Abstract

Karl Mannheim's contribution to a conceptual framework towards establishing objective knowledge in the social sciences has been overlooked and neglected. The paper discusses and reevaluates particularly Mannheim's concept of relationism which he used for clarifying the possibility of a "dynamic synthesis of perspectives" as the task of sociology of knowledge. One of the functions of Mannheim's conceptual framework was to narrow the gap between the techno-scientific or empiricist paradigm of knowledge and the humanistic-hermeneutical paradigm by a set of mediations which shifted the emphasis from facts to the way of looking at them through concepts and terms which are never purely experiential, i.e. independent of interpretation. The author stresses the epistemological fertility of the relationist model of truth in view of recent insights of sociology of science