The social constructionism considers the discourse on the world not as a reflection or map of the world, but a social exchange device. Try to go beyond empiricism and rationalism by locating knowledge within the process of social exchange.
Summary
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- 1 Historical roots
- 2 Basic assumptions
- 3 Consequences of constructionism for psychological research
- 4 Consequences of constructionism for scientific research in general
- 5 External links
Historical roots
Constructionism can be understood in relation to two great intellectual traditions: empiricism (exogenic perspective) and rationalism (endogenic perspective). The first proposes knowledge as a copy of reality, while the second depends on internal processes to the organism through which it can organize, not copy, reality to make it understandable.
The controversy between exogenism and endogenism also colored psychological research. For example, behaviorists give importance to the environment (exogenists) and gestaltists to the perceptual organization inherent in man (endogenists). Cognitive psychology is also an endogenic perspective: human action depends on cognitive processing, that is, on the world as it is known rather than on the world as it is. However, cognitivism has failed to impose its endogenic point of view on psychology.
Constructionism attempts to overcome this object-subject duality by developing an alternative theory of how science works and challenging the idea of knowledge as mental representation. Constructionism holds that knowledge is not something that people have in their heads but something that people do together: language is essentially a shared activity.
Basic assumptions
Social constructionism seeks to explain how people come to describe, explain or account for the world where they live. To do this, it takes into account four hypotheses:
- What is considered knowledge of the world is not the product of induction or the construction of general hypotheses, as positivism thought, but is determined by culture, history or social context. For example, expressions such as ‘man’, ‘woman’ or ‘anger’ are defined from a social use of them.
- The terms by which the world is understood are historically situated social artifacts, products of exchanges between people. The understanding process is not automatically directed by nature but results from an active and cooperative enterprise of people in relationship. Example: ‘child’, ‘love’ etc. vary in their sense according to the historical epoch.
- The degree to which a given form of understanding prevails over another does not depend fundamentally on the empirical validity of the perspective in question, but on the vicissitudes of social processes (communication, negotiation, conflict, etc.). Eg: interpreting a behavior as envy, anger or flirting can be suggested, affirmed or abandoned as social relationships develop over time. This negotiation of reality gives way to a social epistemology.
- Negotiated forms of understanding are connected to many other social activities, and by forming part of various social models, they serve to sustain and support certain models to the exclusion of others. Altering descriptions and explanations means threatening certain actions and inviting others. Eg: the metaphors used in psychology (machine men, infantile mind, etc).
Consequences of constructionism for psychological research
The consequences of social constructionism for psychological research are far-reaching and it will take a long time to fully explore them.
In psychology, each psychological concept is cut from an ontological base within the head and made into a component of the social process. Anger can be understood far from a deterministic physiology, in a form of social role, and therefore does not refer to a mental state but rather constitutes part of the role itself.
All this leads us to think, from constructionism, that psychological theorization would not reflect an internal reality, but rather in the expression of a social task, and hence that constructionism finds strong resistance within psychology, when transferring the explanation of behavior from within the mind, to the explanation of it as a derivative of social interaction.
Consequences of constructionism for scientific research in general
It is therefore necessary to address a new conception of knowledge, since the exogenist and endogenist conceptions are strongly rooted today. The idea is to leave behind a concept of knowledge as historical, objective and individualistic that allows understanding scientific research not as the impersonal application of decontextualized methodological rules, but as the result of active and communal exchange between people. This perspective, called Sociorrationalism, sees human rationality as something that is not within the minds of independent people, but within the social whole, the rational being the result of negotiated intelligibility.
Constructionism does not offer rules, it is relativistic, but this does not mean that ‘anything goes’, since knowledge systems, as they depend on shared intelligibilities between communities, will be governed to a large extent by normative rules. Constructionism reaffirms the relevance of moral criteria for scientific practice, and elaborates a metatheory, or theory about scientific theories.
