My wife tells me that a constructivist would never ask the question you asked, but would instead be focusing on the relationship between the mind and the experience of the phenomenon, not on the phenomenon, because the phenomenon is not knowable independent of your constructions.
Edit:
(My own thoughts on this)
This is where I think there is a paradigm shift in epistemology between realism and constructivism. Realist see objective reality and mind as independent of each other, constructivist see "ontological meaning" as the intersection of mind and experience.
That's probably a very poor way of putting it, though...
