Grand angle : le lien connaissances–activité chez Soubelet (2010), un commentaire dans la perspective de la psychodynamique expérimentale

RésuméLes résultats d’A. Soubelet (2010) semblent écarter le lien entre connaissances et activités. Ce lien fait l’objet d’une longue tradition de recherche : poursuivant les travaux de Pierre Janet, Piaget y consacre sa carrière. Les critiques qu’a subies Piaget rejoignent les conclusions d’A. Soubelet. Mais si la notion de « connaissances » est bien cernée, celle « d’activité » reste imprécise. Janet et Piaget ne la partagent pas : pour Janet, la perception est déjà une action. Les résultats d’A. Soubelet ou les critiques de Piaget n’invalident donc pas le modèle de Janet, qui bénéficie d’importants soutiens empiriques récents. Examiner le lien connaissances–activités nécessite une définition précise de la notion d’action : la psychodynamique expérimentale conserve donc tout son intérêt.

The experimental results presented here by A. Soubelet (2010) reassess the link between crystallized intelligence and openness to experience factor of the IPIP scale, and seem to do away with the relationship between knowledge and the fact of “getting involved in various activities”. But the link between knowledge and actions or activities has been a long tradition in experimental psychology research: Piaget, for instance, devoted his career to it, continuing Pierre Janet's works that were focused on an innovative “primacy of action” (Prévost, 1973) with no real equivalent in his time. The experimental critics to Piaget's model severely weaken the link between knowledge and action, too (Baillargeon et al., 1985, Lécuyer, 1989 and Lécuyer, 2006) bearing a strong resemblance to A. Soubelet's present conclusions. But although the notion of “knowledge” is well documented with different models and questionnaires, the notion of “action” or activity remains unclear and not evaluated. In particular, Janet and Piaget do not exactly share the same definition: for Piaget, action (via sensorimotor schemes) is generally considered a factual handling of the objects, although for Pierre Janet, perception itself is already an action before any factual handling (Janet, 1889), i.e. an outline of the action to use the object that he calls a “perceptive scheme” (Janet, 1931 and Janet, 1935). Critics to Piaget's model and A. Soubelet's conclusions use a different definition of action than Janet's one and, hence, cannot be said to directly invalidate his alternative model. On the contrary, his experimental psychodynamics recently gained important empirical support in the fields of perception–action (Berthoz, 1997, Coello et Delevoye-Turrell, 2007 and Coello et Iwanow, 2006) and above all affordance (Gibson, 1977), whose close similarity to Janet's views has not yet been highlighted by historians. Due to a lack of accuracy in the characterization of the “action” or activity parameter, it seems possible to acknowledge its presence as a “hidden variable” in Piaget's models and their critics and even in the Goldberg and IPIP scales, the latter being used here by A. Soubelet. Therefore, some inaccuracies or even circular arguments could impede the debates about the links between knowledge or intelligence, and action. Careful examination of the link between knowledge and action would certainly benefit from a more precise definition of action or activity and their evaluation. This was already one of the major tenets of Pierre Janet's experimental psychodynamics a century ago, which therefore still shows high potential for contemporary research in psychology.