ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENTS OF

CONSTRUCTIVISM IN SCIENCE EDUCATION

Pedro J. Sánchez Gómez
Departamento de Didáctica de las Ciencias Experimentales,
Facultad de Educación, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

In this paper, I present an analysis of the ontology of educational constructivism in

science education based on the externalist ideas introduced by Hilary Putnam in his
epoch-making paper The Meaning of ‘Meaning’. I propose a mental experiment, adapted
from Putnam’s famous Twin-Earth examples, to show that learning about natural kinds
cannot be deemed to be the result of a process of subjective construction. Since natural
kinds are a central part of the experimental sciences, I conclude that constructivism, in
its usual presentations, is not a valid model for the teaching/learning of these disciplines.
The obvious way to dodge this conclusion implies challenging the presuppositions of
Putnam's analysis, and in particular to abandon the idea that there exist natural kinds.
Thus, educational constructivism entails a conventionalism about natural kinds. Finally,
I show that the converse is also true in this case: assenting to the existence of natural
kinds involves a rejection to any form of educational constructivism.
Keywords: Hilary Putnam, Semantic externalism, Educational constructivism, Science
Education.
INTRODUCTION
Although under the heading ‘constructivism’ there is not a unique theoretical approach
(Matthews 2000a, b; Rowlands & Carson, 2001), all the constructivist educational
proposals share a family resemblance, namely the “view of human knowledge as a
process of personal cognitive construction, or invention, undertaken by the individual
who is trying, for whatever purpose, to make sense of her social or natural environment”
(Taylor 1993, p. 268). It is thus possible to use the term constructivism, in singular, to
allude to a family of educational proposals based on the vision of learning as an active
process where the previous cognitive contents of the learner play a crucial role (Bodner
1986; Bodner, Klobuchar & Geelan 2001; Taylor 1993; Taber 2006, 2009).
At the core of the different educational constructivisms there is thus a theory of
knowledge acquisition. Learning, from a constructivist point of view, is not an
apprehension of some ready-made pieces of knowledge, but an individual process of
elaboration of information. I do not think that much argument is required to show that the
consequences of this seemingly sensible stance are far reaching. Besides its obvious, if
often overlooked, ethical and political implications, constructivism cannot be separated
from some crucial epistemological and ontological questions (Matthews 1993, 2002).
In a series of previous papers I have focused on some philosophical issues that stem from
the application of constructivism in several specific educational areas. On the one hand, I
have shown that didactic constructivism is at odds with some basic assumptions in
chemistry (Sánchez Gómez 2013, 2016; Sánchez Gómez and Morcillo 2014). In
particular, I have argued that constructivism implies a semantic internalism for the
chemical names, such as ‘water’ or ‘CH3CH2OH’. Semantic internalism is the thesis that
the meaning of a word is determined by the psychological state of the person who utters
it. From an internalist point of view, the meaning of a chemical formula is what the
individual who writes it wants to express by using it. Thus, in this internalist perspective,
the meaning of, for example, 'water', can be established by asking the person who utters
this word to describe what water is for her or him. Thus, educational constructivisms
seems to be incompatible with the much cherished chemical tenet that the idea that the
meaning of a chemical formula is fixed externaly to the individual who uses it. This
externalist position rests on the assumption that it is the microstructure of the substance it
refers to what determines the meaning of a chemical name. In other articles I have
analyzed the methodological commitments that constructivism poses to educational
research (Sánchez Gómez 2014, 2016; Sánchez Gómez and Morcillo 2014). My
conclusion is that only qualitative methodologies comply with the stringent
epistemological constrictions of constructivism.
In all these papers I have explicitly drawn on the analysis of Hilary Putnam of the
problem of the reference of natural kind terms, as presented in his epoch-making paper
The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ (Putnam 1975)1. In that work, Putnam took an explicit
externalist stance that is well enciphered in his famous statement “Meaning just ain't in
the head” (Putnam, 1975, p. 227). In this article I extend my previous ideas to any
educational exchange in science education. I will delve into the ontological implications
of educational constructivism, and in particular I will focus on the notion of nature
implicit in this line of thought. In an appendix at the end of this article I have included a
brief review of the ideas developed in The Meaning of ‘Meaning’. Readers not acquainted
with the ideas of Hilary Putnam are kindly referred to this appendix.
In order to make my argument, in the next section I present an educational adaptation of
the famous Putnam’s Twin-Earth mental experiment. In the third section, I analyze this
experiment, to conclude that the usual versions of educational constructivism are not
compatible with a realist vision of natural kinds. I further argue that the only way of
sparing constructivism in science education implies accepting that natural kind terms do
not refer to an actual underlying structure of nature, but to a conventional classification
that responds only to the interests and abilities of the classifier. Finally, I present a
preliminary revision of the ethical consequences of taking this anti-realist stance in
science education.
METHOD
A mental experiment in science education
Let us imagine a possible world where there is a student, Pedro, who has the idea that the
gas that is emitted by a piece of iron when it is treated with an acid is helium. It happens
perhaps that when the reaction was explained in class Pedro only learnt that the element
that the gas is made of is the main component of the Sun, and he already knew that

1 The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ was first published in 1975 at Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science
and later the same year in a collection of papers of Hilary Putnam entitled Mind, Language and Reality.
Both texts are identical, but the edition of the latter one is much more reader friendly. In this work,
following a common usage, I will refer to the version included in Mind, Language and Reality.
Helios is the personification of our star in Greek mythology (Pedro, though not
particularly fond of chemistry, has a sound classical culture). Besides, it was said in class
that the gas can be employed to fill balloons, and he also knew from an alternative source
that helium is sometimes used for that purpose. Thus, when he sees the gas bubbles
generated in a test tube as a piece of iron is being treated with hydrochloric acid, he has
good reasons to believe that that gas is helium.
In the possible world where Pedro lives there is an exoplanet, Twin Earth, almost
identical to the Earth. In particular there lives a twin-student that is an exact duplicate of
Pedro, to the extent that Pedro’s and Twin-Pedro’s biographies are indistinguishable, so
are therefore their internal states at any time. The only difference between Earth and
Twin-Earth is that in the latter the gas that is emitted by any active metal when it is
treated with an acid is called helium.
And so then, the internal states of Pedro and Twin-Pedro as they think, or say, “Helium is
emitted when a piece of iron is treated with an acid” are identical but their beliefs are
different. When Pedro sincerely says “That gas is helium” he is in fact stating a false
belief. On the other hand, when Twin-Pedro utters the same sentence, he is in fact
expressing the true belief that in the Earthian dialect of English could be enciphered in
the proposition “This gas is hydrogen”2.
As I elaborate in the appendix at the end of this paper, from a Putnamian point of view,
one, and only one, of the following options must hold:
1) The internal states of Pedro and Twin-Pedro do not determine the meaning of
‘helium’, nor the mental content associated to this term.
2) The meaning of ‘helium’ -or, again, the mental contents of Pedro and Twin-Pedro
as they think “This is helium”- does not determine the extension of this kind term.
Since ‘helium’ is a natural kind term, there is a sound argument against 2 (see Appendix)
and therefore, from an externalist point view, 1 must be accepted.
In a synthetic way, a Putnamian interpretation of the experiment would be like follows.
Both Pedro and Twin-Pedro are internally the same, but they refer to different forms of
matter. It is the actual nature of helium, regardless of what Pedro of Twin-Pedro may be
thinking about it, what enters into the meaning of the term ‘helium’ in their respective
idiolects. But since this nature is not fully known to them, they should in the end rely on
experts to decide what exactly they are thinking about as they say ‘This is helium’. The
meaning of ‘helium’ for Pedro and Twin-Pedro depends on the extension of the word,
and this is fixed by some well-defined physical properties of the gases they refer to in
their respective linguistic environments. It is the community of chemists, and that of
twin-chemists, who are to establish what are the relevant properties to be taken into
2 According to the theory of rigid designation that I review in the Appendix, it would make no sense to say
that the name 'Helium' refers to different forms of matter if Earth and in Twin-Earth. Instead, it should be
argued that what we have here is a case of polysemy, that the utterance 'helium' has different meanings in
Earth and in Twin-Earth, as though in fact we had two different words. And since Pedro and Twin-Pedro
are, by construction, internally identical, the meaning of 'helium' for them cannot be determined by their
respective psychological states. If Pedro were transported to Twin-Earth, he would not be aware of being
using a different word from the one employed by Twin-Pedro.
account, and therefore, what helium actually is in Earth and in Twin-Earth. It is easy to
see that this argument is equally valid for the mental contents associated to a natural kind
term. And thus, the mental contents that Pedro and Twin-Pedro have about helium are
determined outside their respective corporal limits.
DISCUSSION
Let us take an educational look on our mental experiment. Since Pedro’s and Twin-
Pedro’s mental contents about helium are not determined in their respective inner
spheres, they cannot be an individual construction, in any reasonable sense of the word
‘construction’. In fact, not even a collective or social construction is acceptable, since it is
nature what in the end fixes the meaning of ‘helium’. Obviously, this conclusion can be
readily generalized: no idea about a natural kind can be regarded as a construction. But
natural kinds are at the core of the discourse of the experimental sciences, to the extent
that the usage of natural kind terms can be employed as a demarcation criterion for these
sciences (see, for a rather revealing example of this position, the introduction to the entry
‘Natural Kinds’ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -Bird and Tobin 2016-). In
conclusion, constructivism is not a valid theoretical approach to the teaching/learning of
the experimental sciences within the conditions implicit in our mental experi11ment.
Thus, in order to study the limits of educational constructivism, these conditions must be
analyzed.
It is very easy to see that there are three presuppositions implicit in Twin-Earth
experiments. The first one is the validity of the Twin-Earth hypothesis itself, that is, the
assumption that it is possible to have psychological duplicates in two alternative non-
identical worlds. The second is assuming that psychological states are narrow. And
finally, a realist vision of natural kinds. In this paper, in order to delve into the
ontological implications of constructivism, I will focus on the third one.
Putnam’s analysis is crucially based on the idea that natural kind terms are rigid
designators (see Appendix). A rigid designator is a word that has the same reference in
any possible world. Therefore, to refute Putnam's argument one should either reject that
kind terms are rigid or, of course, deny the existence of natural kinds. Regarding the
former, some objections against the rigidity of kind terms have indeed been raised (see,
for an excellent up to date review, the section 4.2 of the entry ”Rigid Designators” of The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -LaPorte 2016-). Anyway, without entering in the
extremely complex subtleties of modal logics, it cannot be said that a consensus against
rigid designation has been reached so far. In fact, there is not even a specific proposal in
this respect can be pointed out as particularly accepted. Thus, the obvious way to criticize
a Putnamian interpretation of Twin-Earth experiments passes through objecting to the
idea of natural kinds, or at least to the possibility of an epistemic access to them. In our
specific example, a possible way to give a sensible explanation of the experiment of
Pedro and Twin-Pedro within a constructivist vision of learning would imply rejecting
that helium is natural kind.
Curiously enough, the conception that there are not natural kinds is usually called
constructivism or conventionalism -I shall use here the latter term, in order to avoid a
confusion with didactic constructivism-. A distinction can be drawn between a weak and
a strong conventionalism. Weak conventionalism does not denies that nature can be made
up of kinds, but it assumes that our cognitive abilities are not tuned to uncover them.
Weak conventionalism is thus a form of skepticism. Strong conventionalism, on its side,
takes a metaphysical stance by rejecting that there is an immanent order in reality. Thus,
in sum, a constructivist interpretation of mental experiments like ours entails a number of
strong logical, epistemological or even metaphysical tenets.
Let us think, for example of an educator who is sympathetic to the pupilcentric vision of
the teaching/learning process that is inherent to constructivism (Gash 1993, Fourez
1998). I do not think it is too outlandish an assumption (at least it is not at all within the
Spanish community of educational researchers). My point is that this position is not just
an ethical view. For, in fact, our educator, by subscribing to the ethical tenets of
constructivism, is also endorsing a conventionalism about natural kinds, even if she or he
is not aware of it. Admitting that the student is the center of the teaching/learning
exchange entails that the only rationale behind any classification employed in the
classroom are her or his interests and expectations.
Thus, our constructivist educator must be ready to accept that there is not such a thing as
a natural classification. It is up to them to decide whether they subscribes to this view as a
part of a skeptical stance, or maybe as an outcome of something metaphysically stronger.
But, of course, the converse is also true: a person who does not want to give up natural
kinds cannot be a constructivist. Such is, in fact, my personal option.
CONCLUSION
Educational constructivism stems from a basic intuition that underlies all the
contemporary educational research: the evidence that students have rather personal
conceptions about school topics, and that these conceptions show a stubborn resistance to
change. On the other hand, the idea of learning as construction is extremely problematic
from a philosophical point of view. Can we account for the evidence of the irreducible
variety of the students' ideas without getting into a theoretical deadlock?
I argue that any educational theory that goes beyond a specification of techniques for
facilitating the learning of a given issue must be understood as a part within a larger
ideological cluster. There is not such a thing as a philosophically aseptic educational
theory. My point is that any educational proposal must take into account all this
philosophical entourage if it aspires to coherence (and thus to usefulness). In the case of
educational constructivism, the usual definitions that focus only on its psychological or
epistemic side (see, for example, Taylor, 1993, p. 268; Staver, 1998, pp. 504-505) are
incomplete. In my view, constructivism must be seen as a bunch of ideas from different
fields with the common denominator of placing the learner at the center of the
educational process. This position might be well enciphered in a statement of Protagorean
ascent3:
The pupil is the measure of all (the educational) things.
Take a stance on it and act accordingly.

3 At Theaetetus Plato quotes Protagoras’ dictum “Man is the measure of all things” (Theaetetus, 160d). In
the dialogue, Socrates interprets this statement as a form of epistemic relativism.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y
Deporte, through the research project FFI2014-57064-P. The author is member of the
research group Methods of Causal Inference and Scientific Representation (MCISR),
based at the Complutense University of Madrid.
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APPENDIX: HILARY PUTNAM ON THE MEANING OF NATURAL

KIND TERMS

In order to make my argument, it may be interesting to briefly present the most relevant
features of Hilary Putnam's theory of natural kinds as presented in his paper The Meaning
of 'Meaning' (1975).
Putnam acknowledges three parts in the semantics of a word: on the one hand, its
reference, that is, the objects named by the word; on the other hand, its meaning 4, that is,
the epistemic component of the world, what we want to convey when we employ it; and
finally the psychological state of the person who utters or listens to a word. Putnam’s
primary interest in The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ is to criticize a time-honored semantic
view that is usually known as descriptivism. According to this view, if we want to know
the meaning of a word we must ask the speaker to describe what she or he intends to
mean by uttering it. For example, if somebody employs the Japanese word 'Ushi' (牛), we
should ask her or him to describe what an Ushi is. The speaker would probably answer by
giving a series of definite descriptions such as “They are animals”, “They have horns”,
“They produce milk”, and so on. The underlying assumption is that these descriptions
will eventually permit the hearer to realize that Ushi are in fact what English speakers
call cows. This seemingly common sense view was philosophically elaborated during the
first decades of the 20th century, chiefly by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell.
In a more technical way, descriptivism can be characterized as the conjunction of two
independent theses (Putnam 1975, pp. 216-222):
1) The psychological state (in the narrow sense) of the speaker determines, or fixes,
the meaning of a word.
1) The meaning of a word determines its reference.

4 Putnam’s ‘meaning’ is equivalent to Frege’s ‘Sinn’ or to Carnap’s ‘secondary meaning’.

Since determination is a transitive relation 5, the semantic position criticized by Putnam
implies that the reference of a word is fixed by the psychological state of the speaker. For
obvious reasons, the internal determination of meaning and reference is usually known as
semantic internalism, while the rejection of this view is called semantic externalism.
Putnam, in sum, takes an explicitly externalist stance.
Putnam’s analysis is restricted to a particular type of words, natural kind terms. A natural
kind is the result of a non-arbitrary sorting of the things of the world. Typical examples
of natural kinds are the chemical substances or the biological species 6. Some authors,
chiefly Saul Kripke (Kripke 1972), have argued that natural kind terms are rigid
designators, that is, that they have the same reference in any possible world. Putnam uses
this conclusion to show that the meaning of a kind term necessarily determines its
reference. Thus, in order to refute semantic internalism Putnam focuses on the
determination of the meaning by the psychological state.
The strategy of Putnam consists in putting forward a mental experiment that makes
evident that the internal state of an individual cannot fix the meaning of their words. The
specific experiment designed by Putnam consists in considering a possible world where
there is an exact duplicate of the Earth, Twin-Earth, identical to our planet in any respect
but in some systematic changes in the natural environment. Putnam, for example,
propounds that in Twin-Earth the liquid that fills the seas, that falls from the sky in form
of rain, and so on to exhaust all the descriptions that we can give of water, is not H 2O but
XYZ7. In Twin-Earth, according to the conditions of the experiment, there is an exact
duplicate of any person who lives in the Earth. Any earthling, by definition, share its
biography with their twin-earthling counterpart so that they both are in exactly the same
internal state at any time. Thus, when I say ‘Water is wet’, my psychological state is
exactly the same as that of my twin-earthian mirror image. But the reference of ‘water’ in
English and in Twin-English is evidently different.
As I said above, Putnam’s analysis is crucially based on the idea that natural kind terms
have the same reference in any possible world, that is, that they are rigid designators.
For Putnam, for example, the sentence “In Twin-Earth water is XYZ” would make no

5 Given two properties A and B, A is said to determine B if and only if it is the case that if two individuals
coincide with respect to A, then they necessarily coincide with respect to B. For example, the answers to a
multiple-choice test determine the mark awarded to it, since two identical tests must have the same mark.
Besides, two different marks cannot correspond to identical tests, although the same mark can be awarded
to different tests. In our case, if any two persons are in the same psychological state as they utter a word,
the meaning of their respective utterances must be the same. On the other hand, two terms with different
meanings must correspond to different psychological states.
6 There is some debate about the ontological status of chemical substances and biological species. In both
cases there are some limiting cases, such as berthollide compounds or microbiological species that are
difficult to sort into a well defined kind. Anyway, and always keeping in mind this problems, we can rather
safely assume in this paper that the usual chemical substances and species are non-problematic natural
kinds.
7 As it was noticed from the first moment, Putnam’s most known example is somehow misguided because,
since water is the main component of the human body, this substance cannot be replaced without radically
altering the physical constitution of a person, and thus twin-earthlings cannot be assumed to be exact
duplicates of earthlings. Anyway, the argument is identical if less radical changes are adopted. Putnam
himself presented alternative experiments in which in Twin-Earth elms are substituted by beeches, or
aluminium by molybdenum.
sense. Instead, we should say that there is not water in Twin-Earth. In other words, for
Putnam it is not that the word 'water' has different references in Earth and in Twin-Earth
but instead that we have two different meanings, as though we had two different words
with a common phonology. And since Pedro and Twin-Pedro are, by construction,
internally identical, the meaning of 'water' for them cannot be determined by their
respective psychological states. If Pedro were transported to Twin-Earth, he would not be
aware that the meaning of his utterance 'water' is different word from Twin-Pedro's.
The implications of the analysis of Putnam are immediate. First and obvious, the meaning
of a natural kind term is determined by instances outside the skin of the speaker. In the
words of Putnam himself, “meaning just ain't in the head” (Putnam, 1975, p. 227). In a
synthetic way, Putnam holds that it is the nature of a kind, that is, the properties that
define which individual belongs to it, what actually enters into the meaning of a kind
term. But since we are seldom aware of this nature, we must rely on the community of
the experts in a specific field to fix the meaning of a kind term. For example, we must
defer to the community of chemists to fix the meaning of ‘water’. Obviously, this
scientific meaning does determine the reference of the word. Accepting, even implicitly,
the opinion of the experts about natural kind terms is for Putnam an essential part of a
normal linguistic competence. Thus, in practical terms, the determination of the meaning
is always experienced by the individual as a socio-cultural feature. This is arguably the
most relevant feature of Putnam’s externalism, and is usually dubbed as the thesis of the
division of linguistic labor (Putnam 1975, p. 245 ss.). Second, although Putnam’s
interests are primarily semantic, his conclusions can be readily extrapolated to the
philosophy of mind, and in particular to the problem of the locus of mental contents. It is
very easy to see that holding that the psychological state does not determine the meaning
of a word is equivalent to stating that the mental content related to that word cannot be a
subjective production either. Semantic externalism entails that our mental contents are
also external (McGinn 1977).
The ideas of Hilary Putnam have given rise to a rich debate that stretches over the latest
four decades (for an anthology of the main contributions to this debate up to 1996, see
Pessin and Goldberg 1996). Against the externalist position there is a number of relevant
philosophers, chiefly Noam Chomsky (1995), Jerry Fodor (1987, 1991), David Chalmers
(1996, 2002) and Brian Loar (1988, 2003). These authors, from different positions, have
defended that our mental contents are fixed internally. Nevertheless, a definitive
argument against externalism has not been put forward so far. On the other hand, apart
from Putnam, the most relevant author that have defended externalism is Tyler Burge
(1979, 1986). Burge’s ideas intend to be more general than those of Putnam, and in
particular Burge claims that externalism must be extended to any kind term, natural or
not. Although I will primarily adhere to Putnam’s analysis, in this work I have adapted an
example included in Burge’s Individualism and the Mental (Burge 1979) to create the
mental experiment that I present in this paper 8. Anyway, it must be stressed that my
argument here is essentially Putnamian.

8 I have drawn on Burge’s famous arthritis mental experiment. Burge’s compares Oscar, an individual who
does not know that arthritis is a condition of the joints, and thus erroneously comes to believe that they has
arthritis on his thigh, with Twin-Oscar, identical in any respect to Oscar, but one: in Twin-Oscar’s
linguistic community ‘arthritis’ is employed in a wider sense, so that a pain in the thigh is also a symptom
of this twin-arthritis.