On constructivism, individual differences and universal laws

Three claims are presented and argued for: (1) that universal laws are impossible within constructivistic (humanistic) approaches since the very nature of humanistic explanations (intentional, teleological) precludes possibilities of objective comparisons between investigated targets, (2) that it is unproductive to look for universal attributes of study objects (e.g., attributes common to all people and cultures) since differences seem to be the rule rather than exception in the social sciences, (3) that it is possible to speak of universal mechanisms if one assumes that the formulated laws have an interactive nature and that one of the factors (the independent variable) is a theoretically meaningful dimension that differentiates the compared people or cultures. peerReviewed publishedVersion