Bill B

I recently co-authored a book about the crises of expertise and belief. I go back in this book to an important distinction to be drawn between a view of the world from an objectivist point of view and one from a so-called constructivist point of view. An objectivist point of view would be one in which we believe that there are facts, there is reality out in the world that can be determined. This objectivist perspective comes out of the logical positivist movement of the Vienna Circle during the early part of the 20th century. The positivist’s assumption is that if you have certain principles of verification, you can determine what is real and what is unreal. The problem with that is that the rules of verification are themselves arbitrary. And so, beginning back in the 1950s and early 1960s, there were two prominent sociologists who talked about the social construction of reality, and that in fact, reality is a construction, and there are alternative constructions.

And related to that is some of the work that comes out of postmodernism, which says that most of us were believing in an objectivist point of view because there was one point of view called the grand narrative, which was prominent in Western societies. The colonialism of Europe and America was showing up. People all around the world were told: here’s what’s true about the world, here are the good guys, here are the bad guys, here’s how you determine what’s real, here’s what you determine is not real. And so, a constructivist viewpoint, essentially, is one in which we say: we need to look at the agenda, we need to look at the assumptions and agendas underlying a particular mode of verification. Part of what Bill G is doing here is offering an extremely important constructivist point of view: most of us in medicine and psychology have lived with an objectivist perspective. This is particularly the case in psychology. I can point to behaviorism, and the behavioristic assumption is that there is a correct way, and there are outcomes that are measurable. And these measurements determine whether something works or doesn’t work. Behaviorism is very objectivist. And even at the other extreme, Sigmund Freud thought that there was an objective reality. And Freudians have gone further and have said there really is an ego, and there actually is a superego, etc., rather than thinking of those as interesting metaphors.