of concrete relationships. This formal relationship overlays the first. The self-reflective subject is thus in a double relationship of simultaneous centring and decentring. Or, equivalently, they constantly shape the formal properties and existential attributes in every gesture they perform. If we distinguish between the imaginary and the symbolic, one could envisage that the imaginary pertains to the formal plane and the symbolic to the existential plane. The formal group and existential group are distinguished from membership groups and reference or aspiration groups because the latter must necessarily be the object of a self-reflective conception by the subject.

(5) Group—individual—discourse

We have extensively emphasized social structuring and highlighted that it is first and foremost constituted by constantly interacting groups. Each group effectively represents a subculture, and, from this perspective, society can be defined as a gathering of subcultures in interrelations.

Secondly, we have underscored that the individual maintains a relationship of real mobility (membership groups) or virtual mobility (aspiration or reference groups).

Thirdly, we noted that each individual develops both a formal relationship and an existential relationship with their group. In other words, while they concretely and conjuncturally experience interactions within a group, they can decentre from it and abstract its properties, and, ultimately, their real intervention is the product of the articulation between formal and existential relationships.

However, to delve deeper, we must examine the relationships between group and language. The idea that we advocate is the following: a knowledge relationship is such that the properties of the subject and those of the object are both elaborated, preserved and transformed by the very structuring of the knowledge relationship that unites them; this relationship develops within a social relationship, and this social relationship is mediated by the discursive relationship or, at the very least, by a structured symbolic relationship.

We adopt the propositions of Cassirer (1933), Von Humboldt (1969), Von Bertalanffy (1973) and Whorf (1969), acknowledging that language is not merely descriptive but constitutive of the knowledge relationship. ‘Language is not a simple transposition of thought into verbal form; it essentially cooperates with the primitive act that establishes it’ (Cassirer, 1933). The conceptual division varies with each language, and with the proliferation or dissociation of conceptualization correspond distinctions in the properties of the ‘real’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1962). We have implicated the subject and the group by specifying that the structuring of the real relies on the structuring of group norms. We must now clarify that the known object (the apprehended real) is entirely contained within the symbolic expression that allows its division. This means that the subject, the group and the object—whom we will call the symbolic object—must be considered inseparable.

Between language and speech, we must regard discourse as a specific intermediate instance (Greimas, 1976; Pêcheux, 1975; Robin, 1973). Discourse is the specific locus of the group. A group structures itself through the development of norms that are more or less preserved and regulate interactions among its members. However, the expression of these norms is entirely mediated by discourse, which allows them to be manifested. Thus, the group is the place where these norms are manifested through discourse. Moreover, the group is produced as a group through a structuring interaction by the elaborated discourse and thus exchanged by its members. Certainly, group structures and discursive structures express specific objects that have relative autonomy, but (and this is the crucial point) the structuring of the group seems inseparable from the plane of expressing this structuring. The group structures and preserves itself through the production of a norm that regulates exchanges; however, these exchanges, and consequently the maintenance of the norm, can be manifested only symbolically. If the group is immanent to the subject, language is immanent to the group.

Within a group, discourses and practices are sutured. This is why knowledge is not exempt from norms—it is a norm. In scientific knowledge, there is convergence (and this is its great characteristic) between the modes of knowledge production and the constitutive norms of the group to such an extent that the expression of the scientific norm is also that of the group. In other words, the rules of production, exchange and circulation of knowledge characterize the group's composition rules. Knowledge thus mediates two planes: the plane of managing the real and the plane of determining relationships, in the form of conduct rules for the modalities of real production. We see here the structuring and expression of the specific social relationship.

The ‘truth’ of the real, and not its ‘reality’, for a given group corresponds, to be recognized as such, to the rules of production of this truth, and this truth is never but the expression of the common norm, accepted and shared by the group's members. It defines a field of validity that results from the group's history and summarizes it. From another angle, this truth is merely the production of a predictable response within the context of a rule system. It satisfies the exchange rules at a given moment of the group's equilibrium. In this spirit, the objectivation of the norm into an explicit system is a particular case of the relationship between norms and knowledges.

We can summarize our position as follows: (a) No fact is embedded within a systematization, even unconscious, of which it is the effect. If we maintain the opposition between scientific knowledge and representation, would this systematization not be merely a representation? (b) No systematization exists independently of an elaboration process, and this process is a social process. Hence, the process of knowledge production is entirely mediated by the actions of social actors. This does not mean that one cannot describe and autonomize the properties of the constituted knowledge object, but it does mean, however, that such autonomization can occur only at the expense of reducing the problem's complexity. In this spirit, we can broaden Bourdieu's (1972: 162) conception of information and say that, even for the scientist or aesthete, information is ‘the set of actions it triggers’. We add that it is also ‘the set of actions upon which it relies’.

We can now better discern the functions of discourse; they are threefold. Discourse has a cognitive function: it determines a mode of knowing by favouring the structuring of the objectivation relationship. It has a communicative function because it regulates exchanges among group members. It has a normative function because it allows the preservation of exchange structures and knowledge modes.

Under these conditions, two groups of questions emerge. First, what is the effect of the social conditions of its productivity on the structuring of a discursive system? And what is the effect of a discursive system's properties on the structuring of social relationships? Second, what is the weight of social relationships on the constitution of the cognitive properties of discursive systems? And what is the effect of discursive systems on the cognitive abilities of social subjects?

(6) A working hypothesis

Can we envisage a relationship between a group and the discursive manifestations that occur within it such that each given level expresses a structuring relationship of the group and a specific objectivation relationship?

A certain type of discourse would determine a certain group relationship, and thus a specific state of social structuring. It would entail a certain objectivation relationship, and thus a particular way of knowing. In our view, the way of knowing would not belong inherently to individuals, as Piaget's conception of cognitive development might suggest. On the contrary, individual cognitive development could occur only within a group-mediated process by a discursive structure that would facilitate or inhibit certain cognitive operations performed by the group's members. The cognitive functions of discourse stem from its syntactic structure. This structure organizes, according to rules, the unfolding of operations and, beyond that, actions and interactions. The internal limitations of discursive procedures inherent to any form of structuring operation have a structuring effect on the development and product of cognitive activities.

Does Piaget not tell us that the ‘real’ is the product of coordinating actions and operations by a subject observing and deducing with the formalisms they possess, which serve as a receptive framework for these actions and operations?

In summary, we have argued that a given organization of the group releases or inhibits the cognitive virtualities of its members. The group is a limiting condition for individual expression. There exists a relationship between individual cognitive expression and group structure. The cognitive capacities of a subject cannot be conceived in isolation. They achieve their fulfilment only within the dialectical relationship that binds the subject to the object of their knowledge, but this connection is also relative to other subjects with whom they interact.

It seems to us that it is in this manner and in this manner only that one can say that the knowledge of reality is a construction performed by a subject. And, if we were to provide a definition of intelligence, we would say that it is a potential set of discursive operations arising from a coordinated imaginary. We raise the question of whether discourse overdetermines intelligence or not. The evolutionary stages of subjects should be articulated with discursive situations that mediate them. These situations would determine their thresholds and limits.

Representations, myths and ideologies express different social and symbolic relationships. They thus express different knowledge relationships. Posing the question of their alienation is, in our opinion, unfounded. To better understand them, it seems more judicious to pose the following questions. From which social structuring do they originate? And what structuring do they reproduce as a consequence? Next, what discursive relationships do they generate? And, consequently, what cognitive relationships do they produce? Finally, what is their social legitimacy; that is, what validity does a given society accord to the product of these discourses?

The central problem, according to us, consists of designing a topology of imaginaries to think about their distribution within the social field. We could then conceive of a knowledge relationship within a differential logic of social legitimacy. And the truth of the moment would become a truth relative to a social legitimacy relationship. While it is important to understand that science—more precisely scientism—is a dominant value in our society, it seems even more important to understand that this dominance is entirely relative and transitory.

4. The rupture

4.1 The observation

The notions of ‘obstacle’ and ‘rupture’ are, in fact, two facets of the same problem. The questions raised in this paper aimed to elucidate the relationships between processes and states, necessity and contingency, and norms and knowledges. It follows, within the spirit of this analysis, that these notions of ‘obstacle’ and ‘rupture’ remain to be explained, more than they express the relationships between natural thought and scientific thought.

Let us outline some possible solutions—some working propositions.

Rupture as a resultant: Rupture is a resultant; it stems from work that makes its culmination visible. It does not constitute knowledge in the sense of being its primary act, its founding act; it witnesses structuring, and it is from this structuring that one must account. What the error reveals between the formed and the former, as Bachelard employed the term, is the cleavage between two discursive modes. The error is the product of an interaction between two problem-solving strategies—between two cultural habitus. The obstacle manifests as a cognitive apparatus because it appears as the other only during confrontation with the other (which can be the given). It reveals itself in and through the interaction developed between two or more partners. And the error, since the obstacle reveals the error, is the indicator of a course of action undertaken by a subject, entirely mediated by underlying representations.

Thinking of this error is to deconstruct it, as only deconstruction allows us to consider the limits of the representation from which it originates and thus to perform a cognitive mutation. It is necessary to include the culmination point of the deconstruction as a specific datum, but, above all, not to see this datum as the key that reveals the error. On the contrary, one must think of the differential relationship between a universe deemed false and another deemed true. However, in the scientific approach, the universe deemed true is not known beforehand; it is revealed afterward when the error has been demonstrated, one might say. To this, one can respond that the scientific approach (essentially a significative combinatory) systematically seeks the refutation of error. Error is one of the conditions of the notion of progress and not one of the conditions of knowledge. Contemporary scientific thought perceives itself as fallible in its very genesis. It incorporates into its object the conditions for a future transcendence, as it is acknowledged that this object represents only a stage of an indefinite development. Let us say that the rules endowed to scientific discourse, which manage its development, have an opening function.

Boltanski's work clearly shows that what the epistemological obstacle and the notion of error attached to it testify to is a gap in the distribution of knowledges, which primarily rests on a social gap. It demonstrates, on the one hand, that the gap is also temporal solely because diffusion is a progressive process. Incidentally, it is hard to see how cultural catching-up can occur outside the school for disadvantaged classes. However, on the other hand, one now understands Bachelard's remark that ‘a well-made head is a product of school’ very well. Therefore, one can conclude that accession to knowledge (that is, the rupture with a previously malcrafted and faulty form of knowledge) necessarily involves a temporal leap that is also a social leap. In other words, accession to knowledge implies resocialization. For, if we push Boltanski's reasoning to the extreme, it appears that the epistemological obstacle functions more as a class dispositif than as a relationship between knowledge, which would be merely a representation, unconscious of itself, and explicit knowledge. The obstacle pertains to social hierarchy and the habitus that develop within each social group. Consequently, it functions according to the cultural ethos that orders the world for each considered group. In a word, the epistemological obstacle is the mark of the differential relationship between distinct rationalities that structurally aim at distinct and distinctive objects.

• (b) Progressive and continuous rupture: A major consequence emerges from these considerations: the rupture occurs in a progressive and continuous manner. It is only at the end of the resocialization process, which is never truly completed, that it seems to be consummated. The very notion of ‘deconstruction of a poorly made prior knowledge’, advanced by Bachelard, advocates for a rupture process spread over time. In other words, the transition from common knowledge to scientific knowledge is a matter of degree rather than of nature. Certainly, this degree varies depending on the scale of observation and the temporal scale considered. Moreover, if this proposition is correct, it should be possible to describe intermediate forms that would testify to partial reorganizations without yet making it possible to transform the assimilative schema itself.

• (c) Multiple types of ruptures: A second consequence arises from our propositions: there are not one but several types of ruptures because there are distinct moments and distinct social relationships.

• (d) Dual pluralism: Two major conclusions emerge from the previous considerations. First, a subdivision of the social field corresponds to a subdivision of the cognitive field. We find, scattered within a structured social field, distinct cognitive modes: different objectivation relationships. Second, this social cognitive pluralism is doubled by individual cognitive pluralism. In other words, an individual would possess not one but several cognitive registers. Since the individual lives in different social relationships and is in a constant situation of adapting to social situations, which entails adopting distinct social roles and, consequently, specific behavioural rules, and since this behaviour is mediated by a discursive form, it follows, if our reasoning is correct, that the individual constantly adjusts their cognitive relationship and can, therefore, adopt contradictory cognitive registers depending on the circumstances. It seems to us that there is an alignment between intellectual organization and a social situation: different logics are at work in different social relationships.

4.2 The acquisition of any knowledge or scientific knowledge

What does it mean to access knowledge in general and to access scientific knowledge in particular? It is, at the discursive level, to appropriate knowledge; that is, to assimilate the rules that constitute the objects that it designates (Foucault, 1969). But it is also to assimilate the norms and conventions of the host group whose discourse of knowledge bears its traces.

Since society is stratified and hierarchized, and since knowledges, or at least the objectivation relationships deemed legitimate, are developed at the top and diffuse downward (that is, proceed from a centre to a periphery), to access knowledge is first to perform a translation that is both temporal, by approaching contemporary knowledge, and structural, by transforming the discursive modalities of object designation. It is a change of referent, as one can continue to speak of the ‘same’ object. But this change carries with it a distinct social relationship. Gaining access to knowledge also involves a social translation by moving from group A to group B. This translation requires the subject to accommodate to the rules and norms of group B. In other words, the subject undergoes a resocialization process. They appropriate discursive rules to designate the objects to which the group is attached and through which its cohesion is manifested. Thus, the rupture is the resultant of a resocialization process.

4.3 The constitution of the scientific object: Scientific thought and natural thought

(1) A social process: The first cut (the epistemological plane)

The social field is a complex of structuring interactions that constitute the flow of information in the form of statements produced and circulated. Each statement, which in fact is a structurally decontextualized message, functions as a signifier; that is, as a virtual operator. It opens up a range of probabilities by triggering the activity of schemas that activate cognitive strategies. It can be imbued with meaning, subject to interpretation or reinterpretation.

The operation of constructing an object (the fundamental rupture that institutes the object) consists of the selection and grouping of certain statements among those in circulation. It goes without saying that these statements, although decontextualized, originate from a specific context—a ‘discursive formation’. This process sui generis effectuates a reduction of the richness of the field of statements through the strategic reduction carried out by an operator who limits the range of admissible statements related to a portion of the real by closely associating them with a social practice: in this case, research. But this reduction ipso facto structures the field, which is also an act of legitimization since segregation dissociates, among the statements in circulation, some that are considered legitimate and others that are not. Only certain statements, drawn from the set of unmarked, non-signifying statements, become marked and signifying. They then designate a legitimate objectivation relationship. In constituting itself, a scientific object isolates and structures its reputedly amorphous counterpart designated by the set of illegitimate statements. The operation is thus an individuation operation—a structuring coordination—that engenders the reciprocal constitution of a non-object. And this non-object is nothing other than the set of inadmissible statements. Natural thought can therefore be defined as the place from which inadmissible statements originate and are exchanged.

The transition from an unstructured field to a structured field marks a dual cognitive and social process of object constitution and social structuring. One can thus reciprocally envisage a cognitive and social structuring–differentiation because knowledge exists only within and through the group that allows it to exist. It is neither thought nor structured except through the knowledge that it objectivates, since the rules of object designation are also those that define and identify the conditions for expressing belonging. It signifies itself to itself and to others. The work transcends the ‘subject’ (the creating individual) because it has real meaning only within its sociality—through its social inscription in the form of an accepted and shared discourse. In scientific knowledge, or more precisely in all explicit knowledge, discourse would fulfil the role of practices in groups where ‘discourse’ remains implicit; those where integration is primarily achieved through practice as coordination and conservation.

Science, in constituting itself, does not detach itself from the ideology that it claims to liberate itself from, even if it deems certain statements and practices illegitimate. The rupture, during the constitution of the object, effectuates an individuating dissociation within the social field. On the epistemological plane, it is the establishment of a regulated discourse that institutes an order of the real and from which morphology emerges. On the social plane, parallel to the epistemological plane, it is the structuring of a subgroup: the establishment of a normative system regulating exchanges and interactions among individuals. This normative system fulfils two functions: one of recognition, thus establishing a relationship of belonging, and another of difference, which is establishing a relationship of exclusion. Consequently, the rupture constitutes a structuring of the social field. The operation of selecting and grouping statements carried out by a subgroup initiates a referent change solely because the field of statements becomes marked. Only certain statements become signified, while others are assimilated as signifiers that cannot be related to any object. It is thus the scientific object that, in constituting itself, constitutes its ideological counterpart.

(2) A social process: The second cut

The second cut refers to the successive fragmentations that the object undergoes once it is constituted as a scientific object. These fragmentations split it into as many distinct autonomous objects. The constitution of these secondary objects can be analysed from the same angle as the constitution of the primary object. From our perspective, the first rupture, even if one admits that it constitutes the moment that institutes a science, does not differ in any way from the successive ruptures that follow, as the processes at work remain fundamentally the same. We find the structuring of subgroups, with the caveat that they constitute themselves within the scientific community; we observe the phenomena of the production and the maintenance of a social gap; finally, we observe the production of specific norms that circumscribe the subgroup's economy and regulate the internal validation procedures of the discourse.

The weight of these norms, in the case of a second rupture, increases objectivity. It is less the truth of the fact that ultimately matters, but rather that it is thought of as such. This pertains to the group's internal rules, so much so that the discourse of right grounds the object's objectivity as an observable fact. The structuring of an object entails the structuring of a portion of the ‘real’ that relies on the legitimization of a set of statements and practices inscribed in the social field.

When Bachelard insists on successive rectifications, that involves a systematic process of reducing connotative aspects through the continuous explicitness of rules that favour increased decidability. We find here Piaget's principle of cooperation. Sociocognitive competence would therefore result, at least in part, from the crystallization of relationships between elements but would also involve, through the group's closure upon itself—since it tends to seek and maintain an equilibrium state—a reinforcement of social and labour division.

A final word, in the spirit of Canguilhem: Could the terms ‘ideology’, ‘common sense’, ‘representation’ and ‘myth’ reveal through their transdisciplinary resistance the persistence of an as-yet-unnamed concept acting within distinct problematics? The approach we have developed allows us to consider this: those terms would be equivalent in the sense that they would refer to an equivalent structuring of the knowledge relationship. However, when related to constituted disciplinary fields, they would differentiate by characterizing illegitimate statements, which in this case can be assimilated to things to be studied. Thus, ideology, or what is grouped under this term, would circumscribe the field of illegitimate statements from the constituted fields that are the political, sociological and psychological sciences; common sense would relate more directly to pure sciences; representation and representations would relate to social psychology, and myth to anthropology and related disciplines.

(3) Other paths

Another path involves envisaging the relationships between natural thought and scientific thought in terms of increasing complexity. Natural thought would express, like scientific thought, a level of information organization and an information complexity threshold. More generally, scientific knowledge could be defined as an increase in the coordination of information while simultaneously increasing information itself. By comparison, natural thought would appear as a partial coordination of partial information. The systematic use of natural thought's communication process based on oral and narrative modes would be both its condition and its limitation.

Finally, the Piagetian hypothesis remains ever relevant. It is still possible to conceive the transition to scientific knowledge as an increase in reversibility and an enhanced decentring: moving, in Piaget's sense, from a poorly socialized knowledge to a socialized knowledge. Consequently, this would operate a shift from modes of collaboration based on consensus and regulated by rhythms and regulations to those of cooperation based on groupings—modes through which the group thinks, and its regulation mode, and the regulation or transformations of this mode's conservation. The Piagetian hypothesis thus privileges the notions of increase and knowledge. Scientific knowledge must be understood as a progress in knowledge.

5. Conclusion

If we apply Boltanski's hypothesis to the analysis of the accelerated pace of contemporary knowledge evolution, it is reasonable to envisage that, as knowledge progresses at an accelerated rate, the gap between the upper classes and the popular classes can only widen. Similarly, the gap between specialized groups responsible for knowledge production and the upper classes in general increases, even though these producers predominantly belong to these classes. The rate of knowledge production grows faster than its dissemination. Consequently, according to our perspective, a phenomenon of systematic cultural impoverishment results.

However, these phenomena of knowledge diffusion must be examined in light of two factors: the decisive influence of scientific thought on lifestyles and the impact of mass-media communication modes on the evolution of values and norms in contemporary societies. It seems illusory, and especially reductive, not to link these two phenomena when aiming for a comprehensive understanding of cultural-evolution processes. Thus, in addition to a primary gap related to the self-closure of sciences and their proliferation into autonomous disciplines, a secondary gap arises from the specific effect of mass media. It can be asserted that, today, mass media are, among others, the determining factor in the constitution of common sense because they share the characteristic of providing structurally decontextualized information, while these informations remain meaningful.

Due to the accelerated development of the sciences, it is plausible to foresee a society whose ‘values and ideas associated’ with its practices, particularly the practices of science and technology, radically diverge from the values and ideas associated with the genesis of these practices. It is possible that their reinterpretation, and thus their appropriation by the entire social body, occurs according to discourse emerging from another horizon. At the extreme, one can envisage a society that, although based on a scientific substrate, is immersed in an anti-scientific ideology and consequently develops reinterpretative discourses with mythical or magical overtones—the only ones capable of reinstating a global and coherent vision that assigns order to things and a place to man.