Constructivism

Constructivism is an interdisciplinary school of thought firmly rooted in science, especially biology, and of particular relevance to the understanding of mediagenerated realities. The champions of this school of thought emphatically reject representationist theories and realist conceptions of perception and share the conviction that objective knowledge is essentially unobtainable. They do not deny the existence of an external world; they negate, however, its unconditional cognitive accessibility and, therefore, insist on a critical examination of how concepts of reality are manufactured. All the varieties of constructivist theorizing, whether centered in neurobiology, psychology, the sociology of knowledge, or communication science, additionally share the fundamental conviction that knowledge does not consist of a direct correspondence with an external reality (correspondence theory of truth) but exclusively and inevitably in ...