Constructivist epistemology
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Constructivism is a recent development in philosophy which criticizes essentialism, whether it is in the form of medieval realism, classical rationalism, or empiricism. It originated in sociology under the term social constructionism and has been given the name constructivism when referring to philosophical epistemology, though constructionism and constructivism are often used interchangeably.
Constructivism views all of our knowledge as "constructed". It does not reflect any external "transcendent" realities, but is contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience. It is believed by constructivists that representations of physical and biological reality, including race, sexuality, and gender are socially constructed (Hegel and Marx were among the first to suggest such an ambitious expansion of social determinism).
The common thread between all forms of constructivism is that they do not focus on an ontological reality, but instead on the constructed reality.
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Social constructivism
One account of Social constructivism is as follows: it is a form of constructivism based on the sociological and social psychological concept of social constructionism. Social constructivism contends that categories of knowledge and reality are actively created by social relationships and interactions. These interactions also alter the way in which scientific categories are created and scientific objects are perceived.
A second account differs somewhat. Social Constructivism is based on social construction, that is it is a knowledge product that emerges from social activity. Social activity presupposes human beings inhabiting shared forms of life, and in the case of social construction, utilizing semiotic resources (meaning making and meaning signifying) with reference to social structures/institutions. Several traditions utilize the term Social Constructivism: psychology (after Lev Vygotsky), sociology (after Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, themselves influenced by Alfred Schütz), sociology of knowledge (David Bloor), sociology of mathematics (Sal Restivo), philosophy of mathematics (Paul Ernest). Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy can be seen as a foundation for Social Constructivism, with its key theoretical concepts of language games embedded in forms of life.
Cultural constructivism
The view that knowledge and reality are constructed culturally. That is that two independent cultures will likely come up with different categorizations. For instance, whereas Western culture generally relies on objects for scientific descriptions, American Indian culture instead relies on events for descriptions. This case shows there are two completely different ways in which the world is broken down.
Radical constructivism
Ernst von Glasersfeld is a prominent proponent of radical constructivism, which claims that knowledge is the self-organized cognitive process of the human brain. That is, the process of constructing knowledge regulates itself, and since knowledge is a construct rather than a compilation of empirical data, it is not possible to know the degree to which knowledge reflects an ontological reality.
Critical constructivism
A series of articles published in 1991 in the journal "Critical Inquiry" served as a manifesto for the movement of critical constructivism in various disciplines including the 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, a “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 move beyond analytic procedures based on subtle tautologies. They thus remain in the critical paradigm and consider it to be a standard of scientific philosophy per se.
