Dickins, T. E. (2004). Social constructionism as cognitive science. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 34(4), 333-352. doi:10.1111/j.1468-5914.2004.00253.x eprints.mdx.ac.uk/9462/
[Abstract]Social constructionism is a broad position that emphasizes the importance of human social processes in psychology. These processes are generally associated with language and the ability to construct stories that conform to the emergent rules of 'language games'. This view allows one to espouse a variety of critical postures with regard to realist commitments within the social and behavioural sciences, ranging from outright relativism (language constructs all of our concepts) to a more moderate respect for the 'barrier' that linguistic descriptions can place between us and reality. This paper first outlines some possible social constructionist viewpoints and then goes on to show how each of them conforms to the basic principles of information theory. After establishing this relation the paper then argues that this leads to a deal of commonality between social constructionist positions and the baseline aims of cognitive science. Finally, the paper argues that if information theory is held in common this both suggests future research collaborations and helps to 'mop up' some of the arguments surrounding realist commitments.
[Citing Place (1956)]
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section A brief overview of cognitive science and its commitments
* Under standard physicalist assumptions we might assume that mental states are physically realized in the brain. Theorists have argued that mental states are type-identical with brain states (Place, 1956; Smart, 1959), or token-identical, or supervenient upon brain state transitions (Kim, 1993). Identity theses arguably run foul of Leibniz's Law, which states that if two terms refer to the same entity then what can be said of one term can also be said of the other. Thus, if we claim that brain state X is identical to the mental state of wanting to be unfaithful we ought to be able to say both that wanting to be unfaithful and enduring brain state X are morally dubious, and for those statements to do the same work as one another. Intuitively it would seem that certain types of explanations involving mental states are qualitatively and informationally different from those involving brain states, such that asserting the moral status of a brain state appears meaningless. Supervenience theses leave us with the issue of where to locate causality [...].