Some social-historical issues underlying psychology's fragmentation

Based on a social-contextual analysis, I assess unification and pluralist impulses to resolve psychology's historical disunity. Unifiers and pluralists seem to privilege the context of justification by focusing on rational argument, whereas skeptics in the debate over unification concentrate on irrational dimensions that constitute the social-historical context for epistemic positions on pluralism and unification. Applying Kurt Danziger's (1997b) notion of the “context of construction” to psychological discourse, I discuss six contextual issues that impinge upon solutions to the unification-pluralist debate: historical precedents for disunity; marginalization of human-science psychology; the intersection of psychological knowledge with power; persistent social conflict within the discipline; implicit notions of social change for psychology; and tension between globalized US psychology and an emergent, genuinely international psychology. Adopting the context of construction to examine these contextual issues, pending systematic investigation, might facilitate reflection on the potential of pluralism to resolve the discipline's fragmented state.