Abstract

CASTORINA, José Antonio. The impact of social representations on the psychology of social knowledge: issues and perspectives. Cad. Pesqui. [online]. 2008, vol.38, n.135, pp.757-776. ISSN 0100-1574.

Psychological studies on the formation of social notions by children have been conducted in terms of an exclusively individual intellectual activity in a time sequence. We show the difficulties of this approach, which does not, for example, explain the persistence of "personalized" notions of history during development, besides actual conceptual advancement. We propose to use the theory of social representations, which considers the child as a social actor and focuses on values, which may not be organized in a logical sequence. We then examine the issues posed by using social representations in developmental psychology: whether its definition is acceptable, whether it corresponds to the symbolic order and not to an individual activity; whether it is irrational or has a logic other than individual concepts. We finally shed light on the minimum epistemic conditions for establishing a dialogue between some investigation programs in knowledge psychology and the psychology of social representations.

Keywords : Social Representations; Moral Values; Cognitive Development.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )