Rescuing Epistemology

Abstract

Over the last three decades, the whole project of epistemology has been subjected to criticism and change. This process has been marked, successively, by the transfer of epistemic sovereignty to the “social” domain, by the rediscovery of ontology and by attention to constitutive normativity and the political implications of knowledge. Some have even suggested that epistemology should be abandoned altogether as a philosophical project. However, this process has been offset by a proposal for a new epistemology, rooted in the experiences of the global South. This article explores the possibilities of creating a space for dialogue between the various critiques (“naturalist,” feminist, postcolonialist, epistemographic, epistopic, etc) of epistemology as a philosophical project, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s proposal for an epistemology of the South, taking as a starting point a review of philosophical pragmatism as the most radical form of criticism of conventional epistemology.