> >Simple questions: do you think mutual understanding is possible?
> Mebbe. But I reckon it hardly matters. You and I go at it as if it is -
and there's the human project in a nutshell, eh?
Do you think people have moral obligations to understand one another?
> What empirical conditions must be present for an agreement to be said to
exist - from first, second, and third person perspectives?
On what grounds can be said that an agreement is possible from the outset? Agnes Heller notes, if an agreement is not foreseeable, because the participants do not share common values, then there is no motivation to come to the table. In other words, agreement would only be ethically binding for those who believe agreement is possible, otherwise strategic action is a reasonable response.
> >Is it possible to intuite from within communicative relations the
> >(ultimate) core of such relations without contradiction?
> Nope. So don't anguish yourself by trying.
Well then, the problem is solved. Habermas argues that the core can be illuminated from within - and goes on to argue that this core possesses normative validity (moral substance) ("normatively full, yet content empty").
> Remember, it's always up for grabs (Habermas's core point), so it'll chop and
change over time.
For Habermas, the content is always up for grabs - not the *form* of rationality.
> Epistemologies produce ontologies and ontologies produce epistemologies -
this stuff changes over time, too - coz it's part of the above, no?
The idea of an ontology that changes over time doesn't make much sense to me. As far as I can see, historical contingency is the only ontology that makes sense (Zizek) or, as Adorno puts it, dialectics is the ontology of a wrong state of affairs.
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