ABSTRACT
From very different perspectives Gérard Duveen and Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont provide provocative, innovative views on the social dimension to learning and thinking. The following discussion is all too brief but is also intended to be provocative: it will draw upon aspects of their accounts, but space precludes full engagement with their arguments or even a fully detailed exposition of this response. Both contributors demonstrate the necessity of forging a closer relationship between social and developmental psychologies but come to different conclusions about the significance of the social dimension in Piagetian theorising, and by implication in the Vygotskian model as well. Yet both Duveen and Perret-Clermont conclude that the contemporary images of Piaget and Vygotsky are socio-historically situated, and unhelpful: these images can be interpreted, as Duveen hints, as social representations of Piaget and Vygotsky.
