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.
This book examines social constructionism as a metatheory of psychology. It does not consider constructionist accounts of psycho-social phenomena, but it does assess certain assumptions which are said to underpin those accounts, assumptions which are primarily semantic and epistemological. The first part of the book explains why the charges of relativism and self-refutation leveled at social constructionism miss their target, and it considers a constructionist attempt to defend the metatheory by appropriating the concept of performative utterances. The second part of the book challenges the generally accepted view that social constructionism is antithetical to positivist philosophy of science. This is done via an examination of the doctrine of conventionalism, constitutive relations, dualism, Wittgenstein's meaning-as-use thesis, verificationism, operationism, linguistic phenomenalism, and Kant's limitations of human knowledge. It is shown that, in certain respects, these topics unite social constructionism with its bête noire logical positivism, and that psychology's repeated endorsement of these ideas hinders the development of a rigorous psycho-social science. The book ends with a brief, speculative section in which it is suggested that the skepticism and internalism of social constructionist metatheory is an unconscious strategy of survival against failure.
Fiona J. Hibberd is lecturer in the School of Psychology, University of Sydney. She specializes in the history, theory and philosophy of psychology, and in theories of personality, and has published in theoretical journals in the social sciences.
