Myths in the social sciences

Shades and chiaroscuro
Salvador Franco Craviotto
In the disciplines of the humanities, the Law of Thought was men from five countries: Italy, France, Germany, England and the United States, who produced a sociological theory from the socio-historical experience of their countries.

Experience of 12% of the world’s population

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Dr. Ramon Grosvogel argues that after the horrors of colonialism, European myths have permeated relentlessly in the social sciences and humanities to this day. He talks, for example, of the founding of European philosophy and science, which has a hegemony based on what he calls the knowledge exterminator or the historical destruction of the millennial knowledge of other cultures such as Muslim Arabs, Africans, and those that arose from America before Columbus.

The “Philosophy of European Man, which is said to begin with Descartes”, begins with “the secularization of the attributes of the Christian God”, which turns “I think, therefore I am”, into “I overcome, therefore I am”, with “the claim of Western man to become Allah “. From now on, the former theocratic regime is going through new stages and gradually transforming itself into a Western democracy, and these versions of democracy and the history of humanity themselves ascribe to the character of postulates, which in turn become the “foundation of a Western university”. However, the myth is that what has been “disguised for centuries as universal” does not fit the realities of most of the world. Namely, that “the social-historical experience of the Global South does not appear in law” to the world, as if it were something that did not exist, and at the same time it was not “taken seriously as a social scientific theory”.

It is still believed in social sciences and humanities schools around the world that a non-Western “has no capacity for universality”. This argument according to Grosfoguel comes from “Cartesian philosophy”. Thus, the social knowledge of men from only about five countries is generally represented as objective and universal, excluding the greater complexity and diversity of human beings and cultures in 88% of the world.

While Grosfoguel is right and constantly defends it, he is fallible and his vision is not without contradictions. In another order of myth, perhaps the greatest chasm in social inequality is not that which occurs between so-called priority interest groups and “traditional” people – as was believed and implemented according to the “politically correct” – but between the rich and the poor, or to put it Other, between the oppressors and the oppressed. Here we can find other legends to unravel. However, we have seen that national and transnational elites – allied with the mainstream media or their owners – have already chosen for decades to ignore economic variables and many of their variables, as well as any inequality that has to do with the economy. In general, blaming governments for little or no economic growth, development, employment, and wages, under the partially correct assumption that the present economic reality is the most just and worthy of all that has existed in human history, without questioning its flats, foundations, and contradictions. , based on the myth that in today’s Western “democratic” society, those who try hard or have more talent and aptitude earn more, which is not always the case.