Abstract

While recognizing its positive contributions, the authors argue both that social constructionism is based on faulty assumptions and that it has far more kinship with objectivism than is generally acknowledged: it repudiates the possibility of universally valid knowledge while holding as universal truth that human nature is socially constructed; claims to have overcome a Western scientific view of the world while failing to recognize its own distinctly Western and parochial character; rejects an objective epistemology only to embrace its subjectivist mirror-opposite. Finally, it presents the "self" as a reflection of cultural frameworks, thus failing to attend to personal experience or to account for creativity, and overlooks humans' relationship to nature, thereby sustaining objectivism's dichotomy between the social and the natural world. 2012 APA, all rights reserved)