Beyond the Scare Quotes: Comment on “New Horizons for Piagetian Constructivism”

Abstract

This commentary presents a joint critical perspective in response to the article “Social representations as objects of knowledge: New horizons for Piagetian constructivism” (Barreiro & Castorina, in press). We commend the authors for their theoretical ambition, and particularly for their explicit articulation of the similarities between Piagetian constructivism and social representations theory, as well as for their decision to relocate the problem of social representations to the level of ontogenesis rather than considering it from the perspective of sociogenesis alone. Our commentary then aims to bring focus to several points of tension emerging from this proposal (e.g., concerning the relation between psychogenesis and ontogenesis and the status of critical realism). Of particular concern is the reception and stabilization of a “Piaget” that only partially reflects the heterogeneity of Piaget’s corpus, which we then use reflexively to engage with the theory of social representations as historiography by other means. By making these questions explicit, however, we seek not to criticize but rather to situate the article within a broader theoretical and historical and epistemological problem space. Our commentary deliberately mobilizes historical analysis not as contextual background, but as an epistemic tool for examining how theoretical objects themselves become socially represented.

Introduction

Piagetian does not mean Piaget. This word refers to Piaget; it implies Piaget. But with Derrida (1967/2016, 1993/1994), it could also easily mean “haunted by the specter” of Piaget: so, not really Piaget at all. And that’s not, it seems, what the authors intend. Consistent with what we understand of their goals, therefore, we propose that Piagetian here actually means “Piaget” (treating the inaudible scare quotes substantively to suggest how the label might be “out of joint,” as Derrida put it, with its source). This then also becomes exemplary, in our approach, of what the authors call a “social representation.” And it extends their arguments to the historiography of science, as well as more broadly—we hope—to epistemology in general. Yet what we mean by this also needs some unpacking and clarifying before we can reengage directly and deeply with what the authors seek to do by offering “New horizons for Piagetian constructivism” that involve the social.

“Word” and object

The best-known Anglophone articulation of the path we seek to follow was given by Quine (1951, 1960) in differentiating word and object: when a word is used, how that word attaches to its empirical object is “indeterminate.” Two different users of the same word can therefore intend different things even while pointing at the same referent. This was broadened by embedding such uses in a “web of belief” (Quine & Ullian, 1970/1978). The gist, then, is that these metaphorical webs—networks of meaning-full implication—sit, linguistically, atop our observations and interpretations of the world. So what we see, when we look (empirically), is both the world and what the world means (to the one who looks who might then describe it meaning-fully). We therefore see through our meanings, like lenses, and the implications of our words as we use them reflect how those meanings (beliefs) relate. So the resulting descriptions are of the world and also of the meanings (beliefs). To the extent that these are then also simplifications of the world, there is also necessarily more to the world than what we can see and describe in the moment: as the saying goes, “the map is not the territory” (see Winther, 2020). The word, in other words, is not the object.

To put this more concretely, in the sense of how we mean to use it in highlighting the importance of the authors’ proposals: for there to have been a Piaget other than the “Piaget” implied of the authors’ use of Piagetian, which/who is most visible before the acceptance of this eponymous labelling (as Vidal [1994] showed) but also still detectable after (as Beilin [1992] and Ducret [2000] argued), suggests that “Piaget” and Piaget have the same relation as Quine explained of word and object. This, we propose, is then the same relation as that between the map and the territory. As a result, too, investigations going beyond the scare quotes can discover things not already shown on the map of our knowledge.

Separating word and object suggests that we might be surprised, by such an investigation, about even such a famous figure as Piaget whom every psychologist thinks they know. Perhaps out of concern for forbidden Great Man hagiography, however, this insight—the non-identity of a designated object (Piaget) and the meaning of its name (“Piaget”)—hasn’t been fully developed in connection to historiographical interests. But that does seem to be worth doing, because none of this is personal or celebratory: it is simply the case that there’s something to be seen that isn’t the same as how we think of it (said Burman, handwavingly, in Hobbs & Burman, 2009). The key questions are then about how these epistemic maps are made and how they are learned; how words come to have their meanings separate from the objects in the world.

What follows, as we work backward toward the authors’ proposals, is meant to be about neither historical epistemology nor developmental psycholinguistics. Both are implicated, and yet both are also too narrow. As a result, explaining what we intend—in a way that highlights the full possibilities opened up by the authors—is challenging in such a short space. Especially because, as Føllesdal (2013) reported, Quine (his doctoral supervisor) had intended to expand his linguistic arguments in ways that take this broader social perspective even more seriously: toward the shared, public accessibility of linguistic “similarity spaces” that can nonetheless be implemented neurally in different ways. But then the project went unfinished when Quine died. Let us begin, therefore, with a low-resolution pass of this territory that we think can be productively remapped through the further development of the authors’ proposals.

“Psychology” and psychology

An easy and concrete historiographical entry-point for the broader set of epistemological interests with which we are all engaging, we think, can be achieved in a preliminary way via reference to Kurt Danziger. Thus, briefly, with respect to psychology narrowly: Constructing the Subject (Danziger, 1990) showed how social practices, rather than the progressive innovation of superior methodological techniques, came to define the early discipline. What “psychology” means today, in other words, is a function of those earlier higher-level social relations and not just an acontextual inheritance of the true descriptions of the human subjects found on the ground floor. Naming the Mind (Danziger, 1997) did something similar with psychological concepts: supposedly “natural kinds” like emotion and intelligence that are now taken for granted around the world came to be defined in the sense understood today after a narrowing through American interests, which were imported or in some cases reimported by non-American audiences alongside American media, values, and so on. Marking the Mind (Danziger, 2008) is then an extended historiographical allegory: different ways of remembering throughout human history have produced different remembrances, having different consequences for those who inherited them as fact. And therefore, when reading through the previous two books, current psychologists think of their discipline in very narrow ways: psychology’s memory of itself is skewed, and this is what is taught to new students.

As a recognized founder of Anglophone History and Theory of Psychology, in the contemporary sense, Danziger is understood to have called for the study of context alongside content. But this was of course not his contribution. Nor were those books the first to make that argument. (For another audience, we might have cited Kuhn [1962/2012] and the founding of a synthesized History and Philosophy of Science.) As a result, we can put the “externalist challenge” to intellectual history in another way. Again, with Derrida: context influences meaning as con-text (with-the-text), so it can’t be separated from considerations of meaning as one would separate signal from noise.

Recently, Burman (2022) demonstrated this quantitatively by showing of “Wundt” and “Piaget” that different translations have had different implications in different languages. What those names mean is different for different groups. Crucially for our purposes, though, Burman argued that this wasn’t because of errors and ignorance. Rather, it is because of differences in what we can now recognize as con-text: the preexisting “web” of interests and implications into which new translations are received. This, we propose, is also where the authors—and their approach to the theory of social representations—can contribute powerfully to future discussions: the resulting “constructions” are representations of real objects, and real relations, but with meanings not rigidly determined by the underlying sources.

In short: just as there can be no text without con-text, there are no representations without social re-presentations. Indeed, from this, it follows that there are also no “facts” without the associated infrastructures that warrant them and present them authoritatively as such. (Misunderstanding this is at the crux of the “Science Wars” [see Goldman, 2022].) So a still narrower question can be asked: how are the resulting meanings learned such that they can be acted upon as if real? Hence our enthusiasm for the authors’ proposed synthesis of Moscovici’s theory of social representations with Piagetian constructivism.

Compliments and complements

Rather than treating these frameworks as incompatible, or merely complementary, the authors undertake the more demanding task of rearticulating them around a shared problem: the ontogenesis of socially constructed objects, and thus also the development of meaning itself. This makes for interesting, inspiring reading. Their text, though, isn’t exegesis. (It’s an article, not a book; as is to be expected from the constraint, there’s a lot missing.) Yet they nevertheless address a long-standing gap between developmental psychology and social psychology, while also—as we hope to have already suggested—reopening a genuinely interdisciplinary space in which questions of cognition, sociality, and epistemology can be examined jointly and fruitfully.

The authors shift the focus explicitly toward ontogenesis, which we think is helpful. The discussion also brings into focus the importance of maintaining an analytical distinction between individual reconstruction and the historically situated processes through which social representations are produced, stabilized, and transformed. The risk, though, is to make specters of the sources. Sociogenesis ought not to disappear when attention is redirected toward ontogenesis; it persists in the background of historically sedimented practices, translations, and power relations that delimit what can be appropriated, ignored, or even rendered unthinkable at a given moment.

As it happens, Piaget’s (1965, 1977) Études sociologiques said much the same thing. That he is thought not to have said anything of the sort, today, then suggests that this collection of sociological essays could be treated as an “object of knowledge” in the very way proposed by the authors. Because, despite the common belief, it is simply incorrect to say that Piaget neglected the social. Indeed, this view in the present is the opposite of the view in the past. For example: his honorary doctorate from Harvard, in 1936, was for his sociology of the development of children’s concepts (Hsueh, 2004). And when he was first raised to Full Professor at Geneva, in early 1940, it was initially in Sociology (Ratcliff & Borella, 2013). But again, we propose that the persistence of the contemporary false belief is not out of ignorance; the denial of Piaget’s sociality is a consequence of something else (Burman, 2015). From the standpoint developed in the article, this observation then acquires even greater significance.

We suggest that the various receptions of Piaget’s sociological collection can be interpreted as an example of how the social representations of theoretical objects are constructed, stabilized, and eventually naturalized—and made obvious—within academic communities. Indeed, when Burman et al. (2025) examined the several attempts to translate it into English, as Sociological Studies (Piaget, 1977/1995b), they identified eight different versions and important underlying social relations never before considered—including with Moscovici himself, whom Piaget had hired to teach social psychology in Geneva. (They also found much the same thing with the translation of Vygotsky, albeit at lower resolution as a result of marshalling fewer archival resources.)

We therefore propose, in a way that we think is consistent with what the authors argue, that the dismissal of Piaget’s sociality (and the common contemporary false belief that “Piaget” was asocial) is itself the result of a social representation: the result of an importation and popularization of old sources within a new con-text, whose new meanings were then stabilized and treated as if real. But of course, this dynamic is not limited to translations within developmental psychology alone.

The well-known affinity between Piagetian stages and Kuhn’s (1962/2012) “paradigms” may also be interpretable as a historically situated reconfiguration of Piagetian ideas within an Anglophone epistemological landscape, rather than having arisen in a vacuum (Burman, 2020; Galison, 2016; Kaiser, 2016). In this sense, Kuhn’s notion of paradigms can be understood as a transformation of Piagetian developmental thinking under specific conditions of translation, reception, and rearticulation, thereby exemplifying the very processes of social representation and historical mediation at stake in the article. Yet symmetry then also demands that we consider this both ways. And what we see in the reverse is a little different: Piaget responded to Kuhn, and sought to go beyond paradigms in proposing the cadre épistémique (Piaget & García, 1982/1989). This, though, has been almost completely ignored in favor of continued citations to Kuhn’s Structure. So we propose that popular social representations also need to be understood, under certain circumstances, as “masking” the sources that originally informed them.

From “words” to worlds

We hope to show, by these examples, that the article under discussion is an ambitious and stimulating contribution that addresses a genuine theoretical lacuna at the intersection of Piagetian constructivism and the theory of social representations. And that it has broader epistemological implications. Yet its greatest immediate strength lies in its clear identification of a persistent imbalance in social psychology: while the sociogenesis of social representations has been extensively theorized, the cognitive mechanisms by which individuals appropriate, reconstruct, and transform these representations remain insufficiently specified. By explicitly relocating the problem to the level of the subject’s constructive activity, the authors reopen a line of inquiry that is deeply consonant with the original epistemological ambitions of the Genevan School.

Equally valuable is the authors’ decision to treat social representations as objects of knowledge. This move allows them to avoid a purely discursive or interactionist reduction of social meanings and to reintroduce, in a non-naïve way, the question of objectivity into the analysis of social knowledge. The insistence on the relational ontology shared by Piagetian constructivism and social representations theory then provides a coherent meta-theoretical background for the proposed articulation, and the discussion of cognitive polyphasia and multiple rationalities convincingly captures the instability, heterogeneity, and tension that characterize many social objects.

From a theoretical-conceptual standpoint, however, several central claims raise questions that deserve to be articulated and examined explicitly. For example: the thesis according to which, in most cases, the study of the psychogenesis of abstract social objects is equivalent to the study of the ontogenesis of social representations is heuristically powerful. We worry this risks conflating analytically distinct processes. Interpreted weakly, as a methodological observation that empirical studies of social knowledge development necessarily engage with socially available meanings, the claim is both plausible and productive. Yet interpreting it strongly, as an identity between processes, risks obscuring the historical, institutional, and conflictual dynamics through which social representations are produced, stabilized, and transformed.

A similar need for clarification arises in the treatment of social representations as objects that “await” appropriation by individuals. While the metaphor is intelligible, it may inadvertently suggest a form of pre-given exteriority (akin to Platonic ideals) that sits uneasily with the frameworks endorsed by the sources. If social representations are understood as dynamic signifying structures inferred through participation in social practices, then their relative stability should also not be conceived as ontological essentialism or preformationism but as the sedimentation and entrenchment of prior interactions and power relations; as the result of historical processes and consequences that can be excavated and examined. Emphasizing this point would help avoid any residual ambiguity between constructivism and a reified conception of collective meanings.

Most problematic, perhaps, is the article’s discussion of Piagetian critical realism. The authors argue that this epistemological thesis cannot account for the ontogenesis of social representations because their validity depends on social consensus rather than proximity to a stable object. This interpretation, however, appears overly narrow. In Piaget’s work, critical realism does not presuppose that objects are internally coherent, systematic, and constant. Rather, he explained that objects of knowledge always exceed the subject’s current schemes. This produces resistances that require accommodation, and sometimes also the construction of something new (Piaget, 1975/1985, 1977/2001). From this perspective, too, social objects can participate in a form of critical realism, albeit one characterized by divergence, instability, and historical transformation rather than by an asymptotic convergence toward a true essence. This is discussed at length in many sources, but it is in Sociological Studies that Piaget (1977/1995b) discussed it explicitly in relation to the social.

The authors cited this book in their article, as well as the translator’s introduction that was criticized—on historical grounds, using archival sources—by Burman et al. (2025). We are thus returned to a common difficulty in contemporary debates: there is a tendency for authors to engage less with the primary sources by Piaget than with a stabilized social representation of classical “Piaget” (particularly as shaped by Anglophone translation, selective canonization, and pedagogical popularization). Indeed, several of the positions attributed to Piaget in this article—most notably the reduction of his project to the study solely of logico-mathematical knowledge and the characterization of his epistemic subject as intrinsically asocial—are more characteristic of “Piaget.” So we propose, with the historians, that something occurs over time such that what is given in the primary sources can no longer be seen.

Taken from the perspective of the article, it seems the solution to this “masking” problem can be found in the discussion of “decentration” in Introduction à l’épistémologie génétique that was included and translated in Sociological Studies (Piaget, 1950/1995a). This is a multi-layered process involving not only the overcoming of egocentrism but also a critical distancing from shared norms. This double movement, required for overcoming epistemic illusions, is then particularly relevant for a synthesized theory of social representations: consensus initially functions as a necessary condition for meaning construction, yet may later become an obstacle to further development. Situating the discussion of social representations within a dynamic of successive decentrations then helps to clarify how shared meanings can simultaneously enable initial learning and also later curtail deeper understanding, without presupposing a linear progression toward ever greater truth (see also Piaget, 1965/1971, where philosophy itself is described as a source of both wisdom and illusion).

Conclusion

Seen in this light, several of the article’s most provocative conclusions appear to be directed not at Piaget’s constructivism as such, but at its later social representation in psychology and education: in other words, at a popularized “Piaget” seen in the rearview mirror. A more explicit acknowledgment of the distinction between source and representation would therefore strengthen the authors’ argument while also aligning it reflexively with their theoretical commitments. Indeed, we propose that the very phenomenon analyzed by the authors—the ontogenesis of social representations—can be considered as historiography by other means: the historical trajectories of the many “foreign” contributions to contemporary psychology can be treated as case studies in social representation as they were translated, reframed, and sometimes distorted across disciplinary and linguistic boundaries. And then the same caveats that Quine and Danziger and Kuhn promulgated would also apply: beware of how meanings change as they move between contexts. (And consider this problem reflexively, because your own context is relevant too.)

Taken together, our theoretical and historical remarks are intended not as objections but as an appreciation. The authors have succeeded in reopening a crucial debate about the status of social knowledge within constructivist theory. And we are grateful to the editor for inviting us to explain why we think so. By clarifying the relation between sociogenesis and ontogenesis, reconsidering the scope of Piagetian equilibration mechanisms beyond the usual obligatory reference to The Equilibration of Cognitive Structures, and engaging more directly with the complexity of Piaget’s corpus rather than its received image (as “Piaget”), we then also aim to highlight further directions in which the potential of their proposal may be developed further. Fortunately, too, the sources provide wide shoulders to stand on; wider still, though, if future contributors can see beyond the scare quotes to the world we take to be real.