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

scientific inquiry’ (Santos 2014: 120). This is an important distinction about two
knowledge types.

He argues that today ‘we must start from the verification that the theory of history of

modernity is untenable (and) human initiative rather than any abstract idea of
progress is what grounds hope’ (Santos 2014: 89). We need to replace modernity

paradigm with another paradigm (Santos 2014: 88). While ‘the paradigm of Western
modernity postulates a dialectical tension between social regulation and social

emancipation’, in Santos’s view, ‘the most important problem is the collapse of

social emancipation into social regulation’ (Santos 2014: 71). Hence as social
scientists our challenge is to regenerate emancipation. ‘Because science and hence

the social sciences as we know them are part and parcel of the project of Western
modernity, they are much more part of the problem rather than the solution’ (Santos

2014: 72). To face this challenge social sciences must undergo radical change.

He further says, the structure of modern knowledge has ‘led to total primacy of

knowledge-as-regulation’ (2014:139). Modern science has become the privileged
form of knowledge-as-regulation and it has deserted knowledge-as-emancipation

(2014:156). Thus, ‘global social injustice is intimately linked to global cognitive
injustice (and) the struggle for global social justice must therefore be a struggle for

global cognitive justice as well’ (2014:124). This statement has profound

implications for sociology theory and practice.

Connell clarifies the respective roles of anthropology and sociology in historical
context by stating that anthropology became ‘the designated intellectual container

for primitive societies’ (2007: x) and argues,

The rest of social science formed itself on ethnocentric assumptions that

amounted to a gigantic lie- that modernity created itself within the North
Atlantic world, independent of the rest of humanity. Models constructed

based on that lie, such as functionalist sociology, modernization theory and

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