Showing papers on "Social constructivism published in 1986"

Motivation in Social Constructivist Theory

Abstract: Current trends in research on motivation in the classroom are based on theories that focus on the individual's intrapsychological traits or his or her cognitive and/or affective functioning. In contrast to this individualistic perspective, social constructivist theory provides a framework for conceptualizing motivation as socially negotiated by the participants in the classroom. In such a conceptualization, motivation is inseparable from the instructional process and the classroom environment. The culturally determined joint activity between student and social context results in an internal state of interest and cognitive and affective engagement, and motivated behaviors, both of which can be considered cultural norms. Implications of this perspective for understanding motivation, classroom instruction, and research are discussed.

The Social Construction of Artefacts: a Response to Pinch and Bijker

Abstract: In their paper on 'The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts', Pinch and Bijker advocate an integrated social constructivist approach to explaining scientific knowledge and technological artefacts, suggesting how each separate sociological field might benefit the other. In particular, they compare the Empirical Programme of Relativism (EPOR) for science and the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) programme. They suggest that since their explanatory goals are similar, a relativist approach, and concepts such as 'interpretative flexibility' and 'closure', may be useful in both. I am concerned here with technology rather than science, except insofar as EPOR may have influenced SCOT or come to do so as the relationship is furthered.1 I fully support the objective of developing an explanation of the content of technology as a social product, and so I welcome Pinch and Bijker's discussion. I agree with their criticisms of economists' 'black box' treatments, linear models of innovation, and descriptive historiography. I want, however, to identify a number of weaknesses in the SCOT approach as described in the paper in particular, its espousal of relativism and of an evolutionary model of technological change; its treatment of 'social groups'; and its explanation of their means of influence on development. I shall argue that to transfer the concepts of a sociology of science to technology is to ignore basic differences between the two, as activities and as products. We should do better to try to situate the social processes producing technologies in an established framework that

The Social Construction of Mind

Abstract: Publisher Summary Various works have contributed refinements and clarifications to the thesis that the mentality of individuals is a product of their circumambient social orders. The chapter examines how these various insights are brought together into a systematic account of mind sufficiently clear and simple to serve as the basis of research programs in psychology, attractive enough to displace the current confusions. The chapter presents how, by bringing out the distinctive metaphysics implicit in the social construction point of view, and by setting out a clear alternative system of conceptual controls to the Cartesianism that animates most of recent psychology, the main projects of such a program can be delineated. To help define the projects of a social constructivist psychology the chapter presents a two-dimensional “space.” The chapter illustrates some of the many ways in which properties of mind taken individualistically in the Cartesian framework must be seen socially constructively once that framework is abandoned.

Two ultracentrifuges: a comparative study of the social construction of artefacts

Abstract: The social constructivist approach to the development of technology is adopted to study the development of two ultracentrifuges which have emerged somewhat independently of each other. In a comparative analysis of these two cases, the socially constructed character of the artefacts is demonstrated: it is shown that the different designs of the two ultracentrifuges reflect the different meanings attributed to them by the researchers involved. Finally, two important aspects are identified which should play a role in theoretical explanations of the developmental process of technological artefacts.

Changing Concepts and Stable Order

Abstract: These two quotations might be set in an examination paper as pithy statements respectively of the realist and the social constructivist views of science, to be followed by the instruction: 'Discuss'. They are both asserted with apparent conviction by Harry Collins in his stimulating new book Changing Order, and within twenty pages of each other. Although the book is overtly an argument for constructivism or conventionalism, the 'realist' quotation is not an isolated instance, for there are other places at which it is presupposed that scientists do 'know about the natural world' (167). What, one asks oneself, is going on? Collins begins by telling us that his book requires 'an initial derailment of the mind from the tracks of common sense' (1). So, mindful of this, perhaps we should look again at the 'realist' quotations to see whether they are intended at other than their face value. And indeed, once we have got our minds on to the conventionalist rather than the 'commonsense' tracks, it is possible to read them in a different way. Paraphrasing the first quotation above in the

For the Social History of Medicine: A Reply to David Armstrong

Abstract: David Armstrong's argument (‘The Problem of the Whole Person in Holistic Medicine’, Holistic Medicine, vol. 1, pp 000-000) is often persuasive, but it rests on a model of history which goes unnoticed as it informs the whole of his case. Although he seems to discover the roots and direction of holistic medicine, he actually imputes to it a strategy of constructing the whole person both as its object and as a new territory won for an expanding medical hegemony. Armstrong adapts two historiographical frameworks which tend to see historical processes as an encompassing relationship of subject over object: social constructivism and the archaeological approach of Michel Foucault. As an unexamined framework of interpretation, his model finds examples of itself everywhere, including holistic medicine. I propose a social history of medicine which emphasises the contribution of both subject and object to each others emergence, one which needs a vocabulary of inter-subjectivity, rather than of production. Holistic m...