Categorial points of view in social representation Philippe Castel*, Marie-FrancË oise Lacassagne, E Â dith SaleÁs-Wuillemin Universite de Bourgogne, LPCS-GPSD, 36 rue Chabot-Charny, 21000 Dijon, France Keywords: Vantage theory; Conceptual viewpoint; Categorization; Similarity judgement; Social repre- sentation; Psycholinguistic methodology; Algerians in France; Semantic domains; Prejudice; Abstraction; Subjectivity 1. Introduction The aim of this research is to show that the categorial processes brought to light by MacLaury 1995, 1997) make it possible to account for dierentiated activations of social representation. The notion of ``social representation,'' which is central to European social psychology, refers to all the social experience encoded in memory. It consists of knowledge shared by members of a community about a given subject. This knowledge is that of ``common sense'' Moscovici, 1984), that is to say, of non- specialists on the subject. According to theoreticians of this school e.g. Moscovici, Jodelet, Flament, Abric, Doise and Moliner), social representation would be a structured set of contents and values that one could access by using to an appro- priate methodology. Thus, in France, since the representation of psychoanalysis initiated by Moscovici 1961), the study of many other social representations has been possible: of the artisan Abric, 1984), of madness Jodelet, 1985, 1986), of hunting Guimelli, 1988), of AIDS Morin and VergeÂs, 1992), of the rights of man Doise, CleÂmence et al., 1992), of unemployment Flament, 1994), and of Gypsies Mamonto,1996). Anglo-Saxon psychosociologists of language Wetherell and Potter, 1992) have for their part brought to light a linguistic notion which seems to aim at the same mental object. Through the ``interpretative repertories,'' that is to say through ``sets of Language Sciences 24 2002) 667±678 www.elsevier.com/locate/langsci 0388-0001/02/$ - see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0388-000101)00009-2 E-mail address: rwuillemin@aol.com E. SaleÁs-Wuillemin).