The position that scientific facts are not simply discovered waiting in nature, but are actively constructed by scientific communities through their practices, instruments, theories, and social negotiations. This doesn't mean facts are arbitrary or "made up"—it means that nature doesn't come pre-packaged into facts; we have to build the packages. A quark is real, but "quark" as a category required accelerators, detectors, mathematics, and conferences to agree on what was seen. Constructivism studies how these packages get built, whose labor builds them, and what gets left out of the final product.
"Before the microscope, 'cells' didn't exist as facts—they were constructed when lens-grinders, biologists, and specimen-stainers created the conditions to see them. Scientific Constructivism just asks us to remember that facts have factories, and the factories matter."
by Abzugal February 23, 2026
Get the Scientific Constructivism mug.