Unfolding Social Constructionism

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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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.

• character
• knowledge
• personality
• philosophy
• psychology
• social psychology

• University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

  Fiona J. Hibberd

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