Social Constructionism as Cognitive Science

What is Social Constructionism?

Social Constructionism has been instrumental in remodeling grounded theory. In attempting to make sense of the social world, social constructionists view knowledge as constructed as opposed to created. This paper discusses how social constructionists construct knowledge and argues that social constructionism is concerned with the nature of knowledge and how it is created and as such, it is unco...

Against Metaphysical Social Constructionism in Psychology

Originating in postmodern interpretations of diverse intellectual disciplines, social constructionism (SC) exerts a profound influence throughout modern psychology (K. J. Gergen, 1985), including such areas as social psychology, psychoanalysis, feminist psychology, family therapy, and the psychology of knowledge. The core of SC is the proposition that humans construct knowledge through social i...

Introduction: Social Constructionism and Its Critics

The articles in this issue signify the maturation of social constructionism. After introducing the articles, I raise two questions that have remained under-represented on these pages. First, the historicization of constructionism has been avoided by constructionists and critics alike; and, second, the epistemological concerns have been dominated by realist– anti-realist debates. I conclude by i...

Demography as social science and policy science

Cognitive Architecture as Revolutionary Science

Many proposals for evaluating cognitive architectures rely partly on an analogy between cognitive science and other sciences. We therefore reflect on the relations between cognitive science, cognitive architectures and other sciences. Some important differences caution against the misguided use of some evaluation approaches. Some unique characteristics of human intelligence motivate the need fo...