Social representations as objects of knowledge: New horizons for Piagetian constructivism

The social, the object, and the subject in Piagetian constructivism

One of the most substantial and sustained criticisms Jean Piaget’s theory has faced is its failure to consider the importance of the social in cognitive development (Bronckart, 2007; Smith, 1977). However, Piaget addressed this issue throughout his work, albeit in a heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory manner (Piaget, 1923/1968, 1932/1971, 1965/1977). In this sense, Kitchener (2009) distinguishes three different versions of the social and its role in cognitive development throughout Piaget’s work. The most widely recognized version is the one in which Piaget assigns central epistemic value to social relations in the development of knowledge. Initially, he proposed that cognitive development progresses from an autistic state, in which social aspects are absent, to a decentered thought from the child’s perspective. The exit from the egocentric period—an intermediary state between autistic thinking and socialized thought—where individuals are still unconsciously centered on their own viewpoint (Piaget, 1923/1968, 1932/1971)—is made possible through their involvement in interactions with others. In this version, social interaction with others who disagree with the child’s perspective is essential for knowledge development, as it imposes a need for justification on the epistemic subject.

Following Kitchener’s (2009) argument, a second version of the relationship between the social and the cognitive development posits that individual rationality and social interaction are two facets of a shared equilibrium process with the environment, both physical and social. Piaget (1965/1977) believed that cooperative relationships, based on peer interaction, positively affect development by enabling autonomous thought. In contrast, social relationships based on social constraint or unilateral respect had adverse epistemic effects, such as the unreflective transmission of beliefs (e.g., ideology). However, he did not profoundly investigate such influences.

A third version regarding the relationship between social and cognitive development has been present in Piaget’s work since his early writings, coexisting with the other two versions (Kitchener, 2009): an individualistic conception of development based on an immanent rationalist model. The influence of the social is mediated by cognitive mechanisms that interpret external influences and tend towards equilibrium, leading to higher objectivity in knowledge. According to this theory, equilibrium represents a principle or endogenous norm that constitutes the internal factor structuring the individual’s interactions with their environment, whether physical or social.

Alongside the three versions of the relationships between the social and cognitive development identified by Kitchener (2009) throughout Piaget’s work, we distinguish a fourth version in one of his later works (Piaget & García, 1982). This latest version distances itself from Piaget’s (1965/1977) earlier assertions regarding ideology as sociocentrism, equivalent to egocentrism at the individual level, and as an obstacle to be overcome in pursuit of scientific objectivity. By formulating the concept of epistemic framework, Piaget and García (1982) recognized that the worldview of a historical period, associated with the socio-political context, intervenes by enabling and limiting the problems that can be posed or the explanatory models in the sciences. The epistemic framework also intervenes in the construction of knowledge at the individual level, as the assimilation of objects of knowledge occurs in social situations in which children attribute meanings to them based on socially available meanings. Overall, the four different versions of the role of the social in Piaget’s work referred to the development of physical and logical-mathematical knowledge. The processes of knowledge construction about social objects, with few exceptions ( Piaget, 1932/1971, 1965/1977; Piaget & Weil, 1951), did not have a prominent place in the building of Piaget’s constructivist theory.

Piaget (1968) defined constructivism from an epistemological perspective centered on the constitutive relationship between the subject and the object of knowledge. He aimed to elaborate on the problems raised by genetic epistemology based on empirical evidence from psychological research and the history of science. These cycles raise new epistemological hypotheses and provide empirical data that indirectly test them, opening new epistemological problems (García, 2001). Unlike innatism and empiricism, constructivism’s central thesis is that knowledge systems are novel in their development. In this way, the object of knowledge, that is, the real object from the subject’s perspective, is constructed based on how their activity signifies the world. The mechanism responsible for this construction is the equilibration of cognitive structures, in which the subject’s schemas undergo perturbations in their functioning through interactions with objects and relationships with other schemas (Piaget, 1975/1985).

The theory of the equilibration of cognitive structures (Piaget, 1975/1985) seeks to explain the construction of operatory thinking systems through the interaction among assimilation and accommodation, cognitive schemes, and the latter with observables for the subject. It is a process of constructive compensation in the face of disequilibrium and conflicts. If some properties of an object cannot be assimilated by schemes available to the subject and the efforts of accommodation are insufficient, a disequilibrium is produced. However, as cognitive systems tend towards coherence, it is necessary to compensate for the perturbation (re-equilibrium). In this process, Piaget distinguishes different compensations to perturbations: alpha, beta, and gamma. In the following, we will only consider the first two, as the last one assumes highly coherent knowledge, which is incompatible with the structure of social representations.

In terms of knowledge construction, alpha compensation is the most primitive because it does not integrate the perturbation into the cognitive system; it operates by rejecting the object’s perturbing features and, in this way, cognitively represses the perturbation—in a different sense from the Freudian mechanism of repression—that is, it renders it unthinkable. Despite the actual object being in front of the individual, the alpha reaction creates non-present object properties since the subject epistemically represses their existence to overcome the disequilibrium. For example, when children aged 4 to 7 years old are asked to pair objects, one larger and one smaller, if the researcher introduces a third object to include in the series, they will tend to exclude it. They will consider only the two objects that make up the pair as if the third were absent, since, for them, an object cannot be both larger and smaller simultaneously (Piaget, 1975/1985). The beta reaction was conceptualized by Piaget (1975/1985) as a local and unstable modification of the cognitive system that allows it to accommodate a specific situation without persisting over time. In the case of seriating objects, children faced with the third element would place it, by trial and error, in an empirical series lacking an a priori systemic order.

In one of his latest works, Piaget (1980) expanded on this theory by reformulating his understanding of dialectics to address the transformations in meaning that occur during the equilibration process (Castorina & Baquero, 2005). What he called the inferential side of equilibration is an intent to explain the constructive phase of logical-mathematical concepts. Specifically, during re-equilibration, individuals make inferences that transition from previous knowledge systems to another that reformulates them. Thus, while the equilibration theory attempts to explain the changes in knowledge systems, dialectical inferences specify the transformations in the meaning of concepts during this process. The inclusion of these types of inferences in Piagetian work contributes to specifying the emergence of novelty in cognitive development because, unlike deductive inferences in a formal system—where the conclusion reiterates the premises—they allow access over time to a conclusion that implies more conceptual content than the preceding premises. Piaget (1980) postulated an alternation between deductive and dialectical inferences to explain knowledge construction at a structural level and the dynamics of conceptual development. The most relevant feature of this explanatory model is that the contradictions emerging from the functioning of previous conceptual systems do not generate novelties by themselves or the overcoming of a specific state of knowledge but require the subject’s constructive activity (Piaget, 1975/1985).

This dynamic of equilibrium, disequilibrium, and re-equilibrium—through which the understanding of the physical world is developed—is derived mainly from the attribution to the world of the coordination of the subject’s schemes, which may or may not be refuted by empirical verification. In this respect, Piaget (1975/1985) postulated the epistemological thesis of an unfinished, ongoing approximation of the subject’s structures and theories to the real world, a position that can be characterized as critical realism (Becerra & Castorina, 2024; Piaget, 1975/1985). In other words, reality is not a given fact to individuals or scientific communities; it is not directly cognizable; it is only cognizable through the subject’s structuring activity in the interaction of the processes of assimilating objects and accommodating schemas to their features. The object of knowledge is not identical to reality but is a cutout of it by the constructive activity of the subject; more precisely, it depends on the meaning produced by such activity. In this sense, the subject and the object are inseparable. On the contrary, for example, the numbers do not exist as physical entities. However, they are constructed from abstractions of the univocal relations that the subject’s activity introduces between sets of objects. As such, mathematical entities, while crucial for constructing and specifying the hypotheses that attempt to capture the world, that is, critical realism, do not, by their very construction, aim to approach reality asymptotically, but rather to achieve consistency and demonstrative power.

The construction of logical-mathematical objects occurs in systems of actions, their systematic coordination, and their semiotic expression (numbers, classifications, or geometric properties; Beth & Piaget, 1961). From Piaget’s perspective, the construction of mathematics is not arbitrary; it assumes a certain intrinsic objectivity since it is based on a deductive activity that reconstructs previous systems, which, in turn, acquires greater rigor, consistency, and demonstrative validity. Moreover, logical-mathematical objects exhibit a certain degree of stability in the subject’s experience; for example, mathematical operations always yield the same result, regardless of the situation, and explicit validity criteria are available. In short, physical knowledge, which provides a causal explanation of phenomena—such as the speed or fall of bodies—approximates reality; on the contrary, logical-mathematical knowledge cannot be epistemologically interpreted in terms of critical realism. Despite being an indispensable tool for understanding the physical world, this knowledge does not seek to know reality. Instead, it focuses on constructing properties and demonstrations increasingly consistent with the properties abstracted from coordinating actions and the reorganizations they generate. Importantly, these constructions are independent of any claim to fully understand the world (Beth & Piaget, 1961).

In the 1970s, a line of research emerged to study what was conceptualized as socio-cognitive conflicts—now in its third generation of studies—enriching Piaget’s equilibration theory by examining the role of social interactions in cognitive development (e.g., Mugny & Pérez, 1989; Perret-Clermont, 1980; Perret-Clermont & Nicolet, 1988; Psaltis, 2012, 2015; Psaltis & Zapiti, 2014; Psaltis et al., 2015). These studies demonstrate that cognitive disequilibrium can arise when a subject’s perspective confronts a conflicting viewpoint from another individual regarding the same problem. How they overcome this contradiction will also depend on the type of communicative interaction established during the problem-solving process (Perret-Clermont, 1980). Furthermore, some of these studies have confirmed that participants’ social representations (e.g., gender) can constrain their communicative interactions, similarly to their cognitive developmental level (Duveen & Psaltis, 2008; Leman & Duveen, 1996). This research trend undoubtedly marks a significant milestone in advancing Piagetian theory, enriching empirical inquiry into the role of social interactions in knowledge construction by embracing a ternary perspective on the subject, object, and other. However, it has yet to focus on studying the construction of knowledge about specific social objects.

More recently, as stated in the introduction, studies on the construction of knowledge in the social domain and those coming from the different generations of researchers dedicated to the study of socio-cognitive conflicts, as well as the pragmatic of objects, have raised the need to reformulate the subject-object dyad, giving rise to the subject-object-other triangularity (Psaltis et al., 2009; Rodríguez, 2012). Specifically, such research trends postulate that the epistemic subject of the classical Piagetian tradition needs to be abandoned to become a psychosocial subject by thinking of its interactions where asymmetries between oneself and others—expressed in collective beliefs—play a constructive role (Castorina, 2010; Castorina & Barreiro, 2023; Leman & Duveen, 1996; Lloyds & Duveen, 1990). Institutional practices and collective beliefs intervene by restricting the processes of social knowledge construction, that is, enabling and, at the same time, limiting the subject’s constructive activity (Castorina & Faigenbaum, 2003).

The object and the psychosocial subject in social representations theory

The theory of social representations deals with the processes of social reconstruction of material objects, whether physical or biological, such as the COVID-19 virus (Páez & Pérez, 2020), the body (Jodelet, 2017), or a city (De Alba et al., 2022), as well as the abstract kind of objects that are the focus of our analysis, objects that do not have material existence beyond the social practices that constitute them, e.g., justice, nation, or politics.

Social groups engage in a familiarization process that enables them to symbolically cope with threatening or unfamiliar objects, as the unknown generates a gap in meaning within culture or challenges existing meanings (Barreiro & Castorina, 2016; Moscovici, 2001; Wagner, 1998). Specifically, this process occurs through objectification and anchoring mechanisms (Moscovici, 2001). The former iconically concretizes the knowledge available in the social group, constituting the figurative core of social representations. It implies the selection and decontextualization of certain features of the represented object and its subsequent naturalization; that is, this signifying construction is considered accurate and placed in the place of the object in everyday interactions. The anchoring mechanism is the dialectical counterpart of objectification. It refers to integrating representation into the social group’s existing system of knowledge, beliefs, values, and meanings. Hence, social representations convey a group’s social perspective and carry collective images laden with values and emotions.

The construction of the representational object is situated in the web of tensions at the subjective, intersubjective, and trans-subjective levels that intervene in its constitution (Jodelet, 2011). Kalampalikis and Apostolidis (2021) noted that the objects of social representations involve the subject entirely and systematically as a social group member, becoming a locus of psychosocial investment. Therefore, in its constitutive process, the object represented is crossed by the tensions between the agents involved, their emotions, and their worldviews. Thus, from a sociogenetic perspective, as a socially shared object, every social representation is a tensional object because the context in which meanings are born creates plural zones of tension and practice that can conflict with the adherence to or interpretation of the meanings that constitute the object (Kalampalikis & Apostolidis, 2021). In other words, these social objects present stability and change as they are the product of the constructive and constitutive nature of social representations.

Moreover, following Jodelet (1991), Kalampalikis and Apostolidis (2021) foreground the horizon within which the representational object is outlined. The same object, situated on different horizons, gives rise to different representational exchanges; that is, it is conditioned by the perspective from which it is interpreted. Each horizon highlights a meaning of the object according to the trans-subjective system of representation—understood as a conception of the world—proper to the public or social space in which the object is constructed. In this way, an object’s tensional features are emphasized in its process of constitution through its anchoring in a particular worldview, with beliefs and values proper to it. For example, the ideological belief in a just world (to believe that people get what they deserve), proper to the Protestant work ethic, is part of the meritocratic background against which the hegemonic representation of justice as retribution is established, justifying social inequalities and preserving the status quo (Barreiro, 2021; Barreiro & Castorina, 2015).

Returning to the dialectical relationship between anchoring and objectification, the object’s tensional nature intervenes in the selection of which aspects will form the figurative nucleus of a social representation, excluding others from the representational field. When selecting which aspects of the object will be represented and which will not, the tension inherent to power relations between and within social groups is at play. The meanings that prevail in this dispute among different social actors constitute the positive side of social representations, which is effectively represented. However, the other possible representations of that same object become nothingness; they are not represented and remain the dark side of the positive representation or as the non-present parts of the resulting meaning structure (Barreiro & Castorina, 2016). This repression or exclusion is not casual or arbitrary; those representational elements or meanings may challenge the dominant ideological view and threaten some social groups.

Once constituted, social representations become part of the symbolic world and function as what reality is for the subject (Marková, 2008). People born into a symbolic social world take it for granted; its ontological reality is like that of the physical world, which they perpetuate and question only in concrete social situations. According to Wagner et al. (2018), the material connotation of the word “object” can distort the understanding of the entities that populate this domesticated world, as it is proper to social representations, which are symbolically structured. In that world, people’s beliefs, attitudes, and opinions do not refer to an already given object but shape it. Because of their material ontological status, some objects can affect people’s actions, regardless of whether they are represented symbolically, such as a stone or the roots of a tree we can stumble over. However, socially constructed objects such as justice, nationality, or democracy owe their existence to patterns of social interaction. These are real objects that people cannot bump into or stumble over, but they are just as relevant to human experiences as material objects. Such objects are not strictly physical and can be called social facts because they are constructed through intersubjective practices. At the same time, the discursive and bodily acts of participants lend these symbolic objects a certain tangibility, giving them a quasi-physical existence. Cooperation between people who assume a social representation in their interactions produces a multitude of non-material entities that populate the social world. Thus, in social representations theory, it makes no sense to speak of the representation “of” an object since this is the strict raison d’être of the objects called social (Wagner, 2019).

In the domesticated world, multiple realities can coexist in a state of cognitive polyphasia (Jovchelovitch & Priego-Hernández, 2015; Moscovici, 1961), resulting in knowledge systems that are less homogeneous and stable. Social representations can legitimize and defend a social order expressing the particular social interests of a dominant group, but they can also challenge it. Therefore, from the individual’s point of view, different meanings may constitute the same object in the same cultural and political context, depending on the logic from which they interpret it. This process of construction and coexistence of forms of thinking about the same object contradicts the rationalist postulate that understands the development of knowledge as the advancement of states from lesser to greater validity, still present in most of the works developed within the framework of constructivist psychology, heir to Piagetian thinking. The validity of a social representation does not result from its degree of proximity to the real object but from social consensus. For example, an act can be considered “just” or “unjust,” depending on the prevailing beliefs and values at the historical moment when the subject thinks about a situation, since there is no universal conception of justice towards which moral evaluations are progressively oriented or approximated. Furthermore, the absence of consensus in the social sciences on the definition of such abstract objects does not allow for the postulation of a definition or conception as the most valid or rational, as the culminating point towards social relations moves forward (Campbell, 2010). For example, the various justice analyses correspond to distinct ideological perspectives, including liberalism, socialism, feminism, and others. Hence, unlike physical world knowledge, there would not be more or less valid conceptions of justice that could be interpreted as closer or farther from "the real” object, nor an approximation to an ideal notion of justice.

Social representations as objects of knowledge in ontogenetic development

Unlike Piagetian research on physical and logical-mathematical knowledge, this work aims to analyze the cognitive processes involved in constructing knowledge about abstract objects that are collectively constructed and have no ontological existence beyond the practices in which they are constructed and expressed, such as justice, politics, or nationality. In these cases, cognitive equilibration processes and dialectical inferences are brought into play as individuals attempt to appropriate the social representations of the group to which they belong (Barreiro & Castorina, 2017). Analyzing this ontogenetic process requires replacing the classic Piagetian unity of analysis—the interaction between subject and object—with the interaction of subject, other, and social representation. Insofar as the latter refers to the common-sense meanings of different practices with others, it encompasses the triangular subject-object-other relationship in which social representations are constructed, transformed, and reproduced. It is essential to clarify that social representations are not Platonic entities floating in the world of ideas, but rather collective meanings inferred through different interactions with others about an object of knowledge (Marková, 2008; Wagner et al., 2018). From the subject’s perspective, the object’s ontological reality does not extend beyond social representations—that is, beyond the symbolic world and the history of social interactions that shape it.

Children are born into societies that present them with a symbolically structured world. Individuals appropriate the social representations that constitute the “real world” for their social groups through a process of ontogenesis that primarily occurs in childhood but also occurs every time an individual becomes a member of a new social group (Lloyds & Duveen, 1990). Although social representations theory has not addressed the mechanisms involved in this process, studies from a developmental psychology perspective suggest that it cannot be explained simply as the imposition of collective beliefs on individuals. On the contrary, evidence suggests that the ontogenesis of social representations involves an individual’s cognitive activity aimed at reconstructing representational objects to understand them, constrained by their available systems of thinking (Barreiro, 2013; Barreiro et al., 2026; Lloyds & Duveen, 1990).

At the ontogenetic level of analysis, the object of social representations is presented to subjects dynamically through different and changing social interactions. The abstract social objects we analyze in this work (e.g., politics, nation, or justice) never stably maintain their properties; they are never identical from one interaction to another. However, in the face of this variability of social meanings, individuals manage to construct knowledge directed towards the social representations agreed upon by their social group. This process of knowledge construction, guided by the constraint power of social representations, illuminates the significant role of cultural and social interactions in shaping individual cognition. The intervention of social representations in knowledge construction could be metaphorically characterized as a riverbed that orients the movement of the water. However, the water’s movement force follows a legality not determined by the riverbed. In this way, the subject constructs social meanings, but ones that await him/her (Overton, 1994). The latter is the constitutive paradox of this ontogenetic process: the creation of meanings that preexist individuals in the social world, which are available and guide their elaboration.

The process of individual appropriation of social representations as an object of knowledge cannot be explained by appealing to the theory of equilibration as was originally formulated by Piaget (1975/1985), where equilibration is understood as an immanent process, that is, an intrinsic tendency to increase knowledge towards a higher level of validity according to logical criteria or argumentative sustainability. Understanding the ontogenesis of social representations requires introducing indeterminacy into the construction of meanings, given the cultural environment and the social practices in which the psychosocial subject participates. This process involves the dialectical inferences conceived by Piaget (1980) to account for the construction of logical-mathematical and physical operatory notions (Barreiro & Castorina, 2017). In this way, the meanings constructed through the dialectical movement of differentiation and integration converge towards the consensual social reality (social representations) of the individual’s social group, leading to the reconstruction of the object in terms of greater complexity, i.e., an increase in the articulation of meanings (Barreiro & Castorina, 2017). For example, when investigating the ontogenesis of social representations of justice (Barreiro, 2013, 2021), the identified process of knowledge construction was not due to overcoming conflicts between contradictory representations but rather to dialectical inferences that enable the coexistence and articulation of different meanings. Specifically, three independent representations of justice were identified in children aged 6 to 9 years: distributive justice, which focuses on the fair distribution of resources; retributive justice, which emphasizes punishment for wrongdoing; and utilitarian justice, which prioritizes the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The three representations were integrated from the age of 10 onwards, remaining identifiable until the age of 17. Thus, adolescents’ most frequent representation of justice integrated retributive and utilitarian representations as a method to achieve the common good. This social representation was also characterized as hegemonic among adults, leading to the conclusion that children and adolescents would appropriate it during the ontogenetic process that turns them into social actors.

This movement of dialectical integration and relativization of the meanings of justice co-occurs inseparably with the processes of epistemic decentering by which individuals become capable of thinking about the same social phenomenon from different perspectives to analyze it. Additionally, cognitive decentering arises from individuals’ active participation in broader institutions and social relations, where they and others assume different social roles (Castorina & Barreiro, 2023; Duveen, 2013; Piaget, 1932/1971; Psaltis & Zapiti, 2014). Although the dialectical inferential process moves from the interdependence of meanings available to the subject to a more complex one not yet available, it does not always consist, from the epistemological point of view, in the passage from less valid meanings to others of greater validity according to criteria of scientific rationality. However, it is a knowledge of greater complexity insofar as the previous independent meanings (in this case, the utilitarian and retributive representations of justice) are articulated or coordinated in a consistent whole. In turn, this dialectical process is made possible by reflective abstraction (Piaget, 1977/2001), as the subject takes a previous knowledge or meaning as the object of their thinking and reformulates it; that is, dialectical inferences are made possible by processes of reflective abstraction that intervene in the subjective adherence to or rejection of certain social representations.

In the appropriation of social representations, the alpha compensation, conceptualized by Piaget (1975/1985) to explain the equilibration process of operatory thinking, can be interpreted as the subjective correlate to the repression of meanings during the sociogenetic process of objectifying social representations, as described above as the social construction of nothingness. In affirming that nothingness is constructed in the relationship between individuals and their culture, we are not referring to an epistemic perturbation, but rather to a perturbation to the world’s conception—a threat to the status quo in a particular historical circumstance. From a relational perspective, this absence is not a real absence but the presence of an absence, suggesting an ontology beyond the immediately perceptible presence that results from denying the quality of existing objects. Thus, meanings are not mere products of individual minds, nor are they imposed perceptually by the environment; they are qualities that emerge constructively in the relationship between individuals and their cultural environment.

In this framework, returning to the ontogenesis of the social representation of justice, it is plausible to think that the extremely low presence of the distributive representation throughout the development of Argentine children and adolescents would be the result of a process of active construction of nothingness, as a strategy to deal with—at an individual and collective level—fear or anguish in the face of social injustices (Barreiro, 2013, 2021). This activity of meaning construction is neither conscious nor voluntary, and it determines what individuals recognize—or not—as real. The unbearable for social groups sinks its roots deeply in the subjective dimension of the construction of social representations (Jodelet, 2008). In this sense, subjectivity is a central dimension that remains under-researched, as it refers to how people recreate, reproduce, transform, and resist social representations based on their life histories and social positions (Barreiro, 2021). The construction of nothingness at the sociogenetic level may involve the subjective dimension that the cognitive activity of alpha compensation can explain. For example, Argentinean adolescents are involved daily in social interactions based on implicit assumptions of distributive justice, but they cannot thematize them as objects of knowledge.

We have already stated that, according to social representations theory, it is possible for contradictory meanings about the same object to coexist, arising from different forms of thought or logic, without demanding cognitive integration or transformation. When the subject feels this contradiction, and it somehow affects their identity, they can appeal to compensatory cognitive mechanisms. However, because the perturbation is caused by a social representation that constitutes the reality in which they live, they cannot repress it (alpha compensation); they must undertake a process that allows them to transform this contradiction. Such a process could be interpreted as a beta reaction, by which both contradictory representations are modified at the individual cognitive level in an idiosyncratic way, giving rise to a new, unstable representation of the social object. For example, if, in a particular context, a negative social representation of one’s national group becomes salient, such as having committed morally questionable acts in the past, this representation would conflict with those that shape an individual’s positive identity (Barreiro et al., 2016). Therefore, the individual will face the affective need to transform some of such representations, constructing a new one with no social consensus and whose existence does not last beyond the situation in which it is elaborated (Barreiro, 2024; Barreiro et al., 2026). Although this is not a transformation of social representations at the collective level, this constructive process may be the first step in that direction—the individuals’ grasp of consciousness of the contradictions between different representations of the same object in their cultural environment.

Conclusion

In introducing this writing, we asked whether the characteristic features of social representations as objects of knowledge demand modifications to the basic assumptions of Piagetian constructivism, initially elaborated as an explanation of logical-mathematical knowledge. To do so, in the first place, following the line of previous studies on socio-cognitive conflict and social domain objects as representational systems or institutional norms, we justified the need to replace the traditional Piagetian epistemological subject with a psychosocial one, whose cognitive activity operates within a cultural environment amidst daily social interactions. This has been the subject of social psychology, whose interpretation of the world is constrained by its social positioning.

In the second place, we analyzed the differential features of social representations as objects of knowledge compared to other social domain objects and to knowledge about the physical world structured by logical-mathematical structures. Social representations are collectively constructed, abstract objects (e.g., justice or politics), whose existence individuals infer from the social practices in which they are involved. We posit that the properties of these objects are not stable, as they vary from one interaction to another; however, individuals can abstract regularities in their daily interactions with them. Through such an inferential process, social representations become part of the symbolic world and function as what reality is for the subject; their ontological status is akin to that of the physical world from the subject’s perspective. The validity of such constructed knowledge does not stem from its degree of proximity to the real object, but rather from social consensus rooted in contextual, political, and historical backgrounds.

In the third place, regarding the ontogenetic appropriation of social representations by the psychosocial subject, we appeal to the inferential side of Piaget’s theory of equilibration to address the transformations in meaning that occur when individuals reconstruct them from their social and personal perspectives, based on their developmental possibilities. Dialectical inferences enable individuals to construct novelty through the creative differentiation and integration of prior available meanings. We also illustrate the potential of alpha and beta compensations to account for different dynamics in this process. A distinctive feature of its functioning with respect to social representations is that the latter involve affective aspects that can lead to the denial of specific meanings or to compromising reactions in order to maintain a positive assessment of one’s own social position, issues that have not been addressed in the original Piagetian theory. However, there is still a gap in empirical research dedicated to extending the study of these cognitive mechanisms’ functioning to the appropriation of social representations by individuals. This ontogenetic process of knowledge construction is directed towards the consensual structure of meanings that populate an individual’s social group cultural environment. In this vein, one of the main contributions of our analysis is to foreground the subjective dimension of social representation reconstruction by foregrounding the cognitive mechanisms involved, a gap in social psychologists’ studies of the topic. However, future studies and theoretical elaborations must address the affective dimension of this process, which is intertwined with the individual’s life story (Barreiro, 2020).

We believe that the most profound revision demanded by our analysis of Piagetian theory, which previous studies on social knowledge have not pointed out, concerns the epistemological thesis, characterized as a form of critical realism, which would not allow for interpreting the processes of ontogenesis of social representations. Such a thesis posits that knowledge approaches the real world in an unfinished and unfinishable manner. In the development of knowledge about the physical world studied by Piaget, the dynamics of equilibrium, disequilibrium, and re-equilibration are driven by the attribution to the world of the subject’s coordination of cognitive schemas, which may or may not be refuted by empirical verification. On the contrary, the validity of social representation does not result from its degree of proximity to the real object but only from social consensus. From an individual’s point of view, there is no real object beyond the socially constituted object. Such objects, as collective beliefs, vary according to historical processes and specific social situations; for example, there is no universal representation of justice or politics towards which knowledge progressively converges.

However, questioning critical realism does not mean to suggest that there is no possibility of increasing objective knowledge in the social sciences, in terms of approximating social practices and structures; undoubtedly, their history shows a clear advance in this direction. Here, it is important to emphasize that our analysis focused on social representations as a modality of common-sense knowledge, which people use daily and whose validity rests on the social consensus about reality.

Therefore, Piagetian constructivism aligns with critical realism in understanding the physical or natural world, and it may also be applicable to understanding social structures in the social sciences. The ontogenesis of social representations does not involve an asymptotic approach to the real world through individuals’ cognitive activity. This process is directed towards a collective meaning structure. In this process, it is possible to identify a certain realism insofar as such meanings await subjects (Overton, 1994). It is not about an individual invention of meanings regarding the social world but rather about reconstructing social representations based on the cognitive possibilities of children or adolescents. In this sense, while the resulting development process is directed towards them, it does not advance to higher levels of validity in objective knowledge; instead, it is an unfinished approach to the collective meanings of such abstract objects.

This interpretation of realism is compatible with the Piagetian constructivist epistemological assumption that knowledge is not a priori in either the object of knowledge or the subject. It is the product of the dialectical relationship between the two. From an ontological perspective, we assert that this object is constituted by collective meanings external to the subject but whose character of reality differs significantly from that of the physical or logical-mathematical objects investigated by Piaget. In ontogenesis, individuals strive to comprehend the social representations that shape their understanding of social reality. They are immersed in a process through which their social identity is constructed. In this sense, an individual’s social perspective on the social world differs from the logical-mathematical categories that structure the physical world. The differences we have mentioned are sufficient to demand a nuanced understanding of what has been conceptualized as “critical realism” within the Piagetian constructivist theory. Furthermore, this category was initially conceived to explain the development of scientific knowledge, not for common-sense representations that follow a different logic. However, future philosophical work should specifically dedicate itself to conducting a metatheoretical analysis that clarifies this complex issue we have begun to outline.

The potential impact of the insights presented here is significant, as they could promote a deeper understanding of the relationships between the collective, constructive meaning process and individual creative activity in their appropriation. However, the analysis presented is based on the available evidence, and it is necessary to conduct studies specifically designed to test these conclusions, given that few empirical studies have been devoted to understanding the ontogenesis of social representations.