Social Constructionism: Critical Analysis from a Vygotskian Perspective

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.