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We Don’t Share! The Social Representation Approach, Enactivism and the Ground for an Intrinsically Social Psychology

Open Universiteit Nederland, The Netherlands

Cor Baerveldt

University of Alberta, Canada

Wolfgang Wagner is a current and productive advocate of the social representation approach. He developed a version of the theory in which social representations are freed from individual minds and instead conceived of as concerted interactions. These epistemological starting points come very close to the enactive outlook on consensually coordinated actions. Yet Wagner is not radical enough in that he continues to see concerted interaction as an expression of representations that are already shared by the actors constituting a group. In our view, the ubiquitous notion of sharedness—which is also found in studies on social models, cultural patterns, schemas, scenarios, and so forth—is conceptually problematic and reveals a misapprehension of how orchestrated actions come about. Moreover, it obscures a proper understanding of what really constitutes intrinsically social behavior. Enactivism provides a much more consistent epistemology for a psychology that is intrinsically social.

Key Words: cultural psychology • culture • enactivism • epistemology • sharedness • social representations

Culture & Psychology, Vol. 13, No. 1, 5-27 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1354067X07069949


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