Learning and Transmission: Semiotic Mediation, Ange Péron

For Vladimir Jankélévitch, learning is valid for everything that aims for progress in continuation; only the hour of death cannot be learning because learning bears the traces of the future. Learning is therefore, by deduction, the very face of life. Learning is the most significant mark of the living, whose culmination is "habit." When the symbolic animal, as Charles Sanders Peirce describes it, learns, does it learn by watching, by imitating, or by exploring? Is there intentionality in the act of learning? There are several ways of learning, including demonstration. But is demonstration the mark of the greatest creativity? What can demonstration be compared to? Demonstration is to learning what interpretation is to psychoanalysis. Learning is not simply the implementation of a gesture, a methodology, but the setting in motion of cognitive content, emotional content, a body, and a singular history.