Realism and constructivism in social perception

Reconciling Social Constructivism and Realism in GIS

An epistemological and discursive divide separates critics of GIS and its researchers. An assumption exists among many users and developers of GIS that the technology models reality and can thus be used to predict and explain spatial processes. This realist position is not sanctioned by social science critics of GIS who have focused efforts on illustrating the social effects of technology as we...

How Essentialism Properly Understood Might Reconcile Realism and Social Constructivism

social entities like roles and institutions. What they might have been in illiterate foreign cultures is almost impossible to find out, and even with literate societies it is often difficult, since their signs and languages are social entities themselves and hard to access. Let it suffice with these remarks on social ontology. They are neither systematic nor particularly revealing. Their only p...

Vampires: Social Constructivism, Realism, and Other Philosophical Undead

Reality Construction as Problem Oriented Decomposition : between (social) Constructivism and Realism

By constructing realities, we try to make the stream of our experiences manageable. Reality construction thus takes place in a context of continuous problem orientation. What basically drives reality construction is not some all-compassing plan, but an unremitting flow of problem orientation. The results are not neatly ordered patterns of separable elements, but large nets of constructs, with c...

Realism and Explanation in Perception

Suppose that we identify physical objects, in the first instance, by extension, as things like stones, tables, trees, people and other animals: the persisting macroscopic constituents of the world in which we live. Of course, there is a substantive question of what it is to be like such things in the way relevant to categorization as a physical object. So this can hardly be the final word on th...