Abstract

Despite its enormous paradigmatic influence upon social psycholgy arid psychology in general in European context, the concept of Serge Moscovici's social representations suffers from definitional ambiguity. It still remains at the level of debate as to what it is and/or what it is not. The present paper was addressed primarily to this conceptual dispute. In particular, an emphasis was placed upon integrating historical and philosophical as well as conceptual developments of social rep-resentations, on which a more solid and reified conceptualization of the concept was sought. Implications were made in relation to the currently dominant tradition of individualistic American social psychology, particularly focusing upon the area of social cognition. Finally, methodological issues associated with the theory were discussed.