Gergen's Social Constructionism, Logical Positivism and the Continuity of Error

Abstract

It is the received wisdom that K.J. Gergen's postmodernist metatheory of psychological science—social constructionism-is the anti-thesis of positivist philosophy of science. If by `antithetical' it is meant that the two share nothing that is central to each, this view is mistaken. One of the links between social constructionism and logical positivism is that both embody conventionalism. This is not a minor similarity between two otherwise different theories. Conventionalism involves the claim that theories (or certain parts of theories) are non-empirical because they are not forced on us by nature but adopted for non-epistemic reasons. Despite differences in the way social constructionism and logical positivism conceptualize conventionalism, certain features of Gergen's theory are clearly evident in the theories of Schlick, Reichenbach and Carnap. The logical positivists' difficulty in consistently maintaining a conventionalist account of scientific theory is repeated by Gergen, though camouflaged by the Modern-day flavour of his metatheory.