Social psychology at Epistemological cross-roads: On Gergen's choice
✍ Scribed by Wolfgang Stroebe; Arle W. Kruglanski
- Book ID
- 102173999
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1989
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 352 KB
- Volume
- 19
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0046-2772
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Until 1973 Kenneth Gergen was a prominent experimental social psychologist whose main research interest was in what we would broadly term social cognition today. That year in his classic paper on 'Social psychology as history' he revoked his earlier beliefs and attacked the epistemological basis to which most experimental social psychologists adhere (albeit mostly unwittingly). This paper launched him on his second career as the major critic of traditional social psychology. Since then he has not only been relentless in his methodological criticism but he has also developed his own constructionist approach with which he hopes to overcome the shortcomings to traditional theorizing in social psychology (e.g. Gergen, 1982). Thus, in the present paper he puts forward a two-pronged attack: He argues 1) for replacing the epistemological dualism presumably embedded in traditional social psychological research by a position which he calls social epistemology and 2) for replacing a dominant 'dualist' research program in social psychology by a 'social epistemological' alternative namely social constructionism. Since his epistemological argument is the more fundamental one, we will address it first and then discuss his criticism of social cognition.
CRITICAL RATIONALISM VERSUS SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY
When pressed to reveal their innermost epistemological credo most social psychologists would probably admit to accepting some form of Popperian falsificationism. Now the Popperian epistemology may be considered as (weakly) dualistic in that it presumes a distinction between data and theory. The latter is the 'representation' whereas the former is (at least temporarily) accepted as the 'reality' to be represented. Accordingly, the validity of a theory is assessed by the degree of fit it affords to the data. In Popper's (1963Popper's ( , 1968) 'critical rationalism', progress in science is achieved by trial and error, or 'conjectures and refutations', as Popper entitled a collection of his papers. According to his position, theories cannot be verified or