ABSTRACT
The social constructivist investigation of science presumes "that scientific knowledge originates in the social world rather than the natural world". The social-construction-of-reality premise is the myth that fosters and sustains the ideal and material interests of constructivist sociologists. It is the basis upon which constructivist sociologists of science have fabricated a science without nature, which is part of the broader phenomenon of the construction of sociology as if nature did not matter. Social constructivism "brings the self-inflicted wounds of relativism, when the sociologist's own knowledge can be of no more relevance than that of anyone else". Discrepancies are constructed by constructivist sociologists as rhetorical devices to aid them in negotiating their sense of reality. A peculiarity of constructivist sociology is its focus on the determination of meanings by local contingencies and local interaction. Social constructivism seeks to 'suspend' accepted meanings in order to arrive at an uncommon understanding of how science is socially constructed.
