Relation to truth· Truth, language and science
Constructivism
Axis: Status of knowledge — Does science describe the world as it is, or does it construct its own objects?
Knowledge is a historical and social construction: paradigms, institutions, and power relations shape what counts as true in a given era. Science does not mirror the world; it organizes it through its own frameworks.
Movements 4
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Pragmatisminferable
Inquiry, for Dewey, does not passively mirror a pre-existing object: it transforms an indeterminate situation into a determinate one, and so shapes its own objects of knowledge. Knowing is an active, instrumental construction, embedded in a practice, rather than the tracing of an independent reality. The leaning is constructivist, without denying that reality offers resistance.
Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938) · Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929)
Skepticisminferable
The same thing appears differently according to the animal perceiving it, the sense organ, the subject's state, distance, mixture, or custom: this is the observation that Aenesidemus' ten tropes catalogue and order. Yet to adjudicate these irreconcilable appearances and say which one delivers the real thing, one would need an absolute standpoint, outside every condition of appearance, which no one has. The trope therefore bites exactly where the claims to describe natures in themselves: we never grasp anything but the relative, which reduces every assertion about essence to .
Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, 36-163 · Diogenes Laertius, Lives, IX, 79-88
Marxisminferable
The theory of ideology holds that the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of its ruling class: consciousness is socially situated and tends to disguise the real relations. Knowledge is not a neutral contemplation but is shaped by class interests, which brings Marxism close to a social constructivism, without renouncing a truth unveiled by critique.
Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (1845-1846)
Phenomenologyinferable
The fulcrum is intentionality, taken over from : all consciousness is consciousness of something, never a content sealed upon itself. It follows that the object cannot be severed from the act that aims at it: meaning and objectivity are not brute facts deposited in nature but are constituted in that relation. The target is objectivist naturalism, which takes the world for an in-itself independent of all consciousness and forgets that it has itself posited it. Husserl thus shows that scientific idealities are rooted in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), forgotten as their ground; Merleau-Ponty recalls that science is a second-order expression of the perceived world. The stance leans toward constructivism, without sliding into relativism.
Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936) · Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), preface
Philosophers 3
Marxexplicit
The ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of the ruling class: legal, moral and religious thought is ideology, an inverted reflection of the relations of production that masks class interests under the guise of universal truths. Social knowledge is thus largely constructed by material positions, hence a marked leaning, even though Marx claims a scientific status for his own analysis.
The German Ideology, I (the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class) · Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (base and superstructure)
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Nāgārjunainferable
No description grasps a reality endowed with , since there is none: the categories and distinctions of knowledge belong to conventional truth, dependent and useful constructions, never the mirror of essences in themselves. Our statements order an world rather than reflecting independent structures: a pronounced epistemic constructivism, at the conventional level.
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way), XXIV, 8-10 (the two truths) · Vigrahavyāvartanī (The Dispeller of Disputes), on the means of knowledge (pramāṇa)
George Berkeleyinferable
In De Motu, Berkeley anticipates scientific : the force, attraction and absolute space of Newton's mechanics are not hidden realities that physics would uncover but convenient terms, calculational fictions that let us predict and order phenomena. The physicist does not unveil real causes; he establishes rules of use among signs. This distrust of science's claim to describe a mind-independent structure of the world removes him from scientific realism, without amounting to a social constructivism: it is idealism that gives it its colour.
De Motu (On Motion), §§1-6 and 35-42