Cognitive development and social representations: Philosophical conditions for possible collaboration

CASTORINA, JOSÉ ANTONIO; BARREIRO, ALICIA VIVIANA

Santiago

Conferencia; el 15th Biannual Meeting of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology; 2013

International Society for Theoretical Psychologyc

This paper proposes arguments in defense of the compatibility between social representations theory and genetic psychology to study the ontogenesis of social knowledge. Basically, such compatibility will be justified appealing to the relational meta-theory (or epistemic frame) that underlies both disciplines. On the one hand, Social Representations Theory rejects any kind of dualism: individual/society, subject/object, representations/reality, etc. Rather it sustains a relational perspective for considering the classic psychological dichotomies. It postulates that individuals actively understand and renegotiate social meanings during the development of their social identity. Furthermore, this relational or dialectic meta-theory constrains the research process, enabling to propose some problems instead of others or guiding the delimitation of specific units of analysis. On the other hand, Genetic Psychology also assumes a relational meta-theory to study the development of social knowledge. Epistemologically this discipline is based on a constructivist perspective that proposes a constitutive relation between individual knowledge and its social conditions of construction. In other words, social practices are inseparable from the transmission of collective beliefs and both constrain the cognitive knowledge construction. Moreover, this perspective enables researchers to postulate problems about development in terms of the emergency of novelties and to adopt units of analysis that join the epistemic subject together with social practices and their context of manning. The assumption of a relational meta-theory by both disciplines entails an epistemological and ontological understanding that enables a dialogue between them. However it is necessary to maintain the specificity of their levels of analysis and their differences in methodological approaches. This work proposes a genuine collaboration between social and developmental psychologies with solid epistemological grounds. It is possible because the research programs have been modified during their historical development, with regard to formulation of research problems and hypotheses, reformulating their concepts and making their basic assumptions explicit. Finally this paper will present some studies on the development of moral judgments in everyday life to critically analyze the epistemic advantages and difficulties of the collaboration proposed. These studies show that the explanation of the reconstruction of social representations in the ontogenetic process needs to take the individual conceptualization involved into account. Furthermore, the individual construction of hypotheses about the moral domain is constrained by social representations. The joined work of social and genetic psychology not only leads to a deeper understanding of the research objects, it also challenges their conceptual categories that need to be reconsidered during the research cycle.