No. 25 (13): Subject-Centered Epistemologies and the production of knowledge in Latin America. July-December 2022

How can we accept the validity of the multiplicity and co-existence of epistemologies without delving at the same time into the validity of the very epistemology of scientific knowledge, whose legitimacy entails precisely not being one of many ways of knowing but the proper and exclusive way of knowing? By universalizing one type of subject, Western modernity excluded from participation in the construction of true discourse all those epistemologies based on other assumptions, other ontologies, other ways to relate to themselves, to history, and to the universe. Thus, it may be worthwhile to ask some questions:

How can we produce valid knowledge when we are faced with a plurality of ways of knowing, all of them struggling to be recognized as legitimate? How does that plurality influence the teaching and learning processes? How does the knowledge of the participants – which interweaves in a fabric within which what is given and received in the cognitive interaction is combined and recombined – operate in these processes? How can we access the knowledge of the practices, experiences, relationships, ways of knowing and explaining of the participants such as they happen in the teaching and learning processes? How can the view of the Latin American Other be retrieved and made our own in order to see ourselves through it?

Clearly, this discussion cannot be strictly political, insofar and inasmuch as the amount of participation that nourishes the discourses and practices regarded as true will determine an acknowledgement of the otherness and the differences that might range, on an institutional level such as that of education and public policies, from seeking to efface them to trying to protect them.

From this perspective, the centering on the subject to which we invite around this issue’s main topic would equal to a de-centering of a type of subjectivity, to suggest instead a space open to the varied and different participation of diverse subjectivities and their ways to relate to and build the truth and the world.

The central position given to the cognizant subject has begun to be resisted by those who seek either to bring to light the multiple ways to know and create knowledge or to listen to voices that have been forbidden, silenced, overshadowed, outshined, rejected, disregarded by the totalizing concert of authorized, legitimized, and learned voices reiterated by the chorus of traditionally adopted epistemologies. Recovering those overlooked ways of knowing requires a previous decolonization, break, revision, epistemological and methodological objection, as well as the formulation of proposals that admit the plurality of epistemologies and methodologies as an expression of a diversity of ethnicities, peoples, cultures, utopias, cosmogonies, beliefs, ways of being in the world and being in different worlds. 

Thus, the scientific production of social sciences faces huge and paradoxical challenges, such as the one created by the tension between creation and legitimation. This tension encompasses a wide spectrum from epistemologies, theories and strategies to collect and analyze data to ways to conceive, construct, and make use of data, forms and criteria of validity, as well as regimes of truth.