11 - The social construction of psychological knowledge

Summary

The preceding analysis of the historical development of investigative practices in psychology is obviously based on a certain model of the investigative process. Although various aspects of this model have emerged in previous chapters, some of the basic features of the model still need to be made explicit. The first part of this chapter is devoted to this task. In the remainder of the chapter I briefly address some general questions pertaining to the status of psychological knowledge that arise out of the kind of analysis presented here. These questions all revolve around the issue of how the social construction of psychological knowledge affects the reach of the knowledge product. Although knowledge claims are generated in specific sociohistorical situations, it does not follow that they have no significance or validity beyond those situations. There are two possibilities here. First, psychological knowledge may be generalizable to situations other than those in which it was generated. This is the question of applicability. More fundamentally, however, there is the possibility that psychological knowledge claims may be able to tap a level of “psychological reality” that is independent of the special conditions under which it is investigated. The second and third sections of this chapter discuss these possibilities.

The political economy of knowledge production

Investigative practices are part of a productive work process. Their employment results in the generation of valued products, though of course these are not primarily material but symbolic products – namely, scientific knowledge claims. This same employment necessarily involves people who put these practices to work and also some kind of raw material that is productively transformed into the valued knowledge product.