Social Representations, Social Practices and Causality - A Reply to W. Wagner

Abstract

This article is a reply to Wagner's (1994) criticisms addressed to the Echebarría and Gonzalez's (1993) research on "the social representations of democracy and the prediction of voting". We argue against the sterile attempts to prove the superiority of "rationalistic" versus "rationalizationistic" models of human behaviour. We also present a model which tries to integrate both positions in a general model of social representations and social practices. Moreover, we criticize the strategy of "picking" a specific research out from the context of a general study which in turns could led to some misunderstandings such as those shown by Wagner. Furthermore, we criticize the caricaturistic picture of the concept of "behavior" presented by Wagner as support of his criticisms.