Abstract

This essay is an attempt to indicate a perspective of research rather than to furnish definitive results and, trying to interprete Mannheim's work, sustains that: 1. origins and validity of thought can be separated; 2. the approach of genetic analysis, typical of sociology of knowledge, constitutes a type of valid reasearch different from scientific research; 3. these facts require a perspective of methodological pluralism that can prove the legitimacy and the specifics of different known complementary approaches; 4. genetic validity studies the relationship between thought and being (that is "social being"); 5. such research can provide a contribution in terms of (historic) "objectiveness" of cultural elements, that can add (methodological pluralism) to the "universality" and the "instrumental validity", understood as specific outputs of other forms of rational researches.