Discours et cognition : les prédiscours entre cadres internes et environnement extérieur

While discourse analysis seeks a new theoretical lease of life, cognitive sciences have integrated the questions of context and culture. Certain researches attempt to give an account of the cognitive dimension in the discursive, and contrariwise. The “discourse and cognition” domain is currently represented by Van Dijk’s “mental models” theory in the English-speaking world. However, works are emerging in France, among them a discourse-cognition articulation adding a contribution from the phenomenology of perception and social cognition. Here, we propose a discourse-cognition articulation inspired by the social cognition approaches based on theoretical choices concerning the nature of the spirit and the definition of the context as a material environment. This perspective is based on the idea of an external cognition, the most attractive version of which, for our purpose, is the Clark and Chalmers hypothesis of “active externalism”. From this, we propose a conception of context as a continuum, integrating environmental data consisting both of internal frameworks (pre-discourses as frameworks of knowledge, beliefs and practices) themselves informed by external data, and the exterior realities of our material, concrete environment. Within such an approach, deriving from distributed cognition, we take into account objectal elements and techniques in the process of discourse construction. So, we propose the idea of a discursive technology to designate techniques, artefacts or objects which configure, format, and inform pre-discourses with a view to elaborating discourses