Uncertainties of knowledge is the continuation of Immanuel Wallerstein's work for more than a decade to explain the crisis of knowledge in today's intellectual thinking. The author argues that the disciplinary divisions of the academy have trapped us in a paradigm that adopts the assumption that knowledge is a certainty that serves us to explain the social world. However, for Wallerstein, such a stance is not the most appropriate, and he offers in return a new conception of the social sciences whose methodology opens the door to uncertainty.
From the institutionalization of the social sciences, which grew in the late 19th century under the shadow of the cultural dominance of Newtonian science, Wallerstein describes the process that led to a deterministic conception of the world, central to modern science. Away from all scientificism, and in favor of an idea of science where probabilities have greater place than certainties, the author intends to form new systems based on the conceptions of reality offered by the parameters of uncertain knowledge. Only in this way, he says, can the historical alternatives that the present possesses be analyzed.