A Social Onto-Epistemology

In my understanding, the cardinal sin of epistemocentrism is overlooking ontic properties of objects investigated by social sciences, namely, that they are social tissue woven by different subjects’ actions. Social actors’ knowledge motivates their actions, but also inevitably takes part in constituting them as subjects.

Onto-epistemological transgression of epistemocentrism in the area of sociology, as I see it, is reaching beyond it for manners of conceptualising social life in categories of objectivity, rationality and intersubjectivity, as both ontological and epistemological qualifications. In my project it entails modifying meanings of these notions to encompass relations between manners of being and constituting subjects with modalities of knowledge and self-knowledge, which the modern and post-modern forms of common, social life environment make foundations of contemporary subjectivity forms. Sociology is a special science, because it produces sure knowledge about its theoretically constituted objects, and, at the same time, it reciprocally changes that knowledge which serves practical constitution of subjects participating in social realities. In other words, sociology is a sort of knowledge that produces certain knowledge of social reality, which, circulating in society, reflexively changes sociology. Sociology, then, in its meta-reflection, reaches for philosophy and thereby lies a problem: a discrepancy between research practice and reflection on it. Philosophical thought on sociology considers knowledge that it provides and strives to place it in a general, broader order of knowledge. But knowledge so severed from the conditions of its production and described in a quasi-objectivist way (modelled on natural sciences) stops making sense. Therefore, since the emergence of the discipline, sociology struggled with its status as knowledge; epistemocentrically oriented philosophical thought on science could not grasp that specificity. Early modern philosophy was not able to recognise the communitarian dimension of sociological and social study, whereas the individualist, Cartesian epistemology was blind to that background.

Shortly, philosophical reflection on social study was one-sided, hence newly born sciences of man (the 19^th century), validated with tools of early modern philosophy, were bound for failure. To explain the status and describe the identity of social sciences, not only cognitive involvement of theory is necessary, but also ontic. Hence epistemology and ontology need to be combined in meta-reflection on knowledge about society. On the other hand, social reality is an indispensable component of social study. Nowadays, the concept of creating knowledge independent from human (cultural, social) environment has been largely abandoned, and rightly so. Nobody today believes in pure science, uninvolved, distanced from values and meanings, whether on the side of the subject or the object, thus, from the human world, from culture, even in so-called hard sciences. Hence my proposition is to extend and enrich the notion of cognition, to notice and take into account its part in creating social reality. This proposition is what I call social onto-epistemology. Social onto-epistemology is the unity of ontic determination of social study and epistemic determination of social being. Who is the one who investigates and what/who is investigated? The answer to these questions, inevitable in social life, always influences the process of forging the social world, it shapes social reality.

Therefore, in this book I perform a kind of re-evaluation of social sciences’ self-awareness, leaning above all on Pierre Bourdieu’s and Florian Znaniecki’s concepts, but indirectly also on Norbert Elias, Anthony Giddens and Charles Taylor, along with Stanisław Ossowski, Marek Siemek and Barbara Tuchańska. Analysing models of knowledge, Aristotle’s and Descartes’s, I try to portray how the privileged position of cognition theory in European philosophy was acquired, and what it means for social and ethical knowledge, as well as how ontic moments of cognition became marginalised within this knowledge.

Ancient and early modern sciences grew on the same, however historically differentiated, ground, which is human life environment. Whereas Aristotle’s pluralistic model of knowledge allowed scientific grasp of “things capable of being otherwise”, Descartes’s unitary model didn’t anymore. Within post-Cartesian philosophy this common ground was a priori eliminated as a potential epistemological obstacle invalidating the strategy of philosophical criticism. Knowledge and investigation are thus separated from action, science should be uninvolved, distanced, cleansed of what concerns praxis. In early modernity, poiesis was reduced to techne, and scientific knowledge identified with episteme supported with techne, while praxis was refused a place among sciences.

What is interesting for me is that very co-dependence: creating new, onto-epistemological perspective of social research under the influence of new phenomena in the domain of social realities, which are in turn the object of that research. Just as 19^th-century social processes forged sociology seeking a rightful place among other scientific disciplines, the social processes that we are taking part in today, are, in my view, the base for reorientation of social sciences. I agree with Florian Znaniecki (whom I consider a precursor of onto-epistemological research), when he states that social reality always exists as someone’s reality, that is, examining its social aspect we must involve the humanistic coefficient, the fact of (co-)being, (co-)investigation and (co-)action. One cannot produce a reasonable social theory overlooking the fact that social reality is (co-)created and (co-)maintained by social actors, who are not only investigating agents, but above all acting subjects, ontically located in communities, cultures, languages, grosso modo in co-constituting practices.