This essay aims to discuss the hypothesis posed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos in Um discurso sobre as ciências, that modern science is going through a paradigmatic shift. By grounding this reflection on the disciplinary field of biomedicine, this essay will try to deepen the proposal for a "double epistemological rupture" that might promote a "prudent knowledge for a decent life". From the examination of the ideological filaments that weave the epistemological matrix of biomedicine, as well as of its heterogeneous substantiation as a social practice mediated by power relations, it will be argued that the "first epistemological rupture" between modern science and common sense was mostly discursive, and that for which reason it is precisely on the transformation of that bound (which although invisibilized didn not cease to exist) that a "double epistemological rupture might be operated. For that purpose, it will be proposed, from the analysis of the contemporaneous expansion of the field of biomedicine to encompass objects and methodologies which destabilize modern dichotomies, that the phenomenological and historically marginalized knowledge of the patient should be considered as an emancipatory common sense which enables the production of an "epistemology of consequences". As such, the modest witness to modern science could be transformed into a subaltern witness who speaks from the experiential density of the Self's body which encompasses its social positioning.
epistemology; biomedicine; common sense; experience; emancipation; witness