 By making social factors an inextricable, substantive determinant of what counts as true or false in the realm of the sciences (and elsewhere), social constructivism stands opposed to the realist contention that theories can be understood as furnishing knowledge of a mind-independent world. And as in the historicist approach, notions such as truth, reference, and ontology are here relative to particular contexts; they have no context-transcendent significance. The later work of Kuhn and Wittgenstein in particular were influential in the development of the Strong Program doctrine of “meaning finitism”, according to which the meanings of terms are conceived as social institutions: the various ways in which they are used successfully in communication within a linguistic community. This theory of meaning forms the basis of an argument to the effect that the meanings of scientific (and other) terms are products of social negotiation and need not be fixed or determinate, which further conflicts with a number of realist notions, including the idea of convergence toward true theories, improvements with respect to ontology or approximate truth, and determinate reference to mind-independent entities. The subject of neo-Kantianism thus emerges here again, though its strength in constructivist doctrines varies significantly. (For a robustly finitist view, see Kusch 2002; for a more moderate constructivism, see Putnam’s (1981: ch. 3) “internal realism” and cf. Ellis 1988).