SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM AND THE PRAGMATIC STANDARD

It has become increasingly evident that traditional positivistic expla nations are not adequate for the explanation of human behavior. Altern ative explanations have arisen in recent years in response to dissatis faction with traditional models. Social constructionism is one promine nt alternative. The appropriateness of constructionism as a model for psychology has yet to be sufficiently evaluated. The objective of this paper is to propose one criterion by which explanation models in psyc hology might be meaningfully evaluated. This criterion is the pragmati c standard, by which a model is evaluated in terms of its potential to allow psychology to be useful to society at large. It is argued that one component of usefulness may be entailed in the model's capacity fo r generativity in psychology. The concept of generativity is explored and social constructionism is evaluated according to this criterion.