Poverty, Social Sciences, and Philosophy: toward an analysis of the ontological suppositions of poverty studies

Abstract

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the phenomenon of poverty has shown extensive and intensive growth.

On one hand, there are more and more people who have less, and on the other hand, there are new sectors added to this category who are considered poor.

This situation has given rise to different studies about the phenomenon, generating theoretical and empirical debates about the possibilities of the knowledge that the social sciences have regarding it.

Especially in Argentina, different interpretations were carried out, whose differences originated both at the methodological level and in the determination of the units of analysis or in the use of different theoretical frameworks.

This work synthesizes the first findings of a research work that is being carried out, analyzing the worldviews implied by the different approaches to poverty in our country in the 1990s. Though the present research work has an epistemological character, it also tries to show that the different ways of representing and intervening in poverty imply ontological assumptions.

This communication has two main objectives. One is to explain the ontological content of the studies about poverty, and the other is to reflect on the critical role of philosophy in a disciplinary field of deep practical consequences. In this sense, it will be argued, first, that theories have certain descriptions of “what the poor are like”; second, that an analysis of the ontological dimension provides a reflection about the ways things exist, thus allowing the analysis of pre- and meta-theoretical components of theories. Finally, through this means, it is possible to rethink, in a different way, epistemological practice as philosophy of the social sciences.