Download or read book Psychology's Interpretive Turn written by Barbara S. Held and published by American Psychological Association (APA). This book was released on 2007 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two of the most fundamental and pervasive philosophical questions in psychology are: Is objective psychological truth possible, and how does that possibility pertain to human agency, or our capacity for self-determination? For over 25 years, postmodern theorists have maintained that an antiobjectivist or antirealist philosophy enhances human agency by making us free to be what we interpret ourselves to be. However, in the last decade, a new wave group of theorists with hermeneutic, pragmatic, and constructionist origins has put forth views that are replacing those of conventional postmodernists. Their dual mission is to defend the realism denied by postmodern antirealist psychologists while upholding the agency they believe to be denied by modern objectivist psychologists.