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

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.