When we say that a pupil « learnt » something, what do we assume he knows, then? And what does it mean that he ‘knows’ something new? Does it mean that he is able to do something new? Is it equivalent to say that he “learnt” something and that he “understood” something? For example, does learning the Pythagoras’ theorem mean knowing the following statement (‘In any right triangle, the area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares whose sides are the two legs’) or does it mean knowing how to use this statement in various circumstances (and, particularly, in the complex exercises which require its use, often in a far non-trivial way) ? Or does it mean both of them, for the both of them might be actually the two faces of a same thing? Every theory of learning faces these questions and formulates them in its own terms and concepts. From Socrates (who assumes, in Plato’s Meno, that learning is a specific way of ‘remembering’ an idea, for any knowledge is nothing more that a reminiscence) to anthropology-oriented contemporary didactics which define “learning” in both a specific and pragmatic view (learning knowledge in mathematics is practicing some mathematics in a such a way that theses practices gather to produce a set of ‘complementary’ uses of ‘something’ generic, that one can call knowledge), these questions have so radically mutated that it is not obvious that one speaks of the same thing when one speaks of ‘learning’ something. In fact, Plato’s conception of learning is far closer to the contemporary didactical one than one could have expected. Indeed, both of them assume an idealist conception of knowledge (explicitly for the former, implicitly for the latter). No matter one deals with ‘eidos’ or ‘didactical situation’, they are both definitely parts of ‘semiotic systems’. Thus, the relevant issue is less the account of similarities or differences between classical and contemporary education than the very possibility of theorizing the process of learning ‘something which lies outside any semiotic system’. Thanks to a Wittgensteinian epistemological analysis of the genesis of contemporary French-language didactics, this paper intends to underline some striking consequences of the ‘semiotic reduction’ of learning, as, for instance, is the confusion between ‘physis’ and ‘physics’ in didactics of physical sciences.

Philosophical Sources and empirical materials on didactics

This paper intends to be a contribution to the epistemology of educational sciences, with a focus on Southern Europe didactics