Against reification! Praxeological methodology and its benefits

Abstract

As early as the 1920s, Mannheim (1980, p. 84) criticized the way natural-scientific psychology had anchored is logic of empirical research. Unlike many others, however, he was able to successfully work out his own theories. His work co-founded a research tradition, which is currently of great interest to the social sciences; psychology, however, has remained largely unaffected. For Mannheim, the essential one-sidedness of nomothetic, natural-scientifically oriented methodology lies in its hypostatizing "one type of knowledge"-i.e., theoretical knowledge, abstracted from existential relations and exclusively geared towards universal validity, as it is-"as knowledge per se" and "one type of concepts-the so-called exact concepts, which have their origin [...] in definitions"; (Mannheim, 1982, p. 217)-as the only type of concept suitable for scientific endeavour. © 2009 Springer-Verlag New York.