Closely related to this is Mr. Bruner's "evolutionary instrumentalism," his conception of instruction as the means of transmitting the tools and skills of a ...

Depuis 2006, le Québec débat âprement des règles gouvernant la laïcité de ses institutions et se trouve confronté à deux modèles apparemment irréconciliables : le républicanisme « jacobin » et le libéralisme individualiste, issus respectivement de la France et du Canada. En s’inspirant de la pensée du philosophe politique John Rawls, les auteurs proposent ici d’explorer une voie médiane mieux adap­tée à l’expérience québécoise. Dans ses travaux tardifs, Rawls met en avant une forme de libéralisme républicain affranchi de l’indi­vidualisme normatif (...) de Kant et de Mill et récuse le paternalisme qui vise à imposer aux citoyens une certaine éthique de vie. Tout en étant neutre à l’égard des conceptions individualiste et com­munautarienne de la personne, il cherche à équilibrer les droits collectifs des peuples avec les droits individuels des personnes. -/- C’est donc une conception strictement institutionnelle de la laïcité que présentent les auteurs, qui redéfinissent au passage l’interculturalisme, la liberté rationnelle et le consentement, ainsi que l’expérience religieuse, qui devient hybride, à la fois subjective et objective. En se servant de Rawls, ils expliquent clairement pourquoi l’expression de la religion fait partie de la liberté reli­gieuse, mais aussi pourquoi il faut faire la distinction entre les objets qui relèvent des libertés fondamentales et ceux qui sont sujets à des accommodements. Ils tracent ainsi une authentique troisième voie, qui pourrait bien faire sortir de l’impasse le débat québécois sur la laïcité. (shrink)

Bruner sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of the mind. He examines the irrepressibly human acts of imagination that allow us to make experience meaningful; he calls this side of mental activity the “narrative mode,” and his book makes important advances in the effort to unravel its nature.

Argues that educators should help students piece together authentic narratives about themselves and about society, and not to focus so much on teaching students to process information.

Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a “true” knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind’s interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been (...) to discover how we achieve “reality,” that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, “there to be observed.”This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the “real world.” Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the work out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which—whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning—we came to respond to the world “as it is.” There have always been dissidents who challenged these views, but conjectures about human mental development have been influenced far more by majoritarian rationalism and empiricism than by these dissident voices. Jerome Bruner is research professor of psychology at New York University, where he is also serving as Meyer Visiting Professor of Law. His most recent book, Acts of Meaning, appeared in 1990. In 1987 he received the Balzan Prize for “a lifetime contribution to the study of human psychology.”. (shrink)

Tomasello et al. point up the mutual interdependency of the unique human capacity for intersubjectivity and the evolution and institutionalization of culture. Since both intersubjectivity and cultural cooperation require localized knowledge, Homo sapiens is highly reliant on such knowledge and in that sense is a highly localized species, requiring special means to surmount cultural misreadings and to achieve translocal, or global, interconnection.

Cet article vise à enrichir l’approche désagrégative proposée par Cécile Laborde dans Liberalism’s Religion [HUP, 2017] à l’aide de certaines intuitions rawlsiennes provenant de notre ouvrage La nation pluraliste [PUM, 2018]. En partant de la notion d’« accommodement raisonnable » telle que comprise dans le contexte légal du Québec et du Canada, nous parvenons à une interprétation des fondements normatifs de la distinction entre droits fondamentaux et accommodements qui repose sur la raison publique. La perspective que nous défendons permet ultimement (...) d’admettre des droits fondamentaux à la fois pour les personnes et pour les groupes. (shrink)

However one conceives of the relation between a sign and its significate, referring is a communicative act in which a speaker must intentionally direct the attention of an interlocutor to some object, event, or state of affairs that the speaker has in mind. This article examines the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of acts of referring, with special concern for the possible nature of sign-significate relationships. Findings from developments psychology indicate that a group of abilities and skills underlie the ability to refer. (...) Infants follow the gaze of others to objects of attention, and enjoy joint attention with others. Interactions with caregivers in routines well known to the child enable her to achieve joint attention with the adult on a particular ingredient in the routine. In this way, the ability to refer develops from certain "language games ", interactions that combine goal-seeking and joint attention. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it offers a critique of the normative foundations of the 2019 Quebec Act respecting the laicity of the State. This is primarily based on the theses we developed in La nation pluraliste. Repenser la diversité religieuse au Québec (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2018), and elaborates a suitable diversity management model for Quebec using the republican liberalism described in Rawls’ later work. This discussion draws attention to certain pitfalls in the concept of (...) secularism as defended by the Coalition Avenir Québec government. Second, we present a methodological discussion on how political philosophy can contribute to the formation of law, by examining how our criticism of Act respecting the laicity of the State corresponds to an exercise in implementing Rawls’ own method of thoughtful balance. (shrink)