It is therefore a critique of the perceived hegemony of Eurocentric epistemology; an alternative to single thought and the standardization of the world.
It is, he says, a rationality that considers itself unique and exclusive, which does not make sufficient efforts to look at the inexhaustible wealth of the world.
Boaventura proposes a different model in place of these: cosmopolitan rationality, one of the major processes of which is the sociology of absences.
[7][8][1] In this regard, Edgar Morin writes: “Rationality is not a quality that Western civilization would have as a monopoly.
The European West has long believed itself to be the owner of rationality, seeing only errors, illusions and backwardness in other cultures [...]”.
To put it another way, it makes it possible to map the abyss mentioned above and it describes the mechanisms of rejection of certain forms of sociability into non-existence, into radical invisibility, into the negligible and the insignificant.
[11] Boaventura presents five logical formulations which constitute modes of production of absences, of non-existences.
It consists of classifying populations by racial or gender categories in order to naturalize the hierarchies from which relations of domination result.
In other words, it is “new relations between different types of knowledge, based on the practices of classes and social groups that have systematically suffered from the inequalities and discriminations of capitalism and colonialism”.
It promotes the idea of "knowing with the other, and not about the other", pleading for an inverted process of knowledge diffusion where "instead of transferring it from the university to society, it is now a question of bringing non-scientific knowledge from outside the university inside of its walls to foster dialogues and intercultural translation, and thus strengthen social struggles against domination".
Rather, it is understood as a metaphor for indicating the human suffering caused by the dominant world order.