ABSTRACT
Social constructionism and its sibling social constructivism are often used interchangeably, although they refer to different but greatly overlapping processes. Constructivism is usually taken to be the process by which individuals generate subjective meaning from the knowledge they receive, and it is a concept associated primarily with Piagetian ideas about the psychology of developmental learning. Fact constructionism is an excellent example of what Bruce Charlton rails against. There are a number of prominent social scientists who have been dragged by the data to positions they formerly found ideologically distasteful, but this chapter ignores that point and examines Ian Hacking's sticking points. The first sticking point is contingency, which is the denial of inevitability, or the notion that nothing in science is predetermined and that it could have developed in many different ways. The second sticking point is nominalism, which is the denial of abstractions and universal realities. The third sticking point is the explanation of the stability of scientific theories.
