Chapter 4 - Esteeming Entities

Summary

This chapter demonstrates how concrete practices align and form a praxis, using the field of self-esteem research as a case study – as one of the most popular concepts in both academic and pseudo psychology. The mainstream praxis of self-esteem research is dissected in the context of enacting a substance ontology. Here Aristotle’s distinction between particulars (i.e., primary substances) and universals (i.e., secondary substances) is applied as a way of making sense of various dominant practices in self-esteem research. The tendency to reify self-esteem is discussed, including how this relates to objectivist measurement-standards of self-esteem, an emphasis on predicting ‘levels’ of self-esteem, and a societal need and felt-responsibility to ‘boost’ self-esteem. I discuss how the mainstream praxis of self-esteem research demonstrates an attempt to position our field (and individual scientist identities) as ‘scientific’, thus revealing a (inaccurate) natural-science envy.