Policy, Constructivist Models

Kinds of Social Constructivism

Social constructivist thinking started from the sociology of knowledge and has spread through the social sciences. Since the 1960s, it has flourished and has been further elaborated on with the help of a wide variety of (sometimes conflicting) insights from—among others—Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistics, the phenomenology and hermeneutics of Edmund Husserl and Hans-Georg Gadamer, the poststructuralist thinking of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and the pragmatism of Richard Rorty. There are “stronger” and “weaker” forms of constructivism, differing in their theories on realities beyond the social. Strong constructivism claims that a reality beyond the socially constructed ones might exist but that it is not relevant to talk about it in terms of an objective reality because we cannot have direct, unmediated access to it; it believes in “multiple truths.” A weaker form of constructivism holds on to the idea of an objective reality (of brute facts and/or of “one truth”) that is within reach of human knowing. It is important to keep in mind that it is not the (material) world, as such, that is referred to when we talk about social constructions but the perceptions of this (material) world. Material objects, including all of nature and human artifacts, are assigned a certain place in the social process of the construction of meaning.

Social constructivism can also be situated in terms of the position of the subject who knows and the object that can be known. If one claims that the knower and knowledge are somehow separable, one takes a dualist position. Social constructivists often take a monistic position. That is, they argue that the knower and the world that the knower tries to understand are part of the same. Put differently, the findings are the result of an interaction between the knower and what there is to be known. Crucial in this interaction is the process through which the knower crafts observations into meaningful fact with the help of a theoretical framework. This leads social constructivists to suggest that there is no Archimedean point, “no view from nowhere,” from which we could see the essence of the things that make up our social realities. We can only see reality from a cultural, social, political, historical, or other perspective. This is why we encounter multiple social realities, each of which is created and sustained with the help of a particular set of values and shared only by the members of a certain interpretive community.

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