A Defence of Constructionism: Philosophy as Conceptual Engineering

Abstract

The article offers a broad account and a defence of constructionism, both as a metaphilosophical approach and as a philosophical methodology, with some references to the philosophical tradition that has inspired it, the so-called “maker’s knowledge” tradition. The main thesis defended is that Plato’s “user’s knowledge tradition” should be complemented, if not replaced, by a constructionist approach to philosophical problems in general and to knowledge in particular. To put it simply, an epistemic agent knows something when that agent is able to build (reproduce, simulate, model, construct etc.) that something and plug the obtained information in the correct network of relations that account for it. Or in even more intuitive terms, an agent qualifies as an epistemic agent not when she is a passive user of some information, but when she is a critical producer of it. Her epistemic expertise increases in relation to the scope and depth of the questions that is able to ask and answer on a particular topic. The maker’s knowledge is knowledge of the ontology of the semantic artefact and this is a fundamental epistemological lesson we can learn from poietic disciplines such as computer science and economics. So constructionism shifts the focus away from the mimetic,, passive and, declarative, knowledge, that something is the case, in order to concentrate more on the poietic, interactive and, practical knowledge, of something being the case, that is, of semantic artefacts. Once applied to the interpretation of philosophy itself, constructionism suggests adding conceptual engineering to conceptual analysis as a fundamental method.

Keywords: Constructionism, Constructivism, Epistemology, Levels of abstraction, Minimalism, Philosophy of information.