Bas van Fraassen’s Constructive Empiricism and Bruno Latour’s Constructivism

Abstract

André Kukla has argued that both Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism and Bruno Latour’s constructivism should be regarded as anti-realist approaches. In order to support his own claim, Kukla brought forward three parallels between them, namely: i) the observable/unobservable distinction in Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism may be found in Bruno Latour’s constructivism, too; ii) the constructivist’s emphasis over the social construction of facts could be (although it was not) acknowledged by van Fraassen; iii) both constructive empiricism and constructivism are approaches about scientific practice. The aims of this paper are, firstly, to introduce and criticize the support gave by Kukla regarding his own conception and, secondly, to argue for that there is, instead, a stronger relationship between constructivism and realism than constructive empiricism and constructivism.