It has become increasingly evident that traditional positivistic explanations are not adequate for the explanation of human behavior. Alternative explanations have arisen in recent years in response to dissatisfaction with traditional models. Social constructionism is one prominent alternative. The appropriateness of constructionism as a model for psychology has yet to be sufficiently evaluated. The objective of this paper is to propose one criterion by which explanation models in psychology might be meaningfully evaluated. This criterion is the pragmatic standard, by which a model is evaluated in terms of its potential to allow psychology to be useful to society at large. It is argued that one component of usefulness may be entailed in the model's capacity for generativity in psychology. The concept of generativity is explored and social constructionism is evaluated according to this criterion.
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