Social Constructionism and its Influence on the Practice of Psychology Patricia Houghton University of the Sunshine Coast Abstract Social constructionism functions as a meta-theory of knowledge that crosses many disciplinary boundaries. It focuses on human meaning making as the primary focus of psychological enquiry. Furthermore‚ social constructionism rejects essentialism and demonstrates that objective knowledge is historically and culturally contingent‚ thus allowing an understanding of
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A personal take on the debate between rationalism and empiricism. The study of knowledge‚ or epistemology‚ contains theoretical methods by which information is learned. Of these methods‚ two are most widely accepted. These two methods‚ rationalism and empiricism‚ are also the most widely debated methods of knowledge acquisition. Rationalism claims that knowledge is gained by a priori processes and intuition. Rationalism claims that knowledge is innate; however the level of innate knowledge contained
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philosophy as we know it. The writings of Plato and Aristotle form the core of Ancient philosophy. Aristotle placed much more value on knowledge gained from the senses and would correspondingly be better classed among modern empiricists (see materialism and empiricism). He also achieved a "grounding" of dialectic in the Topics by allowing interlocutors to begin from commonly held beliefs (Endoxa); his goal being non-contradiction rather than
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this essay the concepts of empiricism and empirical methods and their use in geography will be critically discussed. The main points that will be discussed include the origins of empiricism‚ what empiricism means‚ why empiricism might be useful‚ what empirical methods are‚ the advantages and disadvantages of empirical methods‚ how they are applied in geography including examples and the benefits of applying these in geography. Starting with the origins of empiricism‚ Aristotle was the first person
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exist? Why do we exist? Does it even matter? These are questions I will attempt to address thoroughly. Answers may not be comfortable or satisfactory‚ but it’s better to rip that band-aid off now than continue blindly in the dark. Rationalism and Empiricism have both attempted to prove existence‚ but at their most extremes they fall apart. Using these two opposite systems of investigation‚ existence cannot truly be known without a shadow of a doubt. Does it matter? Existentialist philosophers say
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determined by the coincidence of birth‚ which Marx coined the bourgeois‚ the owners of the means of production‚ and the proletariat‚ the wage earning laborers who become alienated from their work due to social constraints. Marx believed in historical materialism and class struggle‚ demonstrating that the private ownership of the means of production enabled the bourgeois to maintain power over the larger‚ powerless proletariats who provided the labor for the means of production. As a repercussion of this
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Chapter 28 – The Age of Anxiety 1) Uncertainty in modern thought a) The effects of World War I on modern thought i) Western society began to question values and beliefs that had guided it since the Enlightenment. ii) Many people rejected the longaccepted beliefs in progress and the power of the rational mind to understand a logical universe and an orderly society. (1) Valéry wrote about the crisis of the cruelly injured mind; to him the war ("storm")
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practical and administrative manifestations‚ to cut itself off from grand theory. Such a situation was paramount in Britain in the post-war period and the turn‚ or should we say reconnection of criminology to sociology was a major first step out of empiricism. The second phase which Downes traces was the foundation of the NDC in 1968 and the ten years that followed it‚ this took on the new American sociology of deviance and considerably radicalised it. It is this phase which gave rise to the ’new’ or
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the opposing beliefs surrounding the theories of empiricism and rationalism. As Benjamin Murphy (2010) notes‚ “the original debate between rationalists and empiricists took place at the dawn of modern science‚ and all the philosophers involved were trying to understand the principles of modern scientific discovery.” 35 Some philosophers defended rationalism‚ while others stayed committed to the ideas surrounding empiricism. The debate between empiricism and rationalism has been on going for nearly four
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idealism to a greater extent on phenomenological analyses of personal experience. This turn toward the subjective anticipated empiricists such as George Berkeley‚ who revived idealism in 18th-century Europe by employing skeptical arguments against materialism. Beginning with Immanuel Kant‚ German idealists such as G. W. F. Hegel‚ Johann Gottlieb Fichte‚ Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling‚ and Arthur Schopenhauer dominated 19th-century philosophy. This tradition‚ which emphasized the mental or "ideal"
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