About the relationship between knowledge and the symbolic thought: some fundamental contributions for the social sciences

Authors

Abstract

This paper proposes a particular form of problematize what we can understand as knowledge in social sciences, that marginalized from a naturalistic perspective and closer to a phenomenological-hermeneutics glimpses possible intersections between the symbolic, the social and the cognitive, with the purpose of establishing from a complex and dialectical dimension an analytical approach of the social science of knowledge. To do this, we will begin by figuring out a problematization about knowledge in social sciences, addressing some sociological premises and socio-cognitive functions to conceptualize a complex perspective of knowledge. Subsequently, a second section is based on three main axes: objectivity, subjectivity and imagination, as a transcendental triad in this epistemological perspective. To end with the search for the relationship between knowledge and the symbolic thought according to the arguments outlined in the preceding paragraphs, where we understood that the imaginary-archetypal structures surrounding the social reality, the process of understanding and intersubjectivity constitute, among others, the foundations of which we will understand by knowledge in social sciences

Keywords:

social knowledge, objectivity, subjectivity, symbolic thought, social sciences