Are Constructs Personal?
Mancuso (1996) accurately identifies some similarities between personal construct psychology and social constructionism. These two traditions agree that experience is mediated, and that humans have no access to the absolute truth about themselves or the world. Against Mancuso, however, I argue that the two traditions have different accounts of what is constructed and how it is constructed. Mancuso’s proposed synthesis stays too close to traditional cognitive psychology, by focusing on individuals’ cognitions and by ignoring the social and relational context in which meaning is constructed.
