ABSTRACT
The dictionary definition of ‘historicity’ is ‘historical quality or authenticity based on fact.’ Historicity is a quality of a discourse perhaps, or even of an opinion. The most general concept would something like this: the historicity of a claim about the past is its factual status. The multi-faceted discipline of psychology implicitly makes claims about the past (and the future) by its resolutely ahistorical stance. The results of contemporary studies are presented as, and probably believed by mainstream psychologists to be, universal, pan-temporal laws of human nature. ‘Mainstream,’ official psychology of human beings is atemporal, or to put this another way, it assumes that the organizing principles of human association have always been the same. This presupposition is surely contestable. We shall contest it by critically examining the practice of contemporary social psychology. To make the force of what we have to say clear, a preliminary sketch of social psychology is in order.
