Per formam enim, quae est actus materiae, materia efficitur ens actu et hoc aliquid. De ente et essentia |
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| Table des Matières | ||
| The Unity of Man Animal and human communication The Jean Piaget / Noam Chomsky debate The Endicott House meeting on language and neurobiology Fermo's Biennial Encounters |
Unpublished research programmes of the CRSH |
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At the time when he developed the details of the concept of allostery, Jacques Monod had a central role in the creation of the Centre Royaumont pour une Science de l'Homme, with the idea to reconcile biology and neurosciences. His ultimate view was that the link between both was ethical: knowledge carries its own ethics. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, who had stayed for some time in his laboratory was most interested in science and philosophy, and it was natural for Monod to ask him to organise a group of reflection which would associate scientists for a variety of disciplines, with a strong emphasis on philosophy of sciences. This led to the creation of the Centre, initially with Jean-Pierre Changeux, François Dell, Jacques Mehler and Dan Sperber. The Abbey of Royaumont had long been a site where intellectuals and artists could convey and organise meetings where discussions went on, in the spirit of the Middle Ages disputatii. Together with Konstanty “Kot” Jeleński (1922-1987) I was asked by Monod to develop new programmes aimed at understanding the relationships between the human body, brain in particular, and the most evolved and "abstract" features of human behaviour. When the Centre closed I maintained for some time a working seminar on memory and learning, every wednesday afternoon at the conference room of the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique. This seminar stopped in 1978 but eventually started again in 1990 at the Institut Pasteur de Paris as a seminar in philosophy of sciences, initially discussing presocratic philosophy. In between, much of the previous programme had been reactivated via the creation of Fermo's Biennial Encounters, with the historian Ruggiero Romano (1923-2002) and the support of the Foundation Einaudi (developing the Enciclopedia Einaudi, with Fernando Gil (1937-2006)), and a research programme of anthropology of the west by non-westerners, inspired by our reflection and starting in West Africa with Alain Le Pichon, and later developed in China under the name Transcultura, after a successful experience held by Umberto Eco – who had been previously involved in the last programme of the CRSH – at the University of Bologna. A first conference was held in Guangzhou in 1990, on the status of science and technology in the western world and in China. The seminar went on at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Hong Kong (2000-2003) and it is now an open E-seminar, working on information and the synthesis of life. In parallel with my work as one of the coordinators of the CRSH
I created at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique, with
the mathematician Philippe Courrège, a working seminar that ran
every wednesday afternoon at the conference room of the third
floor, rue Pierre Curie, next to the Institut Henri Poincaré.
The Cercle Polivanov (centre de poétique comparée) developed
there around Jacques
Roubaud, Pierre
Lusson, Marcel
Benabou,
Philippe
Courrège, Mitsou
Ronat (1946 - 1984) and many others and
we had close contacts with their work, and the journal Change (published
by Seghers). Initially we had chosen to work on the mathematical
formalisation of selective theories, initially at the molecular
level. After a conversation I had with Jean-Pierre Changeux,
we shifted to the analysis of selective theories applied to learning
and memory, and beside the core group formed with Philippe Courrège,
Jean-Pierre Changeux and many mathematicians came on a regular
basis to participate to our seminar (François Blanchard, Alain
Chenciner, Jean-Michel Lasry, Pierre Lusson, Gabriel Ruget, Bernard
Saint-Loup, and even Benoît Mandelbrot; I probably forgot some
of the participants). This seminar lasted from 1972 to 1976 on
a regular basis, then came slowly to an end, as the interests
of its actors began to diverge. Several publications were derived
from this work. JP Changeux,
P Courrège, A Danchin
JP Changeux, A Danchin JP Changeux, A Danchin
Animal communication and human communication This research programme was set up in 1974 but never implemented. Several working papers in particular by Tom Pitcairn and Scott Atran were written as a preliminary set up of the programme. This situation led me to shift my research programme to a completely new domain, microbial genetics instead of neurobiology. A sequel of the programme was the Chomsky-Piaget meeting organized at the Abbaye de Royaumont in 1975 Extensive use of symbolic language in a crative fashion is specific to Homo sapiens. The concept of communication, however, is a pervasive one, manifesting itself in an extensive variety of ways, from chemical markers among insects to bird songs, from animal signalling to human languages to the sophisticated sharing of cultural inheritance in literate societies. The quest for the biological basis of language and communication and the search for the possibility of a common root of thes related phenomena in a fundamental anthropology implies a thorough analysis of the most recent findings in the neurosciences and a fresh review of some of the basic mechanisms of evolution. The solid framework of physiology and of the dynamics of evolution lends itself to a re-definition of certain traits in order to account for behavioral adaptation, learning abilities, and symbolic modes of communication. The understanding of the development of structures allowing for the constitution of a great variety of messages based on a combination of discrete units which are in themselves value-free is a major theoretical challenge. The present somewhat primitive state of investigations in these fields is partly due to the fact that a solid experimental praxis has been developed for animals only, leaving out the most complex and fascinating repository of these phenomena: the human species. On the other hand, anthropology, sociolinguistics and psychology have developed autonomous logics of investigation whose direct application to anatomicla and physiological data is very difficult if not impossible. Without denying the autonomy of these levels of description and without pretending to reduce linguistics and psychology to neuronal circuitry, a new intermediate level of analysis seems nevertheless to be attainable through a cautious but imaginative cross-confrontation of models, theories, data and techniques. The initial aim of this project — and the first problem to overcome — is to bring together the enormous and often redundant wealth of data on physiology, anatomy, evolution and behavior of non-human species, and to confront them with the symmetrical but independent theories and experiments in the psycholinguistic disciplines. As a consequence of these critical confrontations, lines of convergence and divergence will emerge more clearly, hopefully permitting a re-phrasing of the fundamental problems. Once this necessary and comprehensive analysis is acieved, and new investigative strategies and methodologies worked out, lines of development for tuture resarch will be charted and suitable model systems chosen accordingly. A complementary study of animal and human communication provides a particularly auspicious opportunity for bringing the life sciences and the human sciences into a common focus on an anthropological problem whose biological basis is still at the early stage of exploration. Five major lines of enquiry are presently envisaged:
As a preliminary step, a small team of rapporteurs will work together for a period ranging from one to three months, eventually paying visits to laboratories and individual scholars in the disciplines involved. Critical erports elaborated by this interdisciplinary team will then be circulated and discussed at meetings in Europe and America bringing together the original research team and changing groups of senior researchers. The object of these meetings will be to refine the findings of the original team, to work these existing findings into form for publication, and to lay out new lines of enquiry. In principle such meetings would last two days and would convene 10 to 12 scholars chosen in large part by the members of the original research team. A possible composition of the original reasearch team would be:
Once again, the list of names is tentative and neither exhaustive nor exclusive, designed rather to indicate the kind of specialists we have in mind for the project. A preliminary list of specialists to be consulted during the planning phase, or who could take part in some capacity or other in the three year project. Since then, several passed away:
Several texts were written in support of this programme, in particulat texts by Tom Pitcairn and Scott Atran. My own contribution was focused on The Biological Features of the Problem (in French).
The Endicott House meeting on language and neurobiology Not much has been left from that meeting, where Hans-Lukas Teuber participated. Let me quote Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: « This brings me to two curious episodes, both
of which involve Jacques [Mehler]. Massimo does not remember that I played my role there. As a very young scientist, I was shocked to see the way Jacques Mehler had been treated, and I also went to the board, to try to contradict Noam Chomsky's rebuttal of the semantic importance of language. I reminded him something that I had witnessed not so long ago, when living in a small village of West Africa (Lay, then Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso) in company with my friend Hilaire Tiendrébéogo: children and young adults had the habit, at evenings to convey and begin stories that were clearly organised by rythm. And this organisation of the sentences conveyed, in itself, a particular level of communication, which could be easily caught by ear (perhaps in particular when one had a limited understanding of the language). And Chomsky snapped back at me with a "data make no sense", that I still vividly remember, and which has since then been one of my mottos... An account of the meeting was to be published, and papers were collected. A major author would have been Teuber, but, unfortunately he died in a swimming accident when on vacation, before the book could be completely assembled. The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky « The second episode involves Piaget during the preparation of the Royaumont debate with Chomsky. » [Piattelli-Palmarini] Piaget was opposed to the presence of Jacques Mehler at the meeting... Based on a work developed within the exploration of the programme "Human communication - Animal communication", Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget were invited by the CRSH to debate on the theme: "Language and Learning" at the Abbaye de Royaumont in october 1975. On usage of the term phenocopy Massimo PIattelli-Palmarini This debate was paralleled by a reflection to organise further studies in semiology, with Thomas Sebeok, Umberto Eco and others. Kot Jeleński via his collaboration with François Bondy and others asked me to participate to a meeting of the Aspen Foundation in Berlin in 1975. A sequel, Fermo's Biennial Encounters For some reason the contribution of my work has been perceived in Italy as of some importance in the domain of philosophy. This was certainly the result of the stance I took, derived from the view I had constructed together with Jean-Pierre Changeux and Philippe Courrège, of the human brain and its original properties. Yet, rather than sticking to a mechanical view of learning and memory, I progressively shifted to a view where information is a central currency that has to be taken into account as an authentic principle of Reality. This meant that brain had to be seen as an information trap. But, at the difference of the cell, or for that matter, the organism itself, the brain departs from the standard features of Turing Machines. I perceive the human brain as a Turing-Machine-in-becoming, progressively separating the program from the machine, with language as the coded element of the program. The interest of italian thinkers for this type of reflection led some to ask me to contribute to conferences and texts in Italy. Ruggiero Romano, as a prominent historian of the western thought, and supported by the Foundation Einaudi, decided to undertake a grand intellectual entreprise, an general encyclopedy of philosophy, Enciclopedia Einaudi. In parallel he discussed with the political authorities of his birth place, Fermo — where sit the fascinating library of Christine of Sweden — of the idea to create on a regular basis an intellectual rendez-vous, on a biennial basis. This was to become Fermo's Biennial Encounters, that he asked me to organise with him. The adventure resulted in two meetings only, because, supported by the Foundation Einaudi, it could not find further support when the Foundation became bankrupt. The Enciclopedia entreprise (1977-1984) also collapsed and was never completed. The first meeting, Il Tempo, was held in Fermo in 1980, with: Ruggiero Romano (1923-2002) ; Giuseppe Papagno (1938-2009) ; Jean-Claude Schmitt ; Fernando Gil (1937-2006) ; Alberto Asor Rosa ; Krzysztof Pomian ; Jean Petitot ; Giulio Giorello ; Antoine Danchin ; René Thom (1923-2002) ; Marco Mondadori (1945-1999) ; Arnaldo Petterlini ; Eduardo Prado Coelho (1944-2007) ; Umberto Eco The text of the conference was published in Italian in 1981 by il Saggiatore, MIlano, under the title Le frontiere del tempo The second meeting, Il Sangue, Myti e Realtà, was held in 1982. A meeting was planned for 1984, but had to be cancelled as the consequence of Einaudi's bankrupt.
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Danchin, JP Changeux
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Danchin
