The author’s purpose in this article was to respond to two questions raised by Roth and Lawson in the September, 1993, issue of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching. Question 1: Would a radical constructivist step out of the path of an approaching vehicle? Question 2: In the conduct of inquiry, would a radical constructivist employ a controlled experiment, test a hypothesis, and quantitatively analyze the data? The author answers each question affirmatively, using selected work of Heinz von Foerster, Ernst von Glasersfeld, and others in developing the answers. Issues central to the development include the nature of truth and knowledge, the concept of fit versus match, and the notion that inquiry is driven by questions, with methods as subordinate to questions.

Critics praise applications of constructivism in science pedagogy, but they argue that constructivism is severely impaired and hopelessly flawed as a theory. Flawed theory should not be employed to explain innovative practice. My purposes are twofold. First and foremost, I present a case to support my own and others’ assertions that constructivism is a sound theory with which to explain the practice of science and science pedagogy. In accomplishing my primary purpose, I also fulfill my secondary purpose, to respond to constructivism’s critics. My argument is presented in three parts. In Part 1, I delineate the epistemological ground with a brief synopsis of the purpose, nature, and orientation of radical and social constructivism. I then offer a synthesis of their foundations. In Part 2, I offer a constructivist account of five long-standing epistemological issues, including truth, solipsism, experience, instrumentalism, and relativity. Truth is the center piece of the argument, and I show how constructivism avoids the root paradox by embracing truth as coherence. Next, constructivism is shown to be a rejection of solipsism. Then, an account of experience based in neurophysiological theory, emergent properties, and the brain as a parallel data-processing organ is provided to support constructivism’s inside-out view of experience, in which meaning making occurs within individual minds and in communities of individuals. In the final segment of Part 2, I present a constructivist account of relativity which focuses on physicists’ acceptance of relativity, its translation to constructivist epistemology, and constructivists’ request for silence regarding ontology. Response to critics’ objections are also presented at appropriate points throughout Part 2. In the third part, I present constructivism as an epistemological foundation for a cybernetic perspective of knowing. I then summarize the value of constructivism in explaining and interpreting the practice of science and science pedagogy.

Science and religion exhibit multiple relationships as ways of knowing. Truth, knowledge, and their relation are central to both. Discord can be viewed as a competition for social legitimization between two social institutions whose goals are to explain the world and how it works. Under this view, the root of the discord is truth as the correspondence of knowledge to the facts of reality. But, the root paradox suggests that seeking to know nature as it is represents a fruitless endeavor. The discord can be set on new ground and resolved by taking a moderately skeptical line of thought, one which employs truth as coherence and a moderate form of constructivist epistemology. Quantum mechanics and evolution as scientific theories and scientific research on human consciousness and vision provide support for this line of argument. Within a constructivist perspective, scientists would relinquish only the pursuit of knowing reality as it is. Scientists would retain everything else. Believers who hold that religion explains reality would come to understand that God never revealed His truth of nature; rather, He revealed His truth in how we are to conduct our lives.

Excerpt: To be vibrant is to be “pulsating with life, vigor, or activity” (Mish 2003). Science education, like science, is a vibrant discipline. It pulsates due to competition among individuals and groups holding disparate views, as portrayed above (Hull 1988). One source of pulsation is the question: Can we justify that anything we know represents some aspect of reality? My purpose herein is to review an on-going dialectical discussion between communities of scholars that hold different views about whether or not knowledge represents reality, the nature of knowledge, and the process of coming to know. The adversaries, realism and constructivism, constitute different paradigms (Kuhn 1970) or models for characterizing knowledge and the || process of coming to know, for conducting research, and for recommending best practices in teaching and learning science. To achieve my purpose, I will take five steps: (1) define and describe knowledge; (2) describe realism, constructivism, and truth; (3) cite points of divergence, convergence, and peaceful coexistence; (4) review the key issue over which realism and constructivism collide from a constructivist perspective; and (5) offer a closing thought.