Social Constructionism - Criticisms

Criticisms

Social constructionism falls toward the nurture end of the spectrum of the larger nature vs. nurture debate. Consequently critics have argued that it generally ignores biological influences on behavior or culture, or suggests that they are unimportant to achieve an understanding of human behavior. In contrast, most psychologists and social scientists believe that behavior is a very complex interaction of both biological and cultural influences. Other disciplines, such as evolutionary psychology, behavior genetics, behavioral neuroscience, epigenetics, etc., take a nature-nurture interactionism approach to understand behavior or cultural phenomena.

To illustrate what he believed to be the intellectual weaknesses of social constructionism and postmodernism, in 1996, physics professor Alan Sokal submitted an article to the academic journal Social Text that was written purposely to be incomprehensible, but included phrases and jargon typical of articles published in the journal. The submission, which was published, was an experiment to see if the journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." The Postmodernism Generator is a computer program that is designed to produce similarly incomprehensible text. In 1999, Sokal, with coauthor Jean Bricmont published the book, Fashionable Nonsense, that criticized postmodernism and social constructionism.

Philosopher Paul Boghossian has also written against social constructionism. He follows Ian Hackings argument that many adapt social constructionism because of it's potentially liberating fact: if things are the way that they are only because of our social conventions, as opposed to being so naturally, then we can possible change manipulate them into being how we would rather have them be. He then states that social constructionists argue that we should refrain from making absolute judgements about what is true, and instead state that something is true in the light of theory x. Which he counters with this argument:

"But it is hard to see how we might coherently follow this advice. Given that the propositions which make up epistemic systems are just very general propositions about what absolutely justifies what, it makes no sense to insist that we abandon making absolute particular judgements about what justifies what while allowing us to accept absolute general judgements about what justifies what. But in effect this is what the epistemic relativist is recommending"

Later in the same work, Boghossian severely constrains the requirements relaticism. He states that instead of believing that any world view is just a true as any other (cultural relativism) we should believe that:

"If we were to encounter and actual, coherent, fundamental, genuine alternative to our epistemic system, C2, whose track record was impressive enough to make us doubt the correctness of our own system, C1, we would not be able to justify C1 over C2 even by our own lights.

Social constructionism is also one of the philosophical positions attacked by Santa Barbara school evolutionary psychologists John tooby and Leda Cosmides They use the term Standard social science model to refer to all social scientific philosophies that according to them fail to take into account native properties of mind sufficiently.