VII. AZAR, CONTINGENCIA Y CIENCIAS SOCIALES

Abstract

The history of Western thought, and with it the history of its disciplines and
institutions, is to a large extent the historiographic outline of the epistemological constitution
and even the specialization of the sciences. This career of specialized knowledge appealed to
phenomena, apparently objective realities to give an account of the world, as well as the role
of those who have a place there.
In spite of this apparently neutral accent of the research in social sciences, when
penetrating into a review of the transformations of educational institutions, university centers
or corporations of knowledge, it is evident that multiple deductions and interpretations of the
scientific method have been sketched, which are conjugated with the subsequent applications
in concrete multivariate realities, events that have propitiated the professional specialization
in these analyzed particularities.
In this scenario, highly organized since classical times, error, chance and contingent
phenomena have been treated in an opprobrious manner; they have been seen from a sort of
heterotopia that has no place in the orderly world of the sciences, particularly the social
sciences.
In contrast, contemporaneity has proliferated interstices, surrogate realities and
proliferation of cosmogonies, and the imperative need emerges to provide the social sciences
with tools that allow them to approach from a coordinated inquiry and reflection on rare
events as generators of knowledge and realities, precisely there emerges this investigative
process by integrating chance and contingency as gnoseological detonators.