The psychosocial production of ideas: Social representations and psychologic

In responding to Jan Smedslund's (1998) paper, this commentary first of all considers the value of vagueness for research in social psychology. Second , I argue that Smedslund's consideration of social representations underest imates both the representational and social aspects of the theory. This dis cussion leads to some broader characterizations of social representations, and particularly to the relation between social representations and cultura l psychology. Finally, these comments conclude with a discussion of the rol e of language in social psychological research, and suggests that while bot h psychologic and social representations are concerned with the analysis of common sense, they approach this analysis from different theoretical posit ions.