This is a part of the article series Decolonial Praxis: Going Beyond Empty Words, edited by Fernando David Márquez Duarte, Dulce Alarcón Payán and Javier Daniel Alarcón Mares. Editorial and Translation Assistant: Lorenia Gutiérrez Moreto Cruz.

To (re)think the (de)colonization of the social sciences, the relations of production and social change and the visibility/invisibility of historically underrepresented groups, such as the Afro-descendant population and Indigenous communities in the region, it is necessary to make a critical balance of the links between the so-called left cycles in the region, and their relationship or not, with the policies of transformation of the coloniality of knowledge-power. The authors of this chapter recognize that the episteme linked to knowledge is associated with the so-called traditional currents of the so-called classics in the social sciences. In this sense, decoloniality is also an effort based on knowledge without ignoring other types of epistemologies born in the West. Recognizing some of its potentialities and epistemological proposals invites us to build a transhistorical horizontal dialogue. The decolonization of power sounds, in many areas and in scientific disciplines, like an appeal to an essentialized, exotic, wild, premodern or irrational past. The changes in the relations of production of knowledge, science and power, and not only in the identity representation of professional scientists and politicians, imply a positive debate for scientific epistemology, in the sense of overcoming the limits of science.

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Processes linked to new institutions, forms of scientific exploration, objects and methods of scientific collaboration between South-South countries and in a decolonial sense, imply an important reflection on other ways of thinking about politics, from scales of local representations to proposals for the State-Society relationship and its geopolitical impact. Both the production of knowledge and the political representation of underrepresented groups and knowledge bring relational categories such as race, gender and class to the discussion. It is hoped that this representation will be deeper in the relations of knowledge production at a global level. In short, decoloniality is an epistemological-political commitment that helps to position these issues in the academic and political sphere.

The questions that guide this research are two: what is the role of decoloniality compared to other epistemological currents of thought? And what are the political implications of this current in the Latin American turn to the left? Based on these questions, below are some reflections that are not intended to exhaust the topic, but rather to open dialogue.

The chapter is structured as follows. First, to understand the epistemological and political proposal of decoloniality, the characteristics of two traditions that have guided the production of scientific knowledge during much of the 20th and 21st centuries are described: the empirical-analytical tradition and the historical-hermeneutic tradition. The objective of this lies in distinguishing the postulates of these that give rise to decolonial criticism. It is argued that the Latin American current is advancing on them, which helps rethink the current political effervescence. After that, in the second section some of the epistemological and political assumptions of decoloniality as other knowledge are reviewed, and it is proposed that it can be understood both as a critical scientific community and as a research paradigm. Subsequently, representation is discussed in light of decoloniality and the scope of knowledge and power in Latin America is reviewed, paying attention to recent political events in Colombia. Finally, some conclusions are added based on the authors' interests in questioning both the alternative production of knowledge and the great challenges for the region.

The Epistemological Watershed of the Decolonial Turn: The Empirical-Analytical Tradition and Historical-Hermeneutics

To understand the emergence of decoloniality as other knowledge that is constituted as a systemic, complex and holistic view of the realities of the global south, the authors of this work consider it necessary to analyze the characteristics of the two most important traditions in terms of knowledge production. Scientific refers to: the empirical-analytical, and the historical-hermeneutic traditions. The reason for this is that decoloniality in a certain sense was born as a critique of both traditions.

Before doing so, it is worth mentioning that both the empirical-analytical and historical-hermeneutic traditions can be understood as research paradigms, as conceived by Thomas Kuhn (1996). For this author, paradigms are necessary to sustain statements as long as they are accompanied by a scientific community that defends them and sustains their principles of beliefs, values ​​and premises. The scientific community is conceived by the author as groups of scientists who share a paradigm, and generally develop the stage of normal science (Kuhn 1996).

The distinction between normal science and scientific revolution is essential for Kuhn. The first consists of the moment in which a paradigm is in its most valid stage and when the knowledge produced does not question the premises of said paradigm. On the other hand, scientific revolutions occur when these, in their normal stage, exhaust their explanatory capacity and begin to be questioned. In addition to these notions, Kuhn also introduces the concept of incommensurability, which accounts for the inability to translate two paradigms into a common language. From the definition offered in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it could be argued that the empirical-analytical tradition is incommensurable with the historical-hermeneutics, since its ontological and epistemological assumptions, as well as its ways of conceiving the world and practicing science, are different from each other.

The empirical-analytical tradition has a long history that can be traced back to the works of the dominating scientific thinkers of modernity: Newton, Hume, etc. However, in the nascent social sciences, positivism emerged as its most prominent representative. At that time, positive social science regarded mimicking the appearance of natural science as a means to consolidate objective scientific knowledge, free from prejudice. Later, in the 20th century, the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle gave continuity to the tradition from the premises of the hypothetico-deductive method.

Broadly speaking, the empirical-analytic tradition is based on an objective knowledge of reality that is possible through an epistemological dualism consisting of the subject-object separation. Thus, the elements of reality are reified in order to be analyzed. Additionally, its purpose is the causal explanation of reality through the formulation of universal statements (Pasek and Matos 2006), which gives science a generalizing capacity.

From the perspective of the empirical-analytical tradition, for scientific communities to be operable, they must have a production of knowledge that takes into account critical capacity, universality, a logical foundation, that is communicable and that has a claim to objectivity (Pardo 2012).

Heir to the hypothetical deductive method of the Vienna Circle, Popper (1973) maintains that it is essential to subject all scientific statements to constant falsificationism to demonstrate their scientific validity. No matter how much evidence accumulates around a theoretical statement, if said statement is not falsifiable, it will not have a scientific character (Popper, 1973). The advancement of this position favors a demarcation between the scientific and the non-scientific (metaphysics), which can be translated into a differentiation between the rational and the irrational. According to the method of critical rationalism, the advancement of science is promoted only through conjectures and refutations, provided that the replicability of the facts is guaranteed (Maxwell 2017).

Another of the relevant elements for the empirical-analytical tradition are the contributions on the psychology of the researcher and the logic of knowledge revelation (Lakatos 1983). For Lakatos, the objectivity of science does not lie precisely in its progressiveness, it can also be regressive and contain anomalies that must be corrected. Furthermore, scientific statements that are not subjected to epistemological surveillance in strict terms can be branded as pseudoscientific. For this reason, it is essential to use auxiliary hypotheses that protect scientific statements from possible refutation scenarios (Callaghan 2019).

However, some aspects concomitant to the empirical-analytical tradition, such as ‘scientific progress’ or the idea of ​​‘evolution’ were harshly criticized by philosophy and the social sciences, particularly by the Frankfurt School. Some of these critiques were the questioning between knowledge and capitalism turned into ideology and culture. One of the most important exponents of this school is Jurgen Habermas (1998), who became one of the most prominent critics of the instrumental rationality that supported the modern project. Habermasian criticism goes beyond the analytical tension, it offers an alternative: communicative rationality. In summary, the Frankfurt school provided some fundamental steps for epistemic turns not only from the questioning of knowledge production, but also from the historical and ideological production relations that overlap them.

The historical-hermeneutic tradition, also called the interpretive turn, meant the implementation of an alternative paradigm to the positivist and, in general, to the empirical-analytic tradition. Unlike the latter, in which it is maintained that the production of knowledge is governed by a subject-object relationship, in the historical-hermeneutic tradition a knowledge relationship of the subject-subject type is conceived; that is, it is assumed that the researcher is immersed in the reality of the study and cannot separate himself from it. This has several implications and perhaps the most........

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