ABSTRACT
Psychologists generally proceed with their work without stopping to reflect on the basic assumptions that underlie what they are doing. As students we learn how to do psychology. We learn about measurement, about validity and reliability, and about how to analyse relations among variables so as to arrive at general statements that can be accepted as psychological knowledge. We come to believe that to proceed in this way is to conform to the demands of science. All this requires us to make certain assumptions about the objects of our investigative procedures, about the nature of knowledge, and about the ways our methods link the two. The kind of science we thus produce is predetermined by its underlying assumptions, and such a science cannot, in principle, yield any data or other information that will disconfirm those assumptions. If there are fundamental flaws in our science, as Klaus Holzkamp and his colleagues came to suspect there were, it becomes essential to reflect on the assumptive framework itself. It is the effort by the Berlin Critical Psychologists to do this that I want to summarize in this chapter.
