314 Enabling Policies and Institutions for Sustainable Agricultural and Food Systems
by people. There are three main strands in constructionist thinking (Knorr-Cetina,
1995).
In the first place, reality is said to be socially constructed (Berger and Luck-
mann, 1967). It is created in the discourse of, and negotiations among, people as
social actors. Socially negotiated agreements become experienced as ‘objective’
truth. Berger and Luckmann concern themselves with the mechanisms by which
objective social order emerges from interaction.
Second, convincing empirical analysis of ‘fact production’ in natural science
laboratories by, e.g. Knorr-Cetina herself (1981); Collins (1985, 1992) and Latour
(1987) has focused attention on epistemic practices and human construction in
the very area we used to think of as given natural reality (Box 16.8).
Third, biological research into the ‘observing organism’ (Maturana and Varela,
1987) has demonstrated that the environment external to the observer, be it a frog
or a person, does not project itself objectively on to the nervous system. Perception
is accomplished by the brain, and the brain is an informationally closed system
that reconstructs an external environment only from environmental ‘triggers’,
memory and interaction with itself.
We explicitly reject such an interpretation of constructionism. There is an
environment. If an organism loses touch with it, or, as Maturana and Varela (1987)
put it, if the structural coupling between organism and environment is broken, the
organism cannot survive. But the ‘constructions’ appropriate for survival are not
fixed or self-evident, nor is their interpretation unambiguous. They have selec-
tively evolved, are culturally conditioned, continue to be actively created, or learned
experientially on the basis of trial and error, or vicariously on the basis of commu-
nication. In this scheme of things, science has a role to play. It is engaged in the
active construction of reality. But its impact is not based on the predictive power
of its generalizations, however, but on the extent to which it affects other people’s
reality construction.
Social actor network theory (Latour, 1987; Callon and Law, 1989) takes this a
bit further. It claims that the impact of scientific results is based on the extent to
which the laboratory conditions, which gave rise to the results, are replicated in
Box 16.8 Constructionism and quantum physics
Niels Bohr did not believe in the Newtonian clockwork universe (which was the con-
ventional perspective early this century). ‘There is no quantum world. What exists is
a quantum physical description. It would be mistaken, therefore, to believe that it is
the task of physics to find out what nature is. Physics occupies itself with what we
can say about nature’ (quoted in NRC/Handelsblad, 18 May 1995). Another quan-
tum physicist, David Bohm, said: ‘It is not the task of science to increase the store of
knowledge, but to formulate fresh perspectives’ (1993). Some researchers and ana-
lysts reject constructionism because of its apparent relativism (Röling, 1995). If it is
people who construct reality, there must be multiple realities. What the one has con-
structed can be deconstructed by someone else. Everything can be true.