How to Testify to the Emergence of an Idea in Conversation: Methodological Avenues for Exploring Children’s Interviews

In line with socioconstructivist works analysing the impact of social interactions on cognitive development, the present study discusses how to capture, describe, and analyse the emergent co-production of new ideas or creative cognitive solutions. After introducing the methodologies that are currently used in this field, we recall the relevance of pragmatic analyses of conversations. We then identify several possible methodologies for probing and finely analysing the emergence of children’s new thinking, by cross-referencing third-person (i.e., from the researcher’s point of view) and first-person (i.e., from the children’s point of view, following an explicitation interview) analyses.

Conversing as Metaphor of Human Thinking: Is Mind like a Conversation?

How can researchers shape their ideas so that they understand the mind better? This theoretical paper discusses the merits of the conversation metaphor as a means of analyzing the human mind. We will develop arguments concerning conversation as i) a situated and distributed activity, ii) a "product" in perpetual construction, and iii) the amount of credence and belief we afford it. Finally, we will advocate for metaphorical tools that promote a more dynamic conceptualization of human thinking.

Culture and social representations: A continuing dialogue in search for heterogeneity in social developmental psychology

In this commentary on Jahoda (2012) and Moghaddam (2012), I discuss the problem of the reification of culture from a social representations perspective and argue that social representations as a notion overcomes many of the shortcomings of the notion of culture, the main being reification. Whilst building this argument I show, by making reference to recent developments in the field of social representations and social developmental psychology, how weaknesses in social representations theory identified by Jahoda (1988) were addressed and how insights from this approach can be used for diversity management policies in education.