ABSTRACT
In his famous work, the History of Western Philosophy (1961), Bertrand Russell strongly criticized the Greek philosopher Xenophon for his inaccurate report of the reasons behind the execution of Socrates. Russell wrote: “A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand!” (1961, p. 101). This anecdote may illustrate the dilemma we are faced with when knowledge is transmitted from one person to another or from one context to another. The anecdote above can provide a starting point for our refl ection, in this work, on the transformation of knowledge and the role of social representations in it. The meaning of a message is always subject to transformation and reinterpretation depending on how people represent the content of that message. Our social representations of the reality surrounding us, and our daily encounters with other people, obviously affect our interpretation of the meaning conveyed, whether the message is communicated as a formal or an informal one. Neither information nor knowledge is always truthful or even plausible. Infl uenced by the rapidity of the fl ow of information and by media, we always tend to take up the latest information and give it a functional role in our social and professional lives.
