EPISTEMOCENTRISM AS AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL OBSTACLE IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
EPISTEMOCENTRISM AS AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL OBSTACLE IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Summary/Abstract: In the modern era rationality, intersubjectivity and objectivity are primarily con- ceived as epistemological categories. They characterize knowledge or subjects of knowledge, or even the function of knowledge—cognition. Epistemocentrism (in P. Bourdieu’s view a typical feature of modern thinking) supported by epistemological fundamentalism is nothing else but a limitation of this category’s meaning. Epistemocentrism was useful in the past but is now anachronic in view of the modern functions of knowledge in societies and the progress in social sciences. Today the sciences and their contribution to society are not what they once were. This calls for a revision of epistemocentrism and the filling of the “epistemological gap” which emerged in result of the collapse of epistemological fundamentalism. I think that there is room today for a new “philosophical partition of reality” emancipated from the Cartesian despotism of ego cogito, and a recovery of the intuitional insights into social life typical of ancient thinkers like Aristotle. In the present paper I strive to show that epistemocentrism is an epistemological obstacle in the social sciences and the source of its crises.

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