The transtheoretical modeling of the constructivist-interpretative paradigm in explaining the environmental issues

As an interdisciplinary subject, the study of the environment requires an integrated approach. As a matter of fact, a number of thinkers in this field have used the constructivist approach to study the environmental issues because this emphasizes the role of social factors along with technical and ecological ones in explaining them. With a transtheroretical approach, the aim of the present article is to study the constructivist-interpretative paradigm and determine its cognitive aspects as well as provide a model to study the environmental issues. The paper uses Ritzer's meta-theorizing as a tool to achieve the aforementioned goals. The findings of the study of the intellectual evolution of the constructivism paradigm in classical and contemporary thoughts show that the philosophical foundation of this paradigm is intertwined in the thought of philosophers who emphasize the study of interactions between objects and subjects. This school of sociology is based on the theories of Schutz, Weber, Heidegger, Berger and Luckmann, who studied interactions and social contexts. In the sociological domain, for social issues, specifically environment, thinkers such as Spector and Kitsuse, Loseke, Hannigan, and Yearley used the constructivist perspective to study the discovery, emergence and success of these issues. With the formation of absolute and textual schools in constructivism, this approach turns from pure subjectivism to simply objective and subjective factors. As such, many other thinkers with an integrated insight pointed to multiple levels of social realities as mentioned by Ritzer. The results show that the connection and interaction of environmental issues at principal levels of the paradigmatic model of environmental realities in the constructivist-interpretive theory.