Author J.-C. Le Coze

This exploratory paper questions whether resilience engineering is a realist or constructivist approach of safety. After a presentation of two positions: critical realism and radical constructivism, the authors explain how the frameworks provided by thèse two positions were used in différent researches, answering différent questions that arose during the work. For one, critical realism offered an answer to the problem of the relationship between agency and structure. For the other, radical constructivism afforded a good définition of what models can be thought as. Both developments show the relevance of taking into account of philosophical antécédents for applied research and how this is valuable for resilience engineering and the directions that could be pursued for future development.