You write:
>Habermas' account of normative knowledge seems rather similar to
>that proposed by pragmatist philosopher Morton White. White proposes
>extending W.V. Quine's 'Duhemian holism' to encompass normative
>as well as factual or descriptive propositions. (Quine's 'Duhemian
>holism' is the thesis that proposition are never tested against reality as
>isolated statements but only as members of larger networks). This extension
>becomes possible in White's view with the realization of the entanglement of
>facts and values so that normative propositions can then be included in the
>networks of propositions (or what Quine would call the "web of belief").
Thanks for this. Yeah - I dunno what's so original about Habermas's take on social knowledge at all (I'd had a peek at some Quine, but hadn't heard of White). As I hinted in my overly long post, H throws me at that point where he feels (for good reason, but perhaps neither necessarily nor convincingly so) the need to throw out Adorno's quasi-pragmatism (all is historical; nought is a priori) and comes over all Kantian. Maybe a dialectical theory need not throw out transcendental substances, as their historical form can, as Engels told Bloch in 1890, be historically agentic (I hope so, coz I just love the bits I can understand of Kant's moral philosophy). But Habermas goes further than that, doesn't he? As I just opined to Frances, the Habermasian subject is so disembodied and decontextualised a construction as to contradict completely the pragmatist's call for linking the descriptive and the normative with reference to the socio-historical.
I never get anywhere when I consciously try to be a theorist.
But that might say more about me than theory.
Cheers, Rob.