The Reality of Operative Constructivism

The alleged epistemological paradox underlying social systems theory and supposedly arising from the coexistence of contingent realism and operative constructivism, reveals, according to Barros, a coherent structure. While Barros maintains that this justifies a redefinition of Luhmann’s epistemological approach as “factual constructivism,” I argue that such a redefinition is not necessary and that Barros misses an opportunity to compare the concept of fact in Talcott Parsons’s analytical realism with the concept of fact in Niklas Luhmann’s operative constructivism.