Against relativism in psychology, on balance

Abstract

Relativism in psychology unravels the truth-claims and oppressive practices of the discipline, but simply relativizing psychological knowledge has not been sufficient to comprehend and combat the discipline as part of the ‘psy-complex’. For that, a balanced review of the contribution and problems of relativism needs to work dialectically, and so this article reviews four problematic rhetorical balancing strategies in relativism before turning to the contribution of critical realism. Critical realism exposes positivist psychology’s pretensions to model itself on what it imagines the natural sciences to be, and it grounds discursive accounts of mentation in social practices. The problem is that those sympathetic to mainstream psychology are also appealing to ‘realism’ to warrant it as a science and to discredit critical research that situates psychological phenomena. Our use of critical realism calls for an account of how psychological facts are socially constructed within present social arrangements and for an analysis of the underlying historical conditions that gave rise to the ‘psy-complex’. Only by understanding how the discipline of psychology reproduces notions of individuality and human nature, a critical realist endeavour, will it be possible to transform it, and to socially construct it as something different.