Theory of mediation

The theory of mediation, which is the principal referent of the research group of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Language Research (L.I.R.L.), is a theoretic model developed at Rennes (France) since the 1960' by Professor Jean Gagnepain, linguist and epistemologist. This model, whose principles Jean Gagnepain has methodically set forth in his three volume study On Meaning (Du Vouloir Dire), covers the whole field of the human sciences. One essential feature of the theory is that it seeks to find a kind of experimental verification of its theorems in the clinic of psychopathology. For this reason, the theory presents itself as a "clinical anthropology".

The theoretic model developed by Gagnepain and his research group at Rennes has inspired the work of professors and researchers in a number of European countries and in the United States in a wide variety of disciplinary fields, among them linguistics, literature, psychology, art history, archeology, psychoanalysis, theology. Its aim is deliberately trans-disciplinary - or, as Gagnepain humorously puts it, the theory of mediation cultivates "in-discipline".

This model, originally developed with respect to language, today takes for its object the entirety of what is called "the cultural", that is, the dimension that specifies human beings and distinguishes them from other living species. In other words, "the cultural" constitutes the specific order of reality in which only human beings participate. It is the cultural order that permits human beings, while remaining natural beings, to constantly transcend their natural being in abstracting themselves from it.

The theory of mediation understands the cultural order - more simply, culture - not as the totality of the essential works of a society, nor as the general state of a given civilization, but as the ensemble of properly human capacities which, absent pathological conditions, all human beings share regardless of their historical epoch or geographical setting. For the theory of mediation, culture and reason - the "rationality" which philosophers have discussed for centuries - are identical. The human sciences, understood as the theory of mediation understands them, take up in their own distinctive fashion the questions which philosophy has treated only speculatively.

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