Towards an epistemology of social representations

The theory of social representations is primarily a theory of lay knowledge. It is argued that it employs polar concepts of the post-Hegelian social science in which the opposite components of such concepts are mutually interdependent. The focus of this paper is on polarities such as individual/social, implicit/explicit and unconscious/conscious. The theory of social representations is conceptually compatible with the socio-cultural theories of knowledge. The socio-cultural theories of knowledge imply that in order to become an independent thinker, the child or the scientist must conceptually free themselves, at least partly, from the constraints of their symbolic social environment. The theory of social representations, in contrast, studies how the social symbolic social environment arrests the individual in the existing forms of thinking, prohibits him or her fi-om independent thought and enforces a particular manner of conceiving the world, events and objects. Finally, attention is drawn to the multilayered nature of thought and to its methodological implications.