Decoloniality and Disruption of the Scientific Status Quo: Dissemination of Universal Theoretical Assumptions in International Research

The Scientific Communities

The production of scientific communities provides an interesting route to understand knowledge communication process. The organization of science as a social practice is part of the studies of the sociology of science. It is from historical and social elements that scientific practices are constituted through consensus on the scientific paradigms in force in each field of knowledge. Scientific communication is central to the consolidation of such consensus. Communicating discoveries and building knowledge strengthens the directions of scientific production as a social practice, carried out collectively. Research groups at universities and at other research institutions are examples of this social practice that takes place in the larger scientific community.

The way the scientific community is organized depends on the assumptions that are part of the collective understanding of this social practice. In this sense, groups tend to have different views on what the scientific community is and what the scientific community has to do with the objectives, processes, and purposes of science. Baumgarten (2004) states that there are three approaches to define the concept of community in science. These approaches can be understood as: internalist, whose representatives are Popper (1972), Merton (1942), Hagstrom (1974), and Polanyi (1951); externalist, where the works of Marx (1867/2017), (Bernal, 1939), (Habermas, 1975), Santos (2000), and Martínez (1994) stand out; and constructivist, with Latour and Woolgar (1997) and Knorr–Cetina (1983) as leading exemplars.

In the internalist approach, science appears as an autonomous entity, in the sense of having its own rules, consensus, and interests that only concern the community and those who are part of it. Thus, science would have little interest in regard to social or economic issues. The externalist approach, in turn, understands that scientific communities operate at the level of power relations that are determined by the economic model and by the political system.

For those who adhere to the constructivist approach, science is produced from the interrelation between the different dimensions that make up the world-system—political, economic, and cultural (Wallerstein, 2000). The science produced in these dimensions seeks to apprehend, from a certain perspective, the natural physical world and/or reality. In the constructivist approach, there is a certain agreement among scientists that it is only possible to build realities from perspectives that integrate these various dimensions. There is a relationship of mutual dependence between the systems that indicate which research problems should be considered to produce knowledge and the influence that research results have on the systems of which this production is inherent.

The data presented by a representative of a scientific community are considered objective due to the intrinsic value that the data have as determined by the “scientific authority” of the relevant community: internalist, externalist, or constructivist. There is rarely criticism or questions within the community about the data and/or the methods of their construction. Unauthorized questioning can even become legally protected against rival groups that try to replicate the studies. An example of this occurred in regard to the Utah “cold fusion” case (Taylor, 1991), where rival institutions in a scientific field resorted to the use of legal maneuvers to protect their respective controls over their “data” and production procedures. At the end of the 20th century, science became a commercially and legally socialized enterprise, where craft or small-scale data production gave way to “data factories” organized in a similar way to large corporations. Objectivity, therefore, becomes a label that is applied to selected facets of the “research” activity by the public relations or marketing departments of a particular company and ends up being a rhetorical device. “Science is, therefore, what it is rhetorically demarcated and communally authorized to be” (Taylor, 1991, p. 408).

Latour (2004), when criticizing the normative character of science in studies on the body, emphasizes that scientific production must seek more articulated or less articulated forms of explanation. Thus, scientific knowledge or the product of scientific practice is no longer true or false, confirmed or refuted; rather, it becomes an articulated or inarticulate proposition. The articulation proposed by the author, using the study of the body as an example, refers to the way the body is understood as a being that is affected by the various stimuli present in the world. This ability to be affected generates a kind of gradation that becomes more complex based on the multiple considerations about the place, the culture, and the history that simultaneously constitute this body. There is no separation between the place of the body, the world of the objects, and the meanings by which these objects affect that body. This separation, when present in scientific research, typically causes dichotomies that are difficult to reconcile, resulting in endless discussions.

The constructivist approach to science makes it possible to understand the role that the scientific community has in the social configuration. In addition, this approach benefits from the others, which implies an understanding of the historical character of scientific social practices. It should be noted that the historical perspective that underlies our argument is not equivalent to a linear, developmental view of history in which aspects of the past are replaced or overcome by new ones. Our historical perspective is interested in the complex nature of the constitution of scientific communities (Marsico, 2015; Valsiner et al., 2016). In other words, it elucidates the tensions present in the social configuration that reverberate in the practices of scientific production (Mollo, 2021; Savarese et al., 2013; Tateo & Marsico, 2018). Thus, we have a possibility to understand how scientific communities are organized. This historical comprehension allows the investigation of whether it is pertinent to consider the influence of the current capitalist logic in the publication of scientific knowledge at the international level. It is what will be discussed in the next topic.

An Assembly Line of International Publications

Interesting theoretical elaborations on the logic of scientific production have been made based on the influence of the capitalist economic system (Rosa, 1994; Valsiner, 2010). The time allocated for publication, the organization of quality indices and the definition of scientific quality criteria are components of the publication process that have many similarities with the capitalist logic.

One quality criterion is the impact factor of scientific journals. Recently, the impact factor, known as the score used to define the quality of scientific journals and, consequently, of researchers, has been questioned by the Open Science Movement (Woolston, 2021). The Open Science Movement is an alternative to the scientific enterprise of editorial services (Sampaio & Serradas, 2009). The restriction imposed by the scientific publishers is a barrier to accessing scientific information. Traditional scientific publications system ends up excluding those researchers and citizens who cannot pay fees or contribute financially to scientific publications.

Although scientific practice has a certain slowness resulting from the procedures necessary for its execution, validation, and publication, institutional requirements have been increasingly oriented in the opposite direction. Thus, the time dedicated to the study and the production of ideas is now occupied by a rush for fast publishing, which results in the absence of original ideas and the diminishing of creative solutions to issues of great human importance. The entrepreneurial reasoning of universities and research institutions, which is both desired (Peterka & Salihovic, 2012) and criticized (Guimarães, 2019), is at the base of such problems.

In following capitalist logic, the purpose of science as a creative process is replaced by reproduction. This reproduction of ideas in scientific publications can be represented by a not completely closed circle whose points of contact are groups of researchers associated by common theoretical interests, thus, constituting a community committed to creating spaces for the publication of their ideas. The circle reaches a certain cohesion when the researchers are mutually cited in those spaces where their peers are the evaluators. When the group consolidates itself in this investigative practice-production-publication circle, its boundaries become more rigid and even impenetrable to ideas and/or theories different from those used. Therefore, it forms a publication circuit like an assembly line, seeking quantity of publications and citations, thus, reaching institutional requirements in terms of H-index and feeding the entrepreneurial science market.

In international publications, the problems of this model are amplified considering the little space that theories and authors that are not part of these circles have due to various reasons. These reasons range from linguistic barriers related to the predominance of the English language in international publications to socio-economical barriers, bearing in mind that the access to international scientific journals is done through monthly or annual fees or by paying a fee per article accessed. While in many countries (especially in the Global North), scientific journals are freely available to faculty members and students via university libraries access, this is not the case in other places where universities simply do not have sufficient budget to pay the journal’s fees. The Open Science Movement questions this format, especially for Latin American countries that seek to democratize scientific knowledge to achieve optimal social and economic development (Open Access Salvador Declaration, 2005).

The reference to authors who are part of more consolidated circles is a sine qua non condition for young researchers who try to be part of the circle. The contributions of authors outside the circuit are rare and, almost always, they correspond to a hierarchy of knowledge based on a Westernized scientific practice, either by the massive presence of authors from the global North, or by Western philosophical and epistemological foundations.

Thus, the circle is made up of researchers who relate to a theoretical option, find a field for publishing their ideas that are evaluated by their peers who share the same ideas and, therefore, again quote their peers to be evaluated by the former. This form of group consolidation established to deal with the problem of an increasingly short publication time, can assist in the dissemination of a certain theory, but it can also constitute an obstacle to new ideas that are not necessarily those defended by the group. The encounter of divergences that would allow the emergence of authentic ideas is no longer the focus of publications and is replaced by the reification of theoretical concepts already disseminated by Western Science.

The way publication time is treated in scientific practice impels researchers to restrict themselves to a form of scientific production similar to the logic of factory production that is characteristic of the capitalist system. The simplicity and false objectivity of scientific production are capitalist principles that form such organization and criteria definition (Baum, 2011). To meet the demand for publication, the scientific communication process becomes an end per se and ends up diluting the central objective of science, which is to think of creative solutions to the problems faced by humanity.

It seems like the logic of production works just like a factory in which the subject who works on the assembly line (researcher) begins to reproduce an act (articles/research most cited) without the possibility of predicting the result of the product that will be generated at the end of the process. Nor does it reflect on the social consequences of the dissemination of certain theoretical assumptions that carry unique views of being and existing in the world. The alienation and lack of criticality caused by this model is the same found in the production-lines of factories, with a reproductive and non-creative content. Phenomena such as belligerent acts among researchers from different theoretical currents, unethical relationships, and an exacerbated corporatism without reflecting on the role of scientists in society are just some of the results of this practice even with some control mechanisms (Gross, 2016; Stroebe et al., 2016).

However, it is not a matter of advocating for the lack of interest in science as in an internalist view, but revealing the theoretical assumptions that underlie the most published and most cited scientific research. Likewise, it is not a matter of invalidating the work of researchers who have an undeniable role in the construction of scientific knowledge. It is about taking a diverse and, at the same time, global look at the paths taken by science with clear evidence of Westernization and its philosophical and epistemological assumptions that make up the “universal” theoretical corpus of sciences. It is necessary to revisit these paths to critically analyze what is considered “universal.” In this sense, the studies grouped in what is conventionally called decoloniality have significant contributions on the challenges of publishing at an international level.

The Work of González Rey

The discussion of González Rey’s work (2003; 2012; 2017; 2019a) in this article is due to his desire to bring subjectivity into science. The subjective aspect of human production was neglected along with the history of Psychology concerning objectivity as the corollary of Modernity (González Rey, 2017). Objectivity in terms of modern science is the way of claiming universal principles applicable to every human being. Knowledge production in modern science is conceived in opposition to subjectivity. In this sense, the subjective dimension was abandoned from the realm of science and considered as biased and non-verifiable knowledge. Because modern science is objective in its principles, decoloniality, on the contrary, is subjective in its nature. We assume the inherent subjective status of knowledge and scientific production from a decolonial standpoint since “subjectivity as cultural-historical formation is not anchored in a universal condition of individual” (González Rey, 2017, p. 4).

González Rey’s work resonates with what we advocate here as the tripod History-Education-Time. He worked on different research topics such as teaching and learning, cancer, depression, and heart diseases, and he was a great admirer of literature (González Rey, 2005; González Rey, 2017; Goulart, 2019). Throughout his life, González Rey dedicated himself to develop the theory of subjectivity from diverse places: Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Brazil, where he lived in the last part of his life (Goulart, 2019).

All these different fields of investigation have in common the focus on the concept of subjectivity with a social and an individual dimension. The social and the individual dimensions in the theory of subjectivity are not juxtaposed levels of analysis. Instead, they are integrated into the subjective senses, the unit of symbolic and affective aspects of subjectivity considered as a system that drives people’s motivation. “The subjectivity is a complex system with two constitutive places related to each other permanently: the individual and the social are set up reciprocally and, at the same time, are constituted one by the other, simultaneously. In this way, it is possible to break with an isolated and naturalized individual” (González Rey, 2012, p. 141. Our translation).

Through Latin American Critical Psychology and the work of Vygotsky, González Rey acknowledges the role of theories to shift the axis of mainstream psychology too much focused on methodological protocols. He considered theories as open systems to elaborate new comprehensions of psychological phenomena. This position relates to González Rey’s theory of subjectivity that emerges from a cultural-historical perspective in dialogue with social and human sciences. His effort was to elaborate a personality theory from a cultural-historical perspective and this led him to focus on peoples' lives, especially those living in a difficult condition. He assumed the person’s ontological dimension as the core issue of his theorization. Ontology in González Rey’s theory is defined as a relational ontology. The being only exists insofar as it is an Other for a subject. The relational ontology points out the difference between the individualism pursuit by the West and the cultural perspective of relational beings from the East (Viveiros de Castro, 2004).

The concept of subjectivity by González Rey (2003) differs from the notion of subjectivism as the interior psychic life. The process of defining subjectivity in González Rey’s theory follows a different protocol of modern science. Instead of defining the concept of subjectivity from a common-sense opposite side (objectivity), subjectivity is the contrary of subjectivism. By subjectivism, González Rey means the internalist aspect usually used in psychological studies to refer to the individual psychological processes (González Rey, 2003). Since subjectivity is conceived by an articulation of its social and individual dimensions, there is no “inner world” waiting for an exchange with the social.

The theoretical unity of the symbolic and affective, called by him subjective senses, are produced by the person in relation to a social and an individual character during the experience. Past, present, and future are intertwined in an emotional ground with subjective senses representing a microcosm of the person’s life. The genesis of subjective senses’ production is the culture that orients people in a specific way in the social and the individual world (González Rey, 2019a). It is this singular production of subjective senses that feeds the social and the individual subjectivity in order to create a person’s reality. The reality produced is naturalized into a subjective configuration that represents the ontological expression of the person. There is no reality without the emergent meaning of a person’s relation to the culture and the others (González Rey, 2011).

The symbolic production has an affective ground and concerns the social relations that the person cultivated in her life history. The social representation that drives one’s person life is part of subjective senses only if this social representation is significant to the person. This means that the person integrates the social aspect into the individual one. In this sense, the symbolic character of culture is also associated with the scientific production of knowledge. The objectivity that characterizes scientific production is a historical construction situated in an affective dimension. What is symbolized is the process of making up cultural constructions into individual affectivity. Subjectivity is inherent to all human production including those that pretend to represent the real or the truth.

González Rey’s theory of subjectivity changed completely the notion of social and individual interrelation as two different instances in mainstream psychology (such as in social psychology and personality theories). It is this process of theoretical creation which we bring as an example of a decolonial approach in this paper. For González Rey, the process of building a theory is something associated with context and history (González Rey & Mitjáns Martínez, 2013). This can be observed in those Latin American psychologists that were defined as critical ones. Some examples given by González Rey are Ignacio Martín-Baró (1994), Silvia Lane (1981), and himself González Rey (1987). González Rey and Mitjáns Martínez (2013) assume that “theories can be considered as critical when they are able to define new theoretical and practical alternatives to dominant representations and actions” (2013, p. 643). The creation of knowledge is grounded in the historical need to recognize the pathways related to the author’s context. The authors argue that the “colonized mind” impedes the creation of new theories linked with context.

The authorial pathway González Rey pursued during his career allowed him to build a perspective of science production considering the criticism and the historicity of knowledge production. It is common to see in his writings and keynotes an account of how he came to the point in discussion. See, for example, González Rey (2009) on the reference list of Vygotsky’ s work to the development of his theory of subjectivity. This contributes to the memory maintenance of psychology knowledge of the Latin American authors. Moreover, this allowed him to demonstrate that knowledge is not produced from nowhere, and nobody knows everything even when one is hard-working to create a theory.

In his last publication, González Rey (2019b) was interested in the potentiality of new theories and ideas that could overcome the dominant thought in psychology methods, such as its inductive/descriptive character. This was his concern since his first works about methodology where he focused on the reflection and responsibility of the researcher. According to the science production logic we discussed above, this reflection takes time to develop, and it is not suited to mainstream psychology.

With his theory of subjectivity, González Rey opened possibilities to new researchers to seek for alternative paths in mainstream psychology. By considering the social not as a reflection, González Rey ought the subject back in psychology science. Furthermore, changing the focus of theoretical elaborations as separate entities taken for granted and taking them as intertwined dimensions allows us to question the maintenance of status quo. In this sense, it is possible to build another science. Science is always in the process of changing.

Final Considerations: An Alternative to Fast Food Science

Resistance to the implementation of market standards in publications is an urgency. In countries from the Global South, the logic of financing research presupposes a hierarchy loaded with colonizing values about which type of knowledge is considered scientific or not (Loyola, 2012). This aspect, concerning public science policies, depends on the creation of norms, on dialogue between scientific communities and on the defense of epistemic pluralism (Faye, 2014), which can contribute to scientific advancement.

In psychological science, we need a critical reflection about the limits of the modernity project, that is constructing a universal epistemic subject while running the risk of producing epistemic injustice (Silva Filho & Tateo, 2019). For this, we consider that, “The complex of groups and activities that we call science can no longer be conceived as a form of anthropic domination and exploitation of an alien nature. Science is at the same time the existential dread of our human consciousness and the way we can acknowledge our being part of the whole ecosystem” (Tateo & Marsico, 2021, p. 3).

Based on the arguments presented, we defend that a decolonial vision—in psychology and in the human and social sciences as a whole, and its authorization in the list of scientific publications—needs to consider the tripod of history, education, and time. History, with the return to classic works with due criticism and contextualization. Education, based on the urgency in organizing training courses for researchers and professors with accessible vocabulary for the various social strata of the population. And, finally, the time that allows for reflection, review, feedback, rethinking what can be published in opposition to the “accepted” versus “rejected” verdict. Regarding our tripod, there are other aspects such as publication standards, the maintenance of publishers’ market, and the interdisciplinarity dimension of a more suitable science concerned about actual societal problems.

With regard to publication standards, classical studies are generally avoided by widely circulated scientific journals. They try to convey the idea that everything has already been produced and that there is nothing to be found or created based on the analysis of the works of important figures for their areas of knowledge. This prerogative of denying classical studies in the name of articles published by more contemporary authors is precisely one of the mechanisms that collaborates for the maintenance and strengthening of the publication circuit.

To maintain the market, the standards considered to be scientific bet on the false novelty of recent studies as being enough for the definition of academic authority. Despite the denial of classic authors in their studies, the contemporary authors publish their elaborations based on these same denied authors, who are not named. In this practice, they reveal a denial of knowledge to those who are not part of their circuit and produce an academic repertoire that places them at the center of the scientific assembly line. Besides that, the restriction of pages is another limitation present in the publication, which do not favor the presence of studies with a decolonial vision. This is not only because they reduce the space for argument, but because they demand falsely objective knowledge, going “straight to the point,” which requires authors to validate their arguments based on authors who are already part of the publishing circuit. In this way, the author is protected by the shield that has been conventionally called a “reference list” composed of recent articles and, contradictorily, prevents him or her from pointing out new ideas.

Interdisciplinarity faces other challenges. When the objects of investigation are taken as belonging to a certain area of knowledge, any attempt at a more complex interpretation is often seen as ideological. The consideration of the capitalist system as a transversal axis in psychological studies, for example, is seen as an element, which orbits around the object of investigation, causing difficulties in the articulation between person and context, social and individual, and so many other dichotomies present in the processes of oppression practiced by science through the coloniality of knowledge.

Generally speaking, the assumption that the new is better than the old is one among many features that belongs to Modernity. The relevance of classic works in psychology in the publishing circuit and its necessary critical review is denied. The decolonial approach invokes this historical turn to achieve a critical mode of science production. In this sense, Pickren (2009) argues that a historical approach could challenge the notion of center and periphery in knowledge construction and questions the standards of science. Regarding the indigenization of psychology, this author assumes a polycentric history of psychology considering the obstacles faced by Indians' psychologists in applying psychological knowledge in their contexts. Moreover, according to Rose (1991), the critical dimension of history is what Pickren (2009) sees as a new way of constructing the historical discourse of psychology. This criticality is related to the economic, political, and social aspects concerning the processes of knowledge construction in psychology and the roles of other sciences.

This historical appeal is also seen in social sciences such as Anthropology, Economy, and Political Science. According to Lander (2000), the naturalized idea of neoliberalism’s assumptions is based on the axis of historical events concerning the territories’ division of the Western world and the colonial power construction since the conquest of the Americas. These two historical events were foundational to the structure of social sciences and the standards present in its knowledge production centered in Europe. This process is the naturalization of social relations that contributes to the unique epistemological assumptions in psychology with no room for discussion.

In terms of education, important figures who tried to build an authorial perspective of science have to be recognized. This kind of education that creates a valuable place for non-standardized knowledge is found in Paulo Freire’s work Freire (2000; 2005). Paulo Freire widens the field of education where his first writings were done. In social sciences, his work is an example of making clefts between standard and non-standard knowledge to create the new. In this sense, Paulo Freire’s work highlights people’s reality to achieve a decolonial approach in science production. People build realities through their contexts (Sá, 2020). The role of social scientists is to shed light on these local relationships during the research process. Highlighting the potentiality present in people’s realities instead of Western standards is a decolonial attitude in scientific production. It is an ontological dimension of science that unfolds in multiple epistemological choices.

Considering the temporal dimension in science production, speed is considered as given. In the current rampant scientific market, the time to achieve scientific goals is related to the time expected to feed the market (Tateo, 2014). The market’s pursuit is created by the market itself, which claims an infinite circuit where time is something to fight against and not allied to science production. Such alignment can help new researchers to produce their ideas through the publishing circuit without referential expectations to the more publishable authors. In other words, the process of publication and communication in science is itself a training experience with an educational feature. The interrelation between the three aspects present in our tripod is available to acknowledge the decolonial approach. They unify science production, which opens the possibility of epistemic diversity within a decolonial perspective as a theoretical assumption in psychological research (Tateo, 2014).

The three elements—history, education, and time—are needed for the construction of democratic and accessible knowledge. Their presence will not make fairer, better, or happier societies. They will provide tools for us to deal with crises in the past, present, and future.

The coloniality of knowledge in scientific production, aligned with the colonizing social project, makes us all foreigners. Indeed, we are still not allowed to understand the beautiful words of the Guarani people as presented in the title of this article. Rather, we have to advance upon the human condition and its existence in the world in need to understand how other indigenous perspectives participate in the process of knowledge construction about the topics approached, instead of imposing cultural values—present in all theories and methodologies—without reflecting about the ethnic-cultural perspective expressed in those theories (Marsico, 2020).

Only when we have the chance to expand our scientific spectrum through alternative theoretical assumptions and more diverse methodological approaches in publications will it be possible to break with a market oriented scientific status quo.