Constructivist epistemology

The term “constructionism” is used in American philosophy mostly as a name for a new criticism directed against medieval realism and classical rationalism. Critical constructionism recognizes that all our knowledge is “constructed,” it does not reflect any external “transcendent” realities, but is contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience. It is believed that even physical and biological reality, including race, nation, gender, are socially constructed (Orthodox Marxism obviously pales in the face of such a ambitious expansion of social determinism).

A series of articles published in 1991 in the journal "Critical Inquiry" served as a manifesto for this movement of critical constructionism in various disciplines including natural sciences. Not only truth and reality, but also “evidence,” “document,” “experience,” “fact,” “proof,” and other central categories of empirical research (in physics, biology, statistics, history, law, etc.) reveal their contingent character as a social and ideological construction. Thus the “realist” or “rationalist” interpretation is subjected to criticism.

While recognizing the constructedness of reality, many representatives of this critical paradigm deny to philosophy the task of the creative construction of reality. They eagerly criticize realistic judgments, but they do not dare to move beyond analytic procedures based on subtle tautologies. They wish to remain in the critical paradigm and consider it to be a standard of scientific philosophy per se. The problem of critical constructionism is that it is excessively critical and insufficiently constructive.