The Constitution of Knowledge in Action

This article present a revised version of a talk given in January 1997 which, for the first time, spelled out the notion of “hexadic sign” which, since then, has been enriched by a number of subsidiary concepts and hypotheses and which has proved to be fruitful in many academic disciplines and in many social, technical and cultural domains. This presentation takes the form of a case-study where every urban reader can have an opinion based on his own experience. This notion of “hexadic sign” is central in a phenomenology of human activity which has been developed as the preliminary to a cognitive anthropology of this human activity, which is focussed on the constraints and effects of this activity on the bodies, the situations and the cultures of the actors. If the formulation of this notion refers to authors not usually appealed to in cognitive science – the Stoics, Fichte, Peirce and Sartre – it fits within the hypothesis of enaction of Maturana and Varela, and the concepts of its components have contrasting relations with the concepts of the international literature.

[in French]