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Research Journal of the University of Ruhuna, Sri Lanka- Rohana 12, 2020

emerged in the context of ‘the consolidation of the liberal state in Europe and North
America, the industrial revolution and capitalist development, colonialism and

imperialism’ (Santos 2014:166). Western modernity is based on lazy reason and its
constructed dichotomies. Lazy reason created the framework for the philosophical

and epistemological debates in the last two hundred years. There was no
restructuring of knowledge as lazy reason resists change (Santos 2014:166-167).

Sociology and social sciences in this century have developed as disciplines with the

master narrative - structure and agency in sociology and anthropology (2014: 81).

However, this modern equation that guided us to think about social transformation
‘is undergoing a process of profound destabilisation’ (2014: 81). According to

Selvadurai et al, contestations from within the Western realm as well as developing
societies appear to provide a remedy to the contemporary situation, but somewhat at

a slow pace and operating in the margins. The nexus of knowledge and power that

reins in favour of the Western discourse appears to be numbered, in view of the
critique from within and without’ (Selvadurai et al 2013: 104).

Santos criticizes dominant (northern) epistemologies and present an epistemological

proposal for the South consisting of ‘a set of inquiries into the construction and
validation of knowledge born in struggle, of ways of knowing developed by social

groups as part of their resistance’ (Santos 2014: x). It is ‘an emancipatory project

free from the idea of both progress and universalism’ (2014:73). Santos calls for a
paradigm shift in both epistemological and societal terms because ‘the

understanding of the world promoted by modern reason is…. not only partial but
very selective’ (2014: 168). ‘Western modernity, controlled by modern reason, has

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limited understanding not only of the world but also of itself’ (Santos 2014: 168) .
Santos proposes a different reason called ‘subaltern cosmopolitan reason’.

3 For a critique of what he calls lazy or metonymic reason, how it ended up having primacy in the
last 200 years by creating totalizing discourse and dichotomies and consequences, see (Santos 2014:
167- 175). Such criticism is a prerequisite to recuperate the wasted experience.
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