Conocimiento situado: Un forcejeo entre el relativismo construccionista y la necesidad de fundamentar la acción

Abstract

A critical perspective of social intervention as a set of adjustments compatible with the social order considers that intervention should lead to social transformation. A critique by social constructionist perspectives to the possibility of a representation of reality and the unveiling of the technologies of knowledge production undermines the diagnostic and planning of intervention. Questioning the possibility of using arguments such as a reality that must be transformed or the necessary relationship between actions and derived consequences debilitates the possibility of any intervention. It leaves intervention without object, legitimacy and without a set of specific techniques of action. We could summarize these ideas in this sentence: ‘How to change that which we cannot know and, even if it was knowledgeable, how to decide the direction that change should follow?’ In this paper, in spite of the scant literature about applied forms of social intervention based on socio-constructionist perspectives, we consider that those perspectives enrich the concepts used in the context of social intervention and have immediate implications for specific interventions. We analyze the concept of ‘social problem’-understood as the definition by institutionally legitimized agents of the factors degrading the quality of life of social collectives-under the social constructionist perspective. We also use the concept of situated knowledge to suggest forms of identifying and acting upon ‘social problems’ without falling into realist or relativist perspectives.