Don't really know, Jim: I'm as surprised as you regarding that claim which
as you so eloquently point out, is erroneous.
It might have to do with what one might call "inverted reductionism".
By which I mean that the social constructivist position as outlined by
people like Berger and Luckman is as valid for its level of discourse as
the psychological constructivist position is for its own, and it is
reductionist to believe that the fact that society is composed of people
should imply that the social level of explanation will ultimately be
reducible to the individual. We all know that one: the argument which
defends the phenomena explained by individual psychology from being boiled
down ultimately to the interaction between charged particles that make up
brain biophysics, yes?
By analogy, "reversed reductionism" (no, "reification" is _not quite_ the
opposite of "reductionism"!) would argue that Kellian notions of sociality
are insufficient, or, more generally, that individually-based explanations
"lack" something because they don't operate at the social level as well as
social explanations operate at the social level: there is no sense in which
one needs social constructivism to "complete" individual constructvisms
like Kelly's.
By-the-by, that's probably why I'm very leery of people who feel that the
"new physics" (submolecular action-at-a-distance, simultaneity and so on)
can ever hope to explain the fascinating but strange phenomena of
parapsychology, as some recent writers have claimed. Each level of dicourse
to its own. But that's another story...
Kindest regards,
Devi Jankowicz
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%