ABSTRACT
GERGEN (1995) opens his essay on the “mechanical self” with the observation that “One can scarcely overestimate the power of the concept of objectivity in contemporary affairs” (p. 265). The allure of objectivity is all the more impressive when one considers that even the constructivist account, an account that we may expect to be especially careful in this regard, appears as easily seduced by idea of the real world’s objectivity as the information-processing account it has sought to supplant in the field of psychology and the transmission model it rejects in education. Constructivists’ failure, revealed in preauthenticatory practices, lies in our often unreflective attempts at squeezing an unsettling theory of knowledge into a comfortable, elite-idealist framework. Such a misappropriation of constructivist theory, I argued, allows the real world to remain compliantly stable, for only alternative pathways, not alternative real worlds, are conceded.
