social constructivism also called social constructionism, any of a variety of views which claim that knowledge in some area is the product of our social practices and institutions, or of the interactions and negotiations between relevant social groups. Mild versions hold that social factors shape interpretations of the world. Stronger versions maintain that the world, or some significant portion of it, is somehow constituted by theories, practices, and institutions. Defenders often move from mild to stronger versions by insisting that the world is accessible to us only through our interpretations, and that the idea of an independent reality is at best an irrelevant abstraction and at worst incoherent. (This philosophical position is distinct from, though distantly related to, a view of the same name in social and developmental psychology, associated with such figures as Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, which sees learning as a process in which subjects actively construct knowledge.)
Social constructivism has roots in Kant’s idealism, which claims that we cannot know things in themselves and that knowledge of the world is possible only by imposing pre-given categories of thought on otherwise inchoate experience. But where Kant believed that the categories with which we interpret and thus construct the world are given a priori, contemporary constructivists believe that the relevant concepts and associated practices vary from one group or historical period to another. Since there are no independent standards for evaluating conceptual schemes, social constructivism leads naturally to relativism.
These views are generally thought to be present in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that observation and methods in science are deeply theory-dependent and that scientists with fundamentally different assumptions (or paradigms) effectively live in different worlds. Kuhn thus offers a view of science in opposition to both scientific realism (which holds that theory-dependent methods can give us knowledge of a theory-independent world) and empiricism (which draws a sharp line between theory and observation). Kuhn was reluctant to accept the apparently radical consequences of his views, but his work has influenced recent social studies of science, whose proponents frequently embrace both relativism and strong constructivism. Another influence is the principle of symmetry advocated by David Bloor and Barry Barnes, which holds that sociologists should explain the acceptance of scientific views in the same way whether they believe those views to be true or to be false. This approach is elaborated in the work of Harry Collins, Steve Woolgar, and others. Constructivist themes are also prominent in the work of feminist critics of science such as Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway, and in the complex views of Bruno Latour. Critics, such as Richard Boyd and Philip Kitcher, while applauding the detailed case studies produced by constructivists, claim that the positive arguments for constructivism are fallacious, that it fails to account satisfactorily for actual scientific practice, and that like other versions of idealism and relativism it is only dubiously coherent. See also ANTI-REALISM , ETHICAL CON- STRUCTIVISM , FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGY, KANT, KUHN , MATHEMATICAL CONSTRUC — TIVISM , RELATIVIS. P.Gas.