Abstract
Social constructionism is an influential current of thought that has a strong impact on several fields of social sciences. However, some versions of social constructionism suggest implications that are questionable to many researchers: for instance, there is no reference to an objective reality; there are no criteria to discover the truth or to distinguish the true from the false; and science is merely a tradition among other traditions, such as religion. This essay argues that Marxist psychology and especially Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky’s cultural-historical school can contribute to a dialectical overcoming of this dipole between relativism and positivism, thereby constituting a theoretical framework for critical discourse analysis in psychology.
Notes
1 See Brown, Pujol, and Curt (Citation1998), Cromby and Nightingale (Citation1999), Flaskas (Citation2002), Frosh (Citation1995, Citation1997), Held (Citation1995), Lannamann (Citation1998a, Citation1998b), Larner (Citation1994), Parker (Citation1998), Pilgrim (Citation2000), Pocock (Citation1995), and Ratner (Citation2006).
2 For a better understanding of what critical psychology is, see Fox and Prilleltensky (Citation1997) and Hepburn (Citation2003).
4 See Bertrando (Citation2000), Brown, Pujol, and Curt (Citation1998), Collier (Citation1998), Cromby and Nightingale (Citation1999), Dickerson (Citation2010), Donovan (Citation2003), Frosh (Citation1995, Citation1997), Lannamann (Citation1998a, Citation1998b), Larner (Citation1994, Citation1995, Citation2011), Parker (Citation1998), Pilgrim (Citation2000), Pocock (Citation1995, Citation2015), Speed (Citation1991), and Willig (Citation1999).
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