ABSTRACT
Playfully applying socio-analysis to the sociology of knowledge itself, Popper shows how it is self-serving for intellectuals to peddle such an idea. Popper's most important argument is that the sociology of knowledge pays no attention to what its name would suggest it should deal with, namely: the social character of science. The trouble with Mannheim's sociology of knowledge is that it became, in his hands, a self-validating technique, or, as Berger and Luckmann put it, Mannheim's readiness to include epistemological questions concerning the validity of sociological knowledge in the sociology of knowledge is somewhat like trying to push a bus in which one is riding. Science is a paradigm of knowledge; scientific activity is a social activity; ergo the sociology of science will be a paradigm of the sociology of knowledge, or at least the sociology of the nearest thing to knowledge that people possess. Externalization, objectivation, and internalization of social reality are simultaneous during socialization.
