When
psychologists use the term “constructivism” in its most general sense,
what do they mean? In his historical analysis of the changing
nature
of knowing, Sexton (1997) divides human history into three distinct
eras:
premodern, modern, and postmodern. Each of these periods
emphasized
a particular ontological perspective that shaped how people dealt with
events, problems, and solutions. The premodern era (from the sixth
century
B.C. through the Middle Ages) emphasized dualism, idealism, and
rationalism.
Faith and religion played central roles, and “effective change efforts
were prayer, faith, thinking, and/or reasoning” (Sexton, 1997, p.
5).
By comparison, the modern era (roughly from the Renaissance to the end
of the nineteenth century, though modern thought still dominates much
of
current discourse) stressed empiricism, logical positivism, scientific
methodology, the identification of objective truths, and validity. One
consequence of the modern era
Sexton
(1997) labels the third (and present) era as postmodern/constructivist
and depicts it as accentuating the creation, rather than the discovery,
of personal and social realities. The postmodern/constructivist
era
stresses the viability, as opposed to the validity, of knowledge
claims.
It also pays special attention to epistemological issues.
Investigators
and theorists become concerned with the how people know, as well as
what
they know. Compared to modernism (wherein truths independent of
subjective
bias are revealed to neutral scientists), postmodernism/constructivism
highlights human participation in the construction of knowledge:
was
to solidify scientific and professional knowledge as the legitimate
source
of understanding the world. Through the logical process of
science
we could discover that which was true. . . . Scientific knowledge was
assumed
to be a mirror image of objective reality. (Sexton, 1997, p. 7)
Because
constructivism focuses on ways in which persons and societies create
(rather
than discover) constructions of reality, its adherents often exhibit
varying
degrees of skepticism about whether persons have direct and accurate
access
to an external world. In other words, constructivists see reality as
noumenal
—that is, it lies beyond the reach of our most ambitious theories,
whether
personal or scientific, forever denying us as human beings the security
of justifying our beliefs, faiths, and ideologies by simple recourse to
“objective circumstances” outside ourselves. (Neimeyer, 1995, p.
3)
Thus,
all constructivist psychologies share the belief that none of the many
ways of understanding that people have developed provide a God’s Eye
(i.e.,
purely objective) view of the world. All constructed meanings reflect a
point of view. However, constructivists often disagree among themselves
about the implications of this position, particularly regarding the
nature
of reality, the origin of constructed meaning, and the best way to
conduct
psychological research.
References:
Neimeyer,
R. A. (1995). An invitation to constructivist psychotherapies. In R. A.
Neimeyer & M. J. Mahoney (Eds.), Constructivism in psychotherapy
(pp. 1-8). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Sexton,
T. L. (1997). Constructivist thinking within the history of ideas: The
challenge of a new paradigm. In T. L. Sexton & B. L. Griffin
(Eds.), Constructivist
thinking in counseling practice, research, and training (pp. 3-18).
New York: Teachers College Press.
