Epistemologies of the South by Santos Boaventura de Sousa

Author:Santos, Boaventura de Sousa [Santos, Boaventura de Sousa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317260332
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-11-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Toward an Epistemology

of Blindness

Why the New Forms of “Ceremonial Adequacy” neither Regulate nor Emancipate

Introduction

In his celebrated essay of 1898, Thorstein Veblen criticized classical economics for promoting an impoverished, tautological, or circular relation between facts and theory, a relation that he designated as “ceremonial adequacy” (1898: 382). Once the laws of the normal and of the natural are formulated, “according to a preconception regarding the ends to which, in the nature of things, all things bend” (1898: 382), either the facts corroborate such a concept of normality and the propensity to predefined ends and are thus established as relevant, or they do not, in which case they are discarded as abnormal, marginal, or irrelevant. Veblen’s plea was for the replacement of this normative and illusory adequacy with a real one, the abandonment of the “metaphysics of normality and controlling principles” for the observation of the real economic life process made of real economic actions by real economic agents.

With this plea, Veblen launched a debate in economics that has been with us ever since in all the social sciences and indeed in science as a whole. The debate can be formulated in the following terms: What counts as representation? And what are the consequences of misrepresentation? The most intriguing features of this debate are, on the one hand, that it is by far easier to establish the limits of a given representation than to formulate a general coherent representation of limits and, on the other hand, that the consequences of misrepresentation tend to be different from those predicted, thus confirming, if nothing else, the misrepresentation of consequences. In other words, it has been much easier to criticize ceremonial adequacy than to create a credible alternative to it. Veblen illustrates this condition very well. At the outset of his article, he mentions approvingly, and as an example to follow, the “eminent anthropologist” M. G. de Lapouge, whose work is given as a symbol of the evolutionary revolution going on in other sciences (Lapouge and Closson 1897: 373). If, however, we read the article by Lapouge and note the scientific results accepted by Veblen, we are confronted with a delirious racial anthropology in which the binary of dolichocephalicblond and brachycephalic types account for such laws as the law of the distribution of wealth, the law of attitudes, the law of urban indices, the law of emigration, the law of marriages, the law of the concentration of dolichoids, the law of urban elimination, the laws of stratification, the law of intellectual classes, and the law of epochs.

Our evaluation of Lapouge’s evolutionary science and of the way Veblen draws from it shows that the blindness of others, particularly of those in the past, is both recurrent and easy to establish. But if that is the case, whatever we say today about the blindness of others will probably be seen in the future as evidence of our own blindness. The dilemma can be formulated thus: If we are blind, why is it so difficult to accept

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