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Unfolding Social Constructionism

  • Book
  • © 2005

Overview

Authors:
  1. Fiona J. Hibberd

    1. University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

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  • An in-depth analysis of the issue of relativism and social constructionism

Part of the book series: History and Philosophy of Psychology (HPPS)

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xviii
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  2. Social Constructionism as a Metatheory of Psychological Science

    • Fiona J. Hibberd
    Pages 1-28

  3. Relativism and Self-Refutation

    • Fiona J. Hibberd
    Pages 29-54

  4. Non-Factualism

    • Fiona J. Hibberd
    Pages 55-71

  5. The Received View of Logical Positivism and Its Relationship to Social Constructionism

    • Fiona J. Hibberd
    Pages 73-79

  6. Conventionalism

    • Fiona J. Hibberd
    Pages 81-131

  7. Meaning as Use

    • Fiona J. Hibberd
    Pages 133-162

  8. Phenomenalism and Its Analogue

    • Fiona J. Hibberd
    Pages 163-175

  9. Conclusions and Speculations

    • Fiona J. Hibberd
    Pages 177-183

  10. Back Matter

    Pages 185-207
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Keywords

About this book

For more than half of the 20* century, psychologists sought to locate the causes of behaviour in individuals and tended to neglect the possibility of locating the psy­ chological in the social. In the late 1960s, a reaction to that neglect brought about a "crisis" in social psychology. This "crisis" did not affect all social psychologists; some remained seemingly oblivious to its presence; others dismissed its signifi­ cance and continued much as before. But, in certain quarters, the psychological was re-conceptualised as the social, and the social was taken to be sui generis. Moreover, the possibility of developing general laws and theories to describe and explain social interaction was rejected on the grounds that, as social beings, our actions vary from occasion to occasion, and are, for many reasons, unrepeatable. There is, so it was thought, an inherent instability in the phenomena of interest. The nomothetic ideal was said to rest on individualistic cause-effect positivism of the kind which (arguably) characterised the natural sciences, but social psychology (so it was said) is an historical inquiry, and its conclusions are necessarily historically relative (Gergen, 1973). Events outside psychology converged to give impetus to the "crisis" within.

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Fiona J. Hibberd

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