Personal-construct theory and social constructionism: Difference and dialogue

Abstract

In psychology there are at least as many varieties of social constructionism (SC) as there are of constructivism. Many of these versions of SC share a number of crucial properties with several versions of constructivism, including epistemological and ontological asssumptions that are not articulated often or clearly. Personal construct theory (PCT), one version of constructivism, appears in its negative identity to reject the same positivist and representationist psychologies so strongly eschewed by SC. The positive programs of SC and PCT are in accord insofar as they attempt to establish notions of knowledge and categories of psychological life as inherently constructed. The two programs depart however on the crucial notion of the origins of such categories. Linguistic and social communities are essentially the repositories and generators of knowledge even as we are individual knowers. But the knowledge we as individual knowers construct makes sense only within the communal use of categories of knowing, feeling, and construing. On this account we are “persons in conversation” and our perceived unities emerge only as discursive practices conforming to local cultural norms.