The discipline of psychology is primarily concerned with understanding human action and experience for the purpose of bettering the lives of persons both individually and collectively. However, for the most part, psychologists have given little attention to the question of what a person is. Rather, in the attempt to achieve the precision and control of the natural sciences, much mainstream psychology, perhaps somewhat unreflectively, has adopted a materialist perspective that considers all psychological phenomena to be reducible to underlying biological and neurophysical substrates and/or computational and psychometric models. The challenge to this view in recent years launched by social constructionist thinkers (e.g., Gergen, 1985; Shotter, 1993), who reject the notion of fixed, essential selves in favor of an interpretive self that derives meaning from the sociocultural and historical traditions and practices in which it is embedded, overcomes many of the difficulties associated with
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