Constructivism and Realism: from Philosophy to the mass media

Abstract

The terms constructivism and realism suffer from a polysemy that tends to obscure any reasonable dialogue. This problem is very clear in the fields of philosophy, education, and so- cial and political sciences. Therefore, a careful analysis of the terms and their contexts of use is necessary. In this article, the theoretical framework is based on a realistic perspective regarding the existence of an external world independent of the cognizing subject (Bunge, 2002, 2007).

The main question of this research is: can communi- cation research be enlightening when it takes a realist, not extremely relativist standpoint and adheres to the correspon- dence theory of truth and falsity?

The methodology adopted is that of qualitative research based on document analysis. The main results or findings suggest that the conditions of possibility of verifying news, disarticulating fake news, or confronting post-truth, seem to depend strictly on consciously assuming certain philosophical and epistemological instruments.

With the expectation of future advances, for the moment the conclusions point out that the words truth and objectivity are usually assigned an absolute and totalizing character that generates several problems, while truth is not a thing, but a relationship. The results obtained are compatible with other studies: fake news reaches faster and more people than the truth, because the degree of novelty and the emotional reac- tions of the recipients seem to explain that bias (Vosoughi et al., 2018).