Para una psicología social crítica no construccionista: Reflexiones a partir del realismo crítico de Ignacio Martín-Baró

Abstract

The sociohistorically built and created nature of knowledge and subjectivity that social constructionism seems to have arrogated is part of the history of social science. Moreover, criticism to the casual mechanistic model as the only source of knowledge -that the constructionist movement considers as one of its main epistemological contributions- goes back to none other than Kant. The real contribution of social constructionism has consisted in deleting experience as a resource for knowledge and subjectivity, denying the existence of an external reality to the subject, keeping ontologically quiet towards it, and distrusting the possibility of changing it. It seems evident that building a critical social psychology upon these foundations is not possible. Opposing this, Martin- Baró's critical realism is based on the existence of an objective reality of which injustices and wretchedness he insistently denounced. This critical realism makes use of quantitative methods to analyze this objective reality, it holds social structure as its preferred framework when studying the different modalities and manifestations of human behavior, it does not deny the existent of partial and sociohistorically situated truths, and it identifies social change as the objective of its theoretical work.