Constructive realism

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Constructive realism is a philosophy of science that says we can understand the world by building models of it, while still recognizing that these models are not the world itself. It started with Jane Loevinger in the 1950s and was later developed in Vienna by Friedrich Wallner. In Wallner’s view, many traditional ideas about science—universal claims, necessity, and eternal truth—are challenged by relativism. But we can keep the helpful aims of science by changing how we think: shift from simply describing things to constructing workable understandings, and adopt methods that uncover the assumptions behind theories. A key idea is “strangification,” which means taking a scientific claim out of its usual context and applying it in a new one to reveal what it really depends on. This helps scientists see hidden assumptions and improve their understanding, with important consequences for how science is done.

In the philosophy of measurement, Loevinger described the link between constructs (the models scientists create) and traits (the real features in people). A construct is an intellectual synthesis; a trait is a real attribute that a test aims to measure. We never observe traits directly; we infer them through constructs. The construct is our current best understanding, while the trait is the reality we’re trying to grasp. The distinction is similar to parameter and statistic: the trait is what we want to know, and the construct is our best current representation of it.